Isn’t specifying race is voluntary? I did not think that it is mandatory.
No, you don’t HAVE to. It’s not as though there are only 8 colleges in the country.
“If a college is going to discriminate against your children based on their ethnicity, why would you want them to go there?”
Probably spoken as someone who is routinely afforded equal opportunity. I’m insecure and naive enough to believe that if accepted to a certain college, I am no longer considered “other” and people like me for who I am despite my race. It takes a strong person to not mind feeling excluded, unfotunately I’m not one of them.
@GMTplus7, thanks for the references. I don’t have time at present to look through them all, but some time ago I did look at the Epenshade article that everyone cites when discussing this issue and I couldn’t find the pertinent comparison. Did I miss something? You can’t compare the SAT scores of engineers to poets and conclude anything about race. You need to compare the SAT scores of engineers of one race to engineers of another race if you want to conclude anything about race. Without controlling for major it is not meaningful to make this comparison. You also need to pull out the scores of recruited athletes and URMs from the pools you are comparing, because we know they are getting a break. Could you point us to where in all these references an appropriate comparison appears? There may well be a discrepancy in the test scores, but I think the cited numbers are much larger than what the true discrepancy might be, because they aren’t doing the proper comparison.
Forgot to mention, they also need to break it down by SES, quality of high school attended, and might as well look at gender while they are at it.
Also need to control for geography. What else am I forgetting?
This is the tired argument whenever anyone mentions possible discrimination against Asian. The message being: “Be thankful because you are getting more than you deserve”. However, no one seems to have a problem that Jews are ORMs relative to population at a much higher rate. Why is that? My only guess is that Jews can blend in with the white population whereas Asians look different and therefore have an “otherness” quality.
The unfortunate circumstance of being Asian American:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWynJkN5HbQ
anybody who thinks the ivies does not discriminate against asians also thinks you can snow ski in tampa,florida.
I agree 100% that people should leave the race/ethnic box blank on principle and the fact it is not relevant. or better yet write in HUMAN. but the schools will simply either mark you as white or consider you a trouble maker and close your application. the best thing that people can do in general and especially those who are of the wrong “background” just bypass those schools all together and choose a place that wants you for you!
I would point out that it’s entirely possible that all of the LACs mentioned by the OP are probably in the want-you-for-you category. I don’t agree with zobroward or GMT+7 that discrimination against Asians is a sure thing, but if it exists it’s really limited to a handful of ultra-high-prestige universities. I suspect that at lots of LACs good Asian applicants are rare enough that they are almost as desirable as URMs. Pomona and CMC may not be in that category, given their location, but even if Espenshade was right about Harvard-twenty-years-ago, that doesn’t mean she would be describing Pomona today.
That seems to have been my brother’s experience applying to selective LACs in the 90s. Not only did he apply to LACs, his main interest was art. I suspect being Asian was a plus.
If you can get away not checking it, then I would not check it. I mean what do you gain by checking, it’s voluntary information anyway.
jhs
" I don’t agree with zobroward or GMT+7 that discrimination against Asians is a sure thing, but if it exists it’s really limited to a handful of ultra-high-prestige universities"
I made it clear it is only the elitist schools like the ivies and a couple others. the majority of schools do not play this game. of course most schools accept more than 6% or 7% percent. it maybe an inconvenient truth for some to admit to but it is 100% happening.
@JHS Asians are URMs at most LACs, and not just those in the midwest. They’re eligible for the diversity fly-ins at Amherst, Bowdoin and Williams as well as at Carleton and Kenyon.
What is a “diversity fly in?” [NM - looked it up. Great program for first generation college students it looks like.]
@CValle No, they’re not just for first-gen kids. URMs, first-gen, sometimes low-income as well.
http://apps.carleton.edu/admissions/visit/TOC/
https://myadmission.williams.edu/register/WOWApplication2015
The list I checked: http://getmetocollege.org/hs/tag/diversity-fly-in-programs
On that list it looked like 99-100% of the schools did it only for first timers. Great that others may also benefit!
Asians are included in Cornell Engineering’s Engineering Diversity Hosting Weekend, expenses paid. But I assume if you don’t tell them you are Asian, they don’t invite you.
I don’t want to start the whole thing over again, but I have to repeat that although it’s possible that top schools are discriminating against Asian applicants based on race, there really isn’t any strong proof that this is occurring. The evidence is entirely statistical, and is (in my opinion) pretty weak, because it can be explained by factors other than discrimination.
As for the box, declining to check a box at all is certainly better than lying.
Has anyone done a study to look at other factors than race? I know kids of various backgrounds who were not allowed to play sports, in some cases due to starting music at a young age, and it really hurt them in the college application process.
The impact of team sports in high school and socioeconomic class cannot be ignored as factors causing an apparent increase in admissions of certain races and decrease in admissions of other races.
Tell me, does anyone actually think that GPA and test scores should only be used in admissions? And does anyone actually think that if a school has many many top performers, top colleges should be forced to admit all of them instead of picking only some, even if the rest of them are better on paper than, let’s say, a top performer in North Dakota?
Do the top 0.1% of kids applying from North Dakota have a right to get into an Ivy if they don’t have as high test scores as the kid who is the bottom of the top 10% of a highly-ranked California HS?
There are a lot of other factors going on - geographic diversity, socioeconomic diversity, and holistic admissions.
I am sorry, but if anyone thinks that college applications are being separated into the “Asian” and “non-Asian” pile, they are smoking something. It is just as easy to have the same effect by separating the kids into “four-year varsity athletes for team sports” and “not team sport athletes” and many Asian kids I know would be on the latter side because sports are not of value to their families.
JUST like my parents - who never encouraged sports in my family, and me and my siblings pursued varsity sports anyway based on other students and opportunities. We got into excellent schools and having sports on our HS resumes mattered a lot (when comparing where we were admitted to other students who were not admitted to the same schools). My parents idea of sports was tennis or golf when we became adults.
For the record, I agree substantially with Hunt about this. I would also note that the statistical evidence people use for this is significantly outdated, and in the past few years there have been some pretty big changes in the numbers of Asian applicants admitted to the colleges on which everyone focuses.
But I don’t want every thread to have to devolve into a debate about the Espenshade study and any of the recent lawsuits against Harvard. There have been dozens and dozens of those on CC. So for purposes of discussion, I don’t challenge every reference, oblique or otherwise, to discrimination against Asian applicants at elite colleges.
Nevertheless, the adults here do the high school students a terrible disservice by perpetuating an idea for which there is absolutely no evidence, statistical or otherwise – that there is pervasive discrimination against Asian applicants. Whatever the evidence may be that it is (or was) harder (slightly harder) for an Asian applicant to be accepted at Harvard or Stanford compared to a similar white applicant, there is no evidence whatsoever that the same applies or ever applied at hundreds of other selective colleges, including top LACs.
@CValle I looked at that list and can see that it’s confusing, but the ‘d’ notation for first-gen means first-gem in addition to URM, not instead of.