Discrimination against Asians in higher education is entrenched and massive. Someone who is half Caucasian with a Caucasian surname should list themselves as Caucasian. With an Asian surname you pretty much have to claim at least some Asian descent, but you should mark as “mixed” or whatever.
Just because colleges are not permitted to consider race does not mean they don’t do so. Colleges bend the rules and break the law all the time when it comes to race in admissions. So if possible, do not reveal that you are Asian if you can get away with it.
If there truly is no discrimination against Asians, let’s get rid of the check boxes and see how it plays out. To keep it even more unbiased, let’s keep the applicant names anonymous too.
When you have “entrenched and massive” discrimination, usually it has vocal defenders, people in positions of power who believe that the discrimination is right and are proud of their role in it. That was certainly true back in the days of racial segregation, and it was true in the age of Jewish quotas as well, as Jerome Karabell’s book so amply documents.
Where are the vocal defenders of discrimination against Asians? Is there a single person, anywhere, with a role in elite college admissions, who is willing to say, “It’s vital that we hold down the number of Asians enrolled at our college”? Is there a single such person, anywhere, who is willing to say even, “It’s acceptable to discriminate against Asians”?
If there is no one like that – if there are not dozens and dozens of people like that – then how would massive discrimination be enforced? Every top college has dozens of people working in admissions, many of them recent graduates, many of them even ethnic Asians, and those positions turn over a lot, so in the course of 9-10 years it may be hundreds of people. Surely at least a few of them – many of them – are not biased against Asians. Who is sitting on those people and making certain that discrimination occurs notwithstanding? How is it that none of those people has spoken out about the morally objectionable things that they witnessed?
Let’s be clear: discrimination against Asian applicants would be morally objectionable to the vast majority of people. They would not go along with it willingly. They would blow the whistle.
In real life, as opposed to the paranoid fantasies of scriptwriters and some pundits, it’s virtually impossible to conduct a vast, secret conspiracy involving hundreds, thousands of people. In real life, it’s a tremendous management accomplishment if you can get hundreds, thousands of people to apply a few basic policies with any consistency, and you only achieve that by being as vocal and direct as possible about them. Enforcing controversial policies while keeping them secret is virtually impossible at scale – something the US government has learned time and time again.
@Hunt If there is no discrimination against Asians, then why is it that at elite colleges their test scores are higher than those of whites, Hispanics, and blacks? In a system with no discrimination test scores and high school gpa’s should be constant across all racial groups.
I agree with what @bogibogi said: If you want to prove there is no discrimination, just get rid of the check boxes, disguise the name, and don’t include a photo. Redact any portion of the application that might indicate race or ethnicity. Were this to happen, I think we soon would realize just how pervasive the anti-Asian discrimination is.
When California banned racial discrimination, the Asian percentage at UC Berkeley doubled, from 20 to 40 percent (of course, California is bending the rules and still discriminating). Some years back Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade examined applicants to top colleges from 1997, when the maximum SAT score was 1600 (today it’s 2400). Espenshade found that Asian-Americans needed a 1550 SAT to have an equal chance of getting into an elite college as white students with a 1410 or black students with an 1100. If anything, the discrimination has become more pronounced in recent years.
I’d like to ask those who are claiming that these colleges are all discriminating against Asians to show us specifically where the evidence is. I’ve looked through some of the references provided in post 21 and they fail to take into account many factors which we know are taken into consideration in admissions. There are many admissions pools where we know scores are lower and we know that Asian students are not well represented. This is a very complicated question and I’m not aware of where it’s been adequately addressed. If you are going to loudly claim discrimination, especially to the young students who may be reading this, please show us the evidence which shows racial differences when all the other factors we know colleges care about are taken into account.
From Epenshade’s abstract: “Asian-American applicants face a loss equivalent to 50 SAT points.” From the Duke paper: “average SAT scores of natural science, engineering, and economic majors are over 50 points higher than their humanities and social science counterparts.”
My understanding is that if there’s such a thing as “admission advantages” applied to certain groups such as URM and first generation applicants, then some other groups must take some “disadvantages”. In other words, to sum up to 100%, someone must “lose” so another could “gain”. The only issue here is the transparency issue. If the accused colleges could disclose not only their admissions stats but also the applicant pool data, then it’d give a clearer picture. For example, is the admit rate of Asian applicants lower than the overall admit rate year after year or across classes? If so, what is the justification?
Sort of, yes. Non-(recruited) athletes are at a disadvantage at many of the same tippy top schools being discussed. Students with lower grades and test scores, students who aren’t URM or first-gen, students with few or shallow or common extra-curricular resumes, students who aren’t full pay, students without very wealthy or celebrity or influential parents, students from CA, NY and NJ. Just to name a few.
Discrimination against Asians in higher education is entrenched and massive.<<<
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And so much so that it has been impossible to demonstrate in places where it matters, namely the courts. On the other hand, it is common fodder for the sensationalistic Internet gurus, the agenda carrying zealots, the pseudo-scientists who are in need of an education in statistics, and the real ones who are misunderstood and misquoted ad nauseam!
Several posters in this thread have nailed it in terms of honestly answering the question and the improbability of deliberate … discrimination. Those are posters who have been here long enough to hear all the arguments and spend the time to dig deeper in the facts versus the unproven tales.
In the end, honesty trumps everything in the application process. In a sea of candidates with differences in GPA and scores in small decimals, the ones who set aside games to present a compelling and honest case do …, well. The same cannot be said about the gamers, the resume building artists, the serial club joiners, the pursuers of individual glory, and the prestige obsessed.
The issue is not so much about the box one marks but about what racial “educational” baggage he might assume in that choice. There are plenty of Asians who find a way to present an “un-Asian” application despite ticking the Asian box. Not hard to understand what is meant by that last statement.
I have heard it discussed within private college counseling circle that URM status is worth around few hundred SAT pts. I don’t think it is information schools would share, but more of a trend those counselors are seeing.
What is race and why do colleges want that information? From wikipedia:
My simple mind interprets this to mean that when universities ask for race on the application, they want to be able to control what the student body looks like in a physical sense. What other purpose do they have for asking for race? As far as the Asian box, who decided that Indians look like Chinese look like Viet Namese look like Thai look like Mongolian? It is rather outrageous that Asians are lumped together when there is such a vast array of ethnicities. Are we not enlightened and forward thinking enough to know that no one should be judged on how they look or the color of their skin?
From the New York Times article referenced above:
If there is no wrongdoing, why don’t the colleges share the information to shut the Asians up once and for all?
By the same extreme logic, why would a system with no discrimination not yield a population that mimics the population of the United States?
Obviously, your statement relies on using a simplistic and extremely narrow subset of the application process. Even if statistics could deliver more comprehensive results than the outdated and speculative “results” of Espenshade et al did, it would still fall short of representing evidence in a system that goes WELL beyond strict SAT or ACT scores.
And that is the basic problem of the clueless activists who repeat the same trite argument ad nauseam: they have bad data and nothing else than a fraction of the holistic “file” to build a case.
The common application asks for race because the Feds require them to track it. Everyone’s common data set includes a breakdown of the student body by race. The categories don’t make any sense at all (like “Asian” or “White” is some kind of monolithic category), but they are the categories the government chose.
As to racial breakdowns of the applicant pool and the admitted students (not just the enrolled students), maybe the University of California releases that data, but hardly anyone else does. It’s crappy information anyway, relying on self-reporting, with overlapping options (including not answering the question) that are not treated consistently by applicants.
This race thing really bugs me because people are judged for something that is completely out of their control. I feel hopeful, though, that in future generations racial tensions will no longer be a problem as more interracial marriages become prevalent (as evidenced by some posts at the beginning of this thread). As more people start to have racially ambiguous facial features making it more difficult to pigeonhole them into a certain race, maybe society will finally believe that race should be a non-issue.
Private college counselors are NOT necessarily experts on URM statistics, and many of the “special outfits” are specializing in fear mongering as they target the special groups who view admissions as a social stepping stones.
What are the chances that the private counselors you discussed this are the … same who happen to make the news with dubious statements, questionable videos of manipulating gullible applicants and their parents, and … pretending to have developed an algorithm that solves the HYPS riddle?
Do those same “counselors” have much information about … high scoring URMs? Highly doubtful! What can they be saying about the URM who are rejected with 2400 SAT and 36 ACT scores? What can they say about the countless “ingredients” that DO trump race?
To avoid being nebulous, here’s one of those charlatans I am describing:
The counselors I have come in contact with tend to fly under the radar. They do not make a name for themselves by being on the news. They have done so much business that they know past and present college adcoms. What they know is not what’s shared on college websites or on CC. They certainly wouldn’t make a statement about “guaranteed admission,” but their record showed no denial for ED in 2014, and they didn’t do it by having their students applying one tier down.
I don’t think it is true. Most of the parents have already made it on their own, but they are willing to pay mega bucks to make sure their kids get the best education possible, and they also view the right school provides a certain pedigree for their children.
Of course, and that does not even account for the quip about statistics and liars! How many more debates are there needed to arrive at the same conclusion that anyone can arrive at very different conclusions by selecting the appropriate data to … the conclusion sought. Since the data is always hard to come by, most “authors” end up fabricating their “data” by relying on circumstantial “evidence” and massage the process.
Further, it is not only about which statistics one chooses but about WHOM one wants to trust. I’d say that when your first step is to hang your hat on the research prowess of a political activist such as Ron Unz … you’re calling for direct critics of people who happen to understand statistical research that goes beyond sound bites for the Wall Street or the people beyond the lawsuits against Texas, Harvard and UNC.
If CC still exists in a decade, it will still be the same mumbo-jumbo of misquoted data and misunderstood conclusions about meritocracy and discrimination. Even poor Espenshade had to repeatedly correct the activists who make erroneous hay of his research for their own purposes.
In addition, despite the monolithic or finer-grained categories, why do cling to the notion that adcoms do NOT review the application in the appropriate context?
Will the POTUS’ daughters be viewed in a better light than a recent immigrant from Laos who lives with his seamstress mother and four siblings above a donut shop in a dangerous city?
Again, isn’t the right answer to this “puzzle” not to be as detailed and complete as possible and present an honest image to the adcoms that obliterates all the “racial” stuff and focuses on the relative accomplishments in the full context?