This just tells me that you need to get out more.
Your experience is purely stereotypical or what you see is not how it actually is. You see what you want to see.
This result is for the test scores for professional schools.
For GPA/MCAT scores greater than 3.8/39, if I remember it correctly, the numbers of White, Asians and African Americans are 549, 311 and 10 respectively. (But just like Ivy League admissions, stats are just some part of the criteria. The holistic evaluation and the consideration of ethnic groups could be even more important at the professional school level. For certain jobs, academic merit is not everything, maybe not even the most important thing to be considered. An academically rigorous school like CalTech could only produce those who are “best fits” for a small subset of all career paths. For example , Rick Perry in Texas scored Cs or even Ds as an aggie and he has been doing great in his career.)
@xiggi, it is not surprising that you don’t see a problem to fix; I imagine a lot of people feel the same way. In the least, it is a controversial issue that is not going away especially with the recent lawsuits.
- Sorry for not being clear. Yes, I was using anonymous as a proxy for racially blind.
- I am not assuming that adcoms are doing those things. However, I am assuming that given two otherwise equally qualified candidates, the Asian applicant will be denied due to being overrepresented.
- Why would the application be devoid of the finer attributes of the applicant? It is still a holistic process so the student should still make every effort to present herself in the best possible light. It would be wise for an Asian student to not divulge anything that would identify her Asianness. My born and raised in America kids are the typical teenagers whose only difference from our white neighbors is their appearance. If not for the race box and the surname on their applications, no one would have clued into the fact that they are Asian.
I never suggested such a thing. All I am asking for is equal opportunity based on merit (however adcoms choose to define merit for their institution) regardless of race.
@makam63 just curious, what are your daughter’s stats - GPA, SAT/ACT? ECs? How far has she gotten in Math?
I guess it is. Are there that many kids who demonstrate an interest in poetry in high school that colleges seek them out and find them to fill their classes? My kids took the humanities classes because they were required and took a liking to them. As far as I know, most schools do not require a major declaration when applying and how many times do you read on these boards that students change their minds all the time when settling on a major. So the STEM kid in high school could very well become a humanities kid in college and I’m sure that that happens enough that colleges are adequately prepared.
“Your experience is purely stereotypical or what you see is not how it actually is. You see what you want to see.”
Look, I was just at a literary activity for students and it was the same story. I am just telling you what I see and have seen for many years. It has nothing to do with what I want or not want. Lots of Asian kids at the STEM events. Few at the literary/humanities/arts events. There’s nothing wrong with STEM or people who like STEM. I like STEM. It’s not racist, just my observation of the makeup of the participants. It also correlates with many other observations I’ve made. If you visit colleges, you will see that the STEM classes have relatively more Asian students than the non-STEM classes. One of my daughter’s STEM sections was over 90% Asian and most of her friends are Asian because they are in her STEM classes.
Guess what, I’ve also observed that there are more boys than girls participating in the STEM events, and more girls than boys participating in the literary/humanities/arts events. So I guess I’m also sexist. Nothing to do with the choices being made by individuals who have nothing to do with me, nope, it’s me, and I am sexist.
But there is no point to this thread any more if you are going to start flinging those insults around when someone reports data that doesn’t agree with your agenda.
“Are there that many kids who demonstrate an interest in poetry in high school that colleges seek them out and find them to fill their classes?”
Well, yes. Our high school has a literary magazine. They also have a math team. Kids make choices. Of course some kids may be interested in both. Of course kids change their minds. But a college is going to judge them based on what they do. If they are doing math team and not literary magazine, they are unlikely to end up as an English major. And vice versa. Of course there are other venues for kids interested in these areas, but those are two of the main ones, and you can easily see a list of all participants. If you look at the surnames of the literary staff and of the math team you will see a striking difference. Same population. Different choices being made.
@mathyone makes a good point about Asians and STEM. And Asians tend to be quite reserved. My son is one of four students at his school to take trig/pre-calc as a ninth grader; the other three are Asian. My son is the only one of the three who could “work a room.” Sadly, I think he lacks the patience and humility to be in a fraternity.
A friend of mine who is quite gruff hires a lot of students. He only spends a few hours a week in his business, but one day he walked up behind an Asian high school student and watched him work on the computer for about two minutes and maybe said “hello.” His store manager came to him later and told him that he was going to have to stay away from the guy because he was so upset by being observed that he started crying. The guy is a National Merit Finalist, but he is so shy and reserved that he just can’t deal with people.
So FWIW I do feel that Asians are less likely than other students to have the “full package” to go with their academic credentials. I still believe that after all is said and done they are discriminated against. In any event, stereotypes exist because they reveal certain traits that are more common than average but not universal. We shouldn’t condemn people for the thought crime of “noticing.”
Re: “the finer attributes of the applicants”
An issue here is that it is not easy to have most people to have a consensus on the definition of “finer attributes” – in school or out of school.
I could be labeled as being not PC (or worse, a racist) for saying this: Does it occur to some of you here that, if the Asian kids are indeed not favored in this admission game, should their parents share some of the “blames” here? Many of their parents are new immigrants who themselves may have a hard time to assimilate to the main stream culture. Therefore, their children may have a more hurdles in their daily life to develop the so-called “finer attributes” (even though we do not agree on what these attributes are exactly.)
I still remember that when my own kid was applying to college (a decade ago) and he was in a college admission interview, the intervewer was probing the “finer attributes” of the family (i.e., me) in addition to his own “finer attributes”.
In the big picture, I think this country is, relatively speaking, more generous in providing a varieties of opportunity to new comers. This is why the immigrants still “vote with their feet” to come here. The “system” won’t be changed overnight. So just take what you could have as of today and do the best as you can, IMHO.
As I often tell our child, do not try to rely on the family connections, because there is none in your case. If you happen to have a connection because of the college you go to, count it as a pleasant surprise or an extra bonus.
A coworker of mine actually told me that he thinks the academic aspect of college life, for most careers, is not the most important one. He thinks maybe this is the reason why the most leaders even in the private sector are not necessarily the best students in college. Only in some “niche” career paths (e.g., academic career path where the individual contribution is highly valued) that the academic merit may be the only important one. This may be the reason why the college admission is not totally decided by the academic merit alone – most college graduates do not need to use what they learn in college. They need to use the skills learned in those years, in or out of classroom – maybe even in clubs!
Just a quick google search of some national humanities and arts programs that I am familiar with show that Asians are pretty heavily represented. I understand that their percentages are probably not as great as in the STEM programs, but I am certain that plenty of Asian kids have interest in the humanities/arts/literature. As much as people want to believe that they are one dimensional, that is far from the truth.
This is unscientific, but the brochure from TASP, a very competitive humanities program, is heavily Asian judging from the pictures. Also the list of winners from the scholastic arts program show many Asian names.
Isn’t indicating race and ethnicity voluntary? Why not just leave it blank and remove all ethnic and racial indicators from the app?
I’ve read so many threads from people complaining that somebody else’s kid with lower test scores (that are still competitive for the school) “stole” their kid’s spot that I have a hard time believing they want admissions to be based on anything but test scores. If they truly believed holistic admissions were acceptable, they wouldn’t be so angry that students with lower scores were accepted to colleges that rejected their child. I suspect part of the trouble is that some people seem to think a kid with lower test scores (say a 2100 to another kid’s 2250) has to be extraordinary in some way – a world class athlete or have a tragic back story – to be accepted to elite schools over the higher stat kid, and it surprises and angers families when that doesn’t appear to be the case.
Bogibogi, my S just graduated from a top research u.
The first convocation consisted of the different schools (liberal arts, engineering, music, etc.) all seated by school. You would have had to have been blind not to simply observe the heavily Asian makeup of the engineering school.
Then at his individual convocation (he was in liberal arts), the students sat and were called up / graduated by major. Again, only a blind person would have not seen that even within liberal arts, the biology, chemistry, physics and math departments were heavily Asian.
(As it so happens, my white S has an Asian girlfriend who is not in STEM.)
It was almost comical how skewed it was.
On the other hand, at my nephew’s graduation, I noticed a very large Asian population in their Hotel school. I think more Asians are moving away from STEM. I think I was one of those Asians (my siblings included) who never encouraged my kids to go into STEM, but more into business. My father was an engineer because he didn’t think white Americans would hire him into a management role. Growing up we saw how my father was used as a tool. He had the best design, invented many new machines for his company, but never got credit for them, except his paychecks. Things have changed since .com, but I still see programmers and engineers get topped out at their pay, and it is the management that benefit most of the upside. We do not have one single CS or engineering major in my family now.
I was/am an engineer and I think I discourage our child to go into the same career, even though I did not explicitly ask him not to.
While he was growing up, I actually had a lingering concern that if I “mentored” him too much about what I had exposed to as an engineer, he might think he is only good at this and get into the same career path as mine. So I think I intentionally do not want him to know too much about what I do.
I think that in his late elementary school, after he had observed the downside of being in this career path through me, he said that he would never want to be an engineer in his life.
Another story I could share is this: After our child had been in another career path , a friend of mine (who is an engineer) thought he could be a “good model” for his own child and invited our family to his home so that his son could meet our son.
Boy…that father’s parenting style is so “direct”. In front of everybody in the living room, he lectured his son: “You should not become an engineer. If you do, you will not have dignity at your work place after 40 years old just like me.” He also worked at a Fortune 100 company, not at a startup.
Re: “…would hire him into a management role.”
Maybe the ingredients that prevent these people from being hired into a management role are the same that prevents them from being recruited by some top schools. Who knows?! they all want leaders. There is an article that I read some years ago. It is said some top tier MBA programs do not want too many of their students to be minority students; otherwise, they would have a harder time to “sell their students” to companies as managers after these students graduate from their MBA program.
In SV, there used to be an article on the newspaper that if a company’s CEO is not white, he would have a lot of troubles in receiving the funding. So when a startup wants to raise the money, such a company had to hire a white to represent them.
There are certain kinds of jobs that do not fit some types of people (e.g., nerdy egg heads may not be good as a CEO or VP.)
I don’t see that problem now in engineering. The last company I worked in high tech had an Asian CEO graduate from Berkeley. Another ex-boss of mine is a Asian PhD graduated from Stanford also in higher level management, maybe higher than VP at a household name that we use often. He was not executive level but he is not lower level manager either.
I live in the Chicago area. At our large public high school most of our Asian population are not recent immigrants. Probably more than half of our highest academically achieving students are Asian, even though our suburb is predominantly white. To illustrate the point, our school displays the pictures of all the NMF students (~40 this year) and I’ve heard it called “the wall of Asians”.
My point is that in my area, things are changing. These students will be attending mostly Northwestern, Berkeley, UIUC and U of Michigan…though Princeton, MIT, Yale, etc are also represented. A lot are ‘going STEM’, but a good number are pursuing other areas of study…usually business/economics. But the most interesting thing I observed at our academic recognition dinner is that these students are learning what they need to do to “compete”. The ECs are are getting more diverse. Many are getting involved with DECA, yearbook, student gov and debate. They are hearing the message about sports participation and therefore, most have joined a team.
I think stereotyping based on the “immigrant profile” is as much of an injustice as it is to label such a diverse group (Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Taiwanese, Korean, etc) as Asian. Speaking from my own observations, I expect we will see the stereotypical Asian profile evolve with the next generation. So I caution those who tend to discredit certain characteristics and attribute it to a deficiency. In my opinion it often arises from a cultural difference that will probably change with time and outside influences.
When our child was in his high school graduation ceremony, their school had a tradition of having the top 10 students walk in first and then sit on the platform. When these 10 students were walking in, 8 out of 10 were Asians. I heard a parent who sat not far from us was saying to someone next to him: “Look at all the Asians!”
This is neither in California nor in New York.
In California I’ve heard Japanese Americans saying something similar about Chinese.
Are you saying that an Asian-American kid raised by Asian-American parents is less American than your daughter?
Is “white” a proxy for “American”?
I’m saying that the cultural factors that give the Asian stereotype were not present in her life. She didn’t go to Saturday cram schools, didn’t have a tiger mother, wasn’t pushed into science and math. She wasn’t raised in an Asian culture. She was not raised in a Chinese home, nor a German, nor Native American.
If a school is looking for diversity of experiences and cultures and it picked my Asian daughter as being able to supply that diversity, there will be disappointment. She looks Asian but cannot contribute to diversity in any way other than looks. She won’t be forming cultural clubs, teaching others about food and dance or holidays unless they involve cowboy music or surf or baking cupcakes.
If diversity is only about looks, then she’ll meet the requirement. She’s been the ‘diversity’ many times, getting her picture taken to show how diverse the lacrosse team is or how open the Girl Scouts are. Looks only. If the goal of diversity is to bring many cultures together, different ideas from different backgrounds, then she’d not be a good choice. It really depends on what the school wants to achieve as far as diversity goes.