Yes. My sister graduated from one of top 3 law schools and she was first generation. She also married a lawyer. My parents couldn’t be a lawyer or doctor because they were educated in their home country. I know a lot of very successful Asian lawyers and doctors now, especially in the NE. Many Asians feel a lot more comfortable going to a doctor or lawyer who speaks their language.
My daughter went to an elementary school in NYC’s Chinatown where 90 percent of the students were from immigrant Chinese families (English not spoken at home) and 90 percent of the students were eligible for free lunch. No doctors or lawyers. No Tiger Moms in the Amy Chua sense of the word.
I hate when people generalize about any ethnic or racial group, including Chinese-Americans.
@Hunt, why do you question the intentions or motivations of Asian families? What does it matter? Maybe Asian parents focus on STEM because those subjects are universal and it is something they can help their kids study. Especially for immigrants who might want to be involved in their kids’ education, English and history might be completely foreign to them and they are unable to direct their kids in those areas. For my family, I am very puzzled how my kids naturally gravitated to STEM; I can barely add. The subjects are interesting to them and they thrive on the challenge. (I might add that they don’t like biology much because they don’t like all the memorization). From my experience, an unwilling kid who is forced into STEM will not be able to compete because, along with the hard work, there has to be a level of interest for them to succeed because obviously the competition is stiff.
I understand your orchestra analogy and I agree that admissions involves a lot of strategy. However, how can you compare choosing the right instrument with race?
The whole URM/ORM and SAT score battles are silly to me. I am all for adcoms considering SES, background, hardships,(i.e, all the holistic stuff) when making decisions. But I feel like many assume that URMs had more barriers than ORMs and I find that to be close minded.
@JHS, I always appreciate your contributions to these boards. Your objectivity and knowledge about so many things is priceless.
" My kid and many of her friends play varsity team sports, an instrument in band, join and lead clubs AND are majoring in STEM. I’m not sure why the first few things would preclude being interested in engineering or tech or science or math. "
They don’t preclude each other.
But teachers, and the general public, tend to think they do, and also see which kids are not as good at gym or not as interested in gym and tend to encourage STEM for them. My son has all of that - sports, music, bright in math and science - and it contributed greatly to him being admitted to a school where his GPA is not up to snuff at all (good test scores though). Same with me. My parents wanted nothing to do with sports and saw (and see) no value in sports.
Look at the Simpsons. Sports are really big in Homer’s and Bart’s life. Lisa ends up coaching Bart’s team. Lisa ends up as a goalie where she is just batting away pucks as a reflex. The geek <> athlete trope is very common.
It is very difficult to pursue a high level of sports AND a high level of music AND a high level of academics. My son has done his best, but academics won over sports, at least college sports, but he is pursuing music in college and sports at a club level.
Anyway, what is the point of this thread? Is it that the OP is petrified that their child’s application will be in front of an adcom, and they’ll be all ready to admit her, but then see “ASIAN” stamped in red across the front? I think that is worrying over nothing, when it is far more likely when one is talking about top schools, a zillion other aspects of the application will have more weight.
I cannot believe that being Asian would be a detriment in California, where there is a higher native Asian-American population, so the apparent level of discrimination is less (from posts I’ve read on CC).
I’m not questioning anybody’s motivations–rather, I’m describing their behavior, and what its consequences might be. Specifically, if a disproportionate percentage of Asian students choose STEM concentrations, they will be competing for a limited piece of the college admissions pie–and they may even be competing with the highest-stats non-Asian students, who (in my opinion) are also more likely to be interested in STEM. Selective colleges do not simply expand the number of STEM seats to accommodate all the great applicants–instead, they continue to fill English, history, and other departments. The excess STEM applicants get rejected.
Perhaps I wasn’t quite explicit enough with the orchestra analogy. If (as I have observed to be true) Asian families strongly prefer their kids to play violin over wind instruments, percussion, or even other string instruments, those kids will be competing ONLY for violin seats in the orchestra. They are not competing against the kid who plays the bassoon, even if they are much better musicians than he is. The best two bassoon players will get in, while the 13th best violinist will be rejected. That’s the analogy with STEM.
I guess my problem with all of this is that Asians somehow have to strategize more than non-Asians by virtue of the fact that they are ORMs. (No wonder they go to high priced counselors). Just because they have the same “look” doesn’t mean they can’t contribute to the community in diverse ways. My sense is that colleges are trying to preserve the visual landscape of the campus and that bothers me.
I post on these boards as a not-so-smart, over-the-hill, mousey housewife who was a target of bullying and racial taunts throughout childhood. Really, I should have changed my name to Chink. Somehow I was able to trick my smart husband into marrying me and now we are blessed with kind, compassionate, hardworking and decently bright children. I am thankful that my kids have lived charmed lives where race was never an issue for them. My clueless son did not know what an Asian was until middle school when we had to explain it to him. Race issues did, however, rear it’s ugly head when it came to applying to colleges and I found that to be so incredibly sad. So the idealist in me wishes that everyone be accepted for who they are because, truly, each person has a story, and that the color of one’s skin not be used to judge. So as Whitney Houston sang, I believe in the children of the future and trust that eventually enough people will see how wrong all this is and that our young people will right this ship.
Not really. They don’t have to strategize if they don’t want to. They simply have to decide what the goal is. If the goal is for their kid to become an engineer, then he’ll have to compete with other kids who want to be engineers. If the goal is for their kid to get into Harvard, then more strategy may be required–don’t become an engineer, don’t play the violin, look for things that are unusual. But the exact same thing is true for white families.
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But the problem is that a nerd is not what Ivies <<<
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Is that the case? Are nerds more welcome at schools more known for NCAA sports than at the Ivies? Or is it that they do not want to be massively over-represented by a certain category of students?
From my vantage point, I think that there are plenty of nerd-like students at the HYPS level. And some intellectuals who also happen to be athletes. Mathematicians who like to act or play the oboe! And biologists who try out for the cheerleading team … Molly, where are you?
What continues to elude most is that with 2,000 seats, you can’t accept 2,000 STEM students who came with 2300 SAT and shadowed doctors after competing in the Intel boondoggle. How many of those would attend classes in French Lit or African Studies? How many would attend classes in Ethics or Linguistics?
Again, all this discussion boils down to trying to take a blunt but extremely narrow instrument to a complex issue. What would happen if the Ivies abandoned the SAT (they should not) and restricted the AP to zero to two (which they should) and adopted the anonymous system sought by Bogi?
There would be NO change in admissions but we might see the end of this senseless harping. In the same vein, we might get there with the fuller disclosure prompted by the Harvard lawsuit. We would finally have to admit that the schools accept the students they want and that they do a pretty good job at it considering how many are fighting for a spot at them.
Sports <> STEM? That just seems weird to me, and completely different form my experience. Maybe it’s a geography thing.
I’ll grant that, it is hard (and may be why some colleges value kids who can juggle all that and still perform at a high level in all). My D, in fact, dropped out of orchestra to take two sciences junior year, her schedule didn’t permit both. But she never left her two sports teams.
It wanders around a little doesn’t it? 
@Hunt, I think we are talking past each other. If I’m not mistaken, you are saying, “there is nothing wrong with the way admissions works; it is what is is, so work with it”. And I agree with you about all that goal and strategizing stuff.
My contention is that it is wrong to consider the way someone looks, i.e., race (it goes without saying, but whites should not be held to a different standard either) when reviewing applications. Clearly there is nothing I can do about that (unless my daughter agrees to the nose job, eye surgery, hair dye job and name change 
) so I will begrudgingly advise my kids to just work with it. I guess I’m just hoping that maybe some posters might see where I am coming from…
“I guess my problem with all of this is that Asians somehow have to strategize more than non-Asians by virtue of the fact that they are ORMs.”
No, they don’t. Anyone who desires to go to an elite university has to strategize.
Some people take the strategy of - I’ll apply only to the very specific “name brands” that I’ve heard of, under the illusion that those are the only schools worth attending. Is that a smart strategy, or a dumb strategy, if one’s goal is to get an excellent education?
I understand that @Pizzagirl and I commend those who are confident enough to not fall into the trap of following perceived prestige. I think that when there is low self-esteem people mistakenly look for outside validation but I really can’t fault anyone who does that. I will not judge what someone views as important to them.
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I guess my problem with all of this is that Asians somehow have to strategize more than non-Asians by virtue of the fact that they are ORMs. (No wonder they go to high priced counselors). Just because they have the same "look" doesn't mean they can't contribute to the community in diverse ways. My sense is that colleges are trying to preserve the visual landscape of the campus and that bothers me.<<<
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Strategizing MORE is a misnomer. Recognizing that the strategies of yesterday that worked so WELL for Asians have reached diminishing returns is perhaps warranted. The problem with the “doing well” in academics with a sprinkling of tennis and Suzuki schlepping has been …emulated to death. If it was a welcome rarity decades ago, it no longer works for … all the candidates.
In a way, Asians are now facing the same hurdles the BWRK have faced for a longer time when schools took better looks at URM - that included Asians - and sought to diversify the elite schools.
The increased competition forces students to adapt to the 2015 world of admissions. And this applies to everyone … Asians, Whites, Blacks, Brown, and mixed colors. Everyone faces hurdles. They are simply different.
I think you are very wrong with the VISUAL part. It is more about weighing and balancing the … expected contributions.
Well, I don’t know if you’re criticizing affirmative action for URMs, or saying that you think colleges discriminate against Asians in favor of whites. These are not the same thing. Affirmative action is supposed to be discussed on another continuing thread, but I’ll just say that there is no particular reason that Asians should oppose it more than whites.
But mentioning strategy is an interesting point. As I’ve said in other threads, I think some Asian families mistakenly believe that the same strategy that gets you into a top university in their home country will also work in the United States. When they learn that this isn’t true, they say that it SHOULD be true.
My mistake, my comment was in regard to your remark:
Also, their first-generation parents may have a job related to STEM, otherwise these parents would likely not be able to immigrate to this country in the first place. There is some self-selection phenomenon going on here. (Of course, there are exceptions: There are some parents who come to this country with so much financial resources that they do not have to go out to find a job.)
These parents know how to excel in the STEM field. When their children were young, they knew how to “coach” them so that they are academically prepared for STEM. I do not think these parents actually encourage them to become, say, an engineer. But they help their children to have a good foundation so that if they indeed want to pursue this career path, they could likely be able to get into this without much difficulty.
I like Hunt’s orchestra violin example. There are a lot of violinists in our state’s “all state orchestra” who are Asians. I suspect (but not sure) that many of them have a musician parent at home.
Many higher SES families in Asian countries tend to provide their kids, especially their daughters, with music lessons when they grew up. Since these parents could be classical music trained when they themselves were kids, they provided the same learning opportunity to their children as well.
I once heard of this: A century or so ago, a lot of Jewish parents would provide music instructions to their children and make sure that they excel at it to a certain degree at least. A motivation here is that if they happen to need a second income, they may have a second skill to rely upon.
I think some Asian parents who want their children to be reasonably good at STEM subjects may have the same motivation - They thought it could possibly give them a career option. (Re: Music, they likely think it is just a good discipline and help them to have a more fulfill life. Not so much economic motivation.)
I may be wrong, and I hope that I am, but I take my cues from people who post about toooooo many Asians at Berkeley or tooooo many Asians in my math class or toooo many Asians in the orchestra, etc… It surprises me that people freely admit their dislike of toooo many Asians.
My point with this comment was that if your primary goal is to get into Harvard, then there are in fact strategies that might improve your chances, whatever race you might happen to be. It might involve changing your preferred career, getting involved in activities that don’t actually interest you, playing a sport you don’t like, switching from the violin to an instrument you don’t really want to play, etc. Bottom line: having getting into Harvard as your primary goal is not smart.
“As I’ve said in other threads, I think some Asian families mistakenly believe that the same strategy that gets you into a top university in their home country will also work in the United States. When they learn that this isn’t true, they say that it SHOULD be true.”
I think the lack of cultural transmission of the “how it really is” is particularly concerning. It is not a sign of intelligence, IMO, to believe that how things are done in your native land is how they are or should be done in your new land.
Well, I think it’s pretty hard to shake off the belief that what really matters is hard work. Of course, hard work does matter, a lot. But it’s actually not what matters the most in terms of getting into the most selective colleges. I can see how that just seems wrong to people raised on a super-strong work ethic. How can it be that my daughter is practicing the violin too much? Why should she waste her time on something like an acapella group? Those who are able to adapt, though, have better results.