You are only looking at this from the side of the applicants. I think there is an advantage to the matriculated students in having a diversity of people, in their looks, in their socioeconomic background, in their culture and interests. I think (and you don’t have to agree with me) that Harvard would be a much poorer place with 72% Asians (or 72% Caucasians, or 72% African-Americans, or 72% football players or tuba players, or even 72% males or 72% females). Not all qualified Asians are going to get into Harvard whether they admit 20% or 72%. Harvard is in the business of building the class that they want to build and that includes many types of people. If you - Asian or not - are one of those people who is qualified to get into Harvard but doesn’t then there are a wealth of other fabulous colleges and universities that you will get into where you will get as good an education as you allow yourself to get.
Personally I believe Harvard is doing fine with their current system. First, when you guys talk about the white students and the students of color being held to a different standard, I personally think that it’s because they are different people, and different kinds of people. When a black student chooses to achieve in areas like classical music, they are defying the stereotype and going outside their cultural norm. The same goes for many white people. The difference arises in that for the very high-achieving Asian-american population, that is the cultural norm. Instead of their parents and peers discouraging it, they facilitate higher achievement, and therefore must be considered under those circumstances. Secondly, I see no reason that Harvard should be discouraged form trying to accurately represent the cultural diversity of America as a whole. If you take the current numbers, Asians are actually heavily over-represented. If the university were to eliminate consideration of race (which seems like it would be next to impossible in an admissions setting), you can sure bet that the numbers of students of color would drop drastically, something that I hope no one wants. By including a diverse student body that come from all different cultural backgrounds and socioeconomic situations, Harvard does and excellent job of bringing so many different points of view into one great college.
What you (and the complainants) fail to note is that the Asian Americans go overwhelmingly for the STEM majors. That might work at Caltech, but I hope you can understand how that doesn’t work at Harvard. Maybe if they were brought up with more attention to the humanities…
Can u possibly be more expicitly racist in stereotyping people?
Why is it “next to impossible”? UMich has eliminated it, as per law.
The percentage of the applicant pool compared to the percentage of the admits is very significant and damning data. It is evidence that asians are disproportionately rejected despite having the strongest credentials.
41 - Substitute "Jews" for "Asians" and see how that reads. Harvard said the same things about Jewish enrollment in the last century.
Asians aren’t students of color? Or are they just the unfashionable color?
You don’t have to get too many pages into the complaint before it becomes at first, humorous and then, sorta sad.
There have been efforts for some time to prove that Ivy League schools are discriminating against Asian applicants. They have all gone nowhere. In my opinion, this is because there has never been–and probably never will be–any proof that this discrimination is taking place beyond the argument that if the schools admitted solely based on standardized test scores, there would be more Asian students. There has never, to my knowledge, ever been a single smoking gun, from any selective college, in the form of a document showing a discriminatory policy, or a report of such a policy by a whistleblower who was a former admissions officer, or anything else of that nature. It is my opinion that the failure of any smoking gun of this kind to surface in the years that this has been a live controversy means that it is unlikely that any such smoking gun exists.
I think that Asian-American opportunities may actually contract as a result of this. Everyone knows that top universities select on the basis of factors other than GPA and test scores such as leadership, creativity, well-roundedness and other extracurricular activities. The complaint takes a stab at this issue, but, predictably, fails to “prove” anything, certainly not that these factors are 3X overrepresented as well.
Exactly, and contrast that with the “Jewish problem” in which there was a heck of a lot of forthrightness about the undesirability of too many Jews and how admitting too many Jews would damage the reputation of the school.
Is there any credence for the idea that these schools are not fully supportive of Asian students? What, are there no Korean-American or Chinese-American or similar clubs there? Hardly.
Merely anecdotally, my two (white) kids are at top schools, and there is hardly a picture of them with their friends where (as white students) they aren’t the minority and Asian students are the majority. Which is great - more power to these kids! But really - it’s a little hard to swallow the “discriminated against” claim in that regard.
It seems some people can’t wrap their head around the fact that admission to the top universities isn’t just an SAT score contest.
This is really funny but when I saw the headline – about the “asian bias” – I actually thought it was going to be an article about the new class at Harvard being 21% asian when the u.s. population is only 5%…but not what i expected when i visited this thread! in any case, the top schools…well, good luck in figuring how how/why they admit anybody.
@GMTplus7 , your taking my words out of context… When you have 10000 Asians applying to STEM fields each with a score 2300< and a 95+ average… the AO tends to find little to no silver lining in the myriad of applications he or she is reading. This is not all of them BTW, Harvard is still 25% Asian, so those that stand out in the eyes of the AO… get in
Each school has its own selection process. And we must admit the admission selection process is somewhat bias because we, human, are not perfect. These applications are read by AO, human. And it is okay to be imperfect.
If we allow computer to process applications based on stats and to determine acceptance based on tests and scores then why do we ask applicants to submit their essays? It is us that make each one of us unique. And AO wants to know you better to determine if you fit in their, respective, schools or not. Somewhat subjective and bias yet a very humane logically process.
Bottom line, doesn’t matter what race you are your chance of getting accepted by Elite school is luck of draw, provided your stats, EC, Leadership…,meets the requirement.
Ones that didn’t get accepted with excellent scores, ECs, Leadership…take a look at your Essays again. I am 99% sure your Essays did not convince AO.
No, it’s u here who doesn’t grasp the rest of the application criteria (leadership, EC, essay, etc) are also getting a biased review on the basis of race.
Those who believe a bias does not exist against Asian Americans are sticking their heads in the sand. At my daughters competitive independent school there were two half Hispanic students admitted to Harvard while Asian AND white students who were more competitive in every parameter (grades, test scores and ECs) were bypassed. Both were affluent legacies. I completely understand the logic of socio economic consideration in college admissions but what is the logic of admitting less qualified afffluent students over those more qualified just because they are half Hispanic? This same trend is very evident over the last several yearsespecially with respect to Harvard more than any other Ivy – in such a school setting everyone knows the qualifications off the top students. Granted I am not privy to their essays but one of these students was not even in the top 30% of the class, did not have any special ECs and was not an athlete.
The average ‘Asian’ GPA at Harvard is very slightly higher (3.7) than the average senior GPA (3.64). There is a pretty sizable percentage of Asians at Harvard, and they seem to be doing pretty well there.
http://features.thecrimson.com/2015/senior-survey/
Every year, some not-so-good students are admitted and some brilliant students fall through the cracks. The admissions office tries its best to put together a well-rounded class so that the measly 5% of admitted students can benefit from exposure to people from all different walks of life. They don’t to it perfectly, but they do a pretty good job.
I don’t think Harvard has any shortage of good lawyers, so this probably won’t get too far.
@Hunt #48
I think the evidence now is not so much a smoking gun, but a slow smouldering arson over decades. It’s a PERSISTENT pattern of bias that is only visible after many years of data.
The Ron Unz paper, “The Myth of American Meritocracy” illustrates this bias in the graph showing how the number of college-aged asian american students has doubled in the US since 1990, but their percentage of ivy league student body has remained flat.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/asians-large.jpg
This is not statistically likely without some bias on the part of the schools. Grutter v Bollinger does permit schools to apply an admissions bias favor to certain races to produce diversity, so long as the school doesn’t resort to quotas. The flat percentage of asian american admits is a quota.
The admissions data in the Duke University admissions study by Duke economics professor, P. Arcidiacono, 2012, showed how Duke admissions rates the “soft” admissions criteria (page 7, Table 1)
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CB0QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpublic.econ.duke.edu%2F~psarcidi%2Fgrades_4.0.pdf&rct=j&q=duke%20University%20research%20paper%20racial%20outcome&ei=sQtlVcn3BtCSuQSEvYDgAw&usg=AFQjCNEpWU7CDkN6tHVtSDoDwMmZIiawag
Duke admissions actually give numerical scores for subjective qualities:
Essay
Achievement (i.e. ECs)
Personal Qualities (i.e. leadership & character)
LoR
Curriculum strength.
For all these criteria, Duke admissions ranked Asian Americans the highest, except for Personal Qualities where the Asian American applicants were a very close second to whites-- so much for Asian Americans being bookish automatons. The URM Duke applicants were in distant last place for test scores and all soft qualities.
Granted, this is data from Duke admissions, not Ivy admissions. But it’s probably fair to assume there is a lot of overlap in the applicant pools. And I have a hard time believing that the test-cramming Asian robots disproportionately apply to Ivies, while the most well-rounded Asians apply to Duke.
This federal complaint is being lodged by 64 groups, not by one lame-o reject, like Abigail Fisher. So it’s going to be hard for the US Dept of Education and the Justice Dept to just dismiss the complaint as sour grapes by one crank. But then again, perhaps the complaint could be ignored on the calculated risk that asian americans only comprise 6% of the electorate; therefore, they’re politically irrelevant.
All this is doing is throwing back the curtains on how Asian Americans apparently think of themselves.