However, it may be that many such students are like many students of any other race/ethnicity (including white) in shying away from applying to schools where there are very few of their own race/ethnicity. It does seem odd that forum posters do not hesitate to advise Asian students to apply to schools where there are few Asian students (i.e. where they may be URM) but most tend to leave out historically black schools in recommendations for big merit seeking students who are not known to be black.
^ you think that’s why few black/Hispanic/native American kids apply to the most selective schools also, because they don’t want to be among so few of their ethnic/racial peer group?
I suppose many don’t want to be URM, or not very URM.
PS: Are Asian students advised on CC to apply to HBCUs more than white students are, do you think, @ucbalumnus ?
I hadn’t noticed that. Howard comes up a lot for white and Asian and any other students looking for good merit aid, I’ve recommended it myself to others and my D as well.
“because they don’t want to be among so few of their ethnic/racial peer group?”
That, and they correctly perceive that they are often expected to be spokespeople/models for the edification of the majority. It’s a lot to carry.
You got it.
I suggest the HB schools on an equal basis as non-HB schools in the big merit scholarship lists to students seeking big merit (or who need to seek big merit). But it does appear to me that many other posters leave out the HB schools unless the student says that s/he is black.
It does appear to be that case that, among schools in http://automaticfulltuition.yolasite.com/ , the students whose GPA and test scores lean more toward GPA are more likely to find big merit at the HB schools, while the non-HB schools tend to emphasize test scores more.
You obviously have absolutely no clue what the term “hooked” (not “hook”) means in the parlance of college admissions. It doesn’t mean “advantage” or “preference.” But hey, what’s accuracy when you have an axe to grind?
^^^ What??? That quote you had there was in response to a specific post. It had a context. Oh well.
If you read the report, you know that this is not true. That isn’t what OCR did at all.
I think people have a belief that OCR could have performed some kind of statistical analysis that would have proved that discrimination is going on. First of all, I think the statistics are what prompted OCR to do a deeper dive into the actual admissions files. But more importantly, the idea that you can prove discrimination against Asians through statistics in the context of holistic admissions is unrealistic. You simply can’t control for enough variables. (Plus, if you suggest correcting for some obvious factors, such as preference for STEM fields, people get all defensive and go into denial about it.)
Interestingly, Hunt, the claimants likely could prove disparate impact, i.e., the admissions process by its very nature disfavors Asians. But disparate impact is not the law of the land, altho the current Admin is pushing it by regulation.
This is the example I always wanted to use. Say your kid is at a tippy top high school which has a tippy top competitive academic team. It needs a variety of skills and attributes, plus commitment.
You get to choose the team to compete this year, a team which can and should land at nationals. Do you pick based on grades and scores alone?
If the “top scorers” are mostly math wizzes, do you build a team with only math strengths? Or stop and look for some whose ace is chem, history or literature? And if the pool includes many super intense kids, you vet for how they’ll operate as a team. Maybe one kid didn’t score high on math, but her extra is she pulls the whole together or is the tension breaker. And so on.
So you have a list of attributes you want. And suppose, later, the math kids who didn’t make the cut complain that there’s some bias against math kids. And they point to their higher scores as proof. But all along, you were looking at the individuals, yes, but also at the whole team.
And if you happen to choose the math kids who do have higher scores, that still doesn’t mean you are vetting solely on scores. Or biased against math.
Let me say here, as I have many times before, that I think it is possible that admissions officers at highly selective schools may be unfairly biased individually against Asian students, based on stereotypes. For example, I think it’s possible that admissions officers might discount standardized test scores if they believe (rightly or wrongly) that students from specific groups probably had a lot of prep. However, this is different from any kind of policy to discriminate, and schools (like Princeton) say they train their personnel to try to prevent this kind of bias. Unfortunately, I don’t think you can have wide-ranging holistic review and also eliminate all possibility of personal bias–blanking out applicants’ names would not be enough.
Usually, I’m not someone who would buy “conspiracy theories”. If a well established mainstream institution says something is true or not true about their admission policies, we should believe them. Those places are constantly under the spotlight and the last thing they want is to be caught up in a scandal. Over the years, however, the anecdotal evidence has been too much to ignore. In particular, it’s notoriously difficult for Asian boys and unhooked white girls (who share many same attributes as Asian boys, namely, over-represented, intensely academic, more likely picking up certain ECs etc.) to be admitted to the ivies.It seems that the personal bias as @Hunt described is somehow becoming somewhat systematic. It may not be a “race thing” after all. The way the holistic review is done is shutting out some of the best students (not just academically because as posters pointed out earlier these candidates tend to have stellar EC’s as well) for the colleges’ “institutional priorities”. Maybe what people disagree on is the legitimacy of these “institutional priorities”. But what can anyone and OCR do about them?
That’s illogical. If admissions was done on pure test scores+GPA, the highly selective schools would still be " shutting out some of the best students…"
The obvious point is that there are thousands of top students each and every year. 3,000 Vals, 3000 Sals, 3000x football captains, 3000x band leaders/drum majors, 3000x tuba players…
There is just no room in the Inn for all of them.
But what if the anecdotes don’t really tell the whole story? As I noted above, when OCR reviewed the application from “Applicant 1” and the others from his same high school, they concluded that he actually wasn’t superior to the students who were accepted–although he thought he was.
As for institutional priorities, my opinion is that the one that has the most impact on Asian applicants is the desire for the colleges to fill non-STEM majors. In another thread, somebody linked to College Board data showing that Asian students are about twice as likely to pursue STEM majors than non-Asian students. Surely nobody can dispute the legitimacy of the priority to have some classics and language majors?
Other priorities are more debatable, but I haven’t seen a plausible argument that any of them are pretexts to limit the number of Asians, which is pretty much what you’d have to show in order to make a case for unlawful discrimination.
I would not be surprised if admissions officers expect somewhat higher scores from all students whose background would suggest that they had more educational advantage or test prep than is typical–those lucky enough to be attending magnet or other high powered schools, high SES students, and children of highly educated parents. Those students are probably performing closer to their highest potential than a kid from a potato farm in Idaho.
If Princeton takes the kid from the potato farm with a 3.9 and a 2270 SAT, and rejects the kid from Stuy with a 4.0 and a 2400, is that an injustice?
^ that’s really the crux of it, yes. And if they do, and the Stuy kid is Asian and the potato farm kid is black or Hispanic…then it seems that will be perceived as evidence. Even if the Stuy kid comes form a poor family.
“my opinion is that the one that has the most impact on Asian applicants is the desire for the colleges to fill non-STEM majors” I agree, but I got called racist for saying that.
In other discussions, I received a lot of pushback on what I thought was a trivially obvious observation, which is that Asian students are substantially more likely to identify (or embody) a STEM focus than non-Asian students. Some people really didn’t want to accept that this was true. But it is not racist to point out that for cultural reasons, Asian students are more likely to go into STEM, just as it is not racist to point out that Asian kids are more likely to play the violin than a brass instrument.