Opinions on The Chosen?

Parents Forum
41

<p>
[quote]
Asians are <em>not</em> being discriminated against in higher education.

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<p>Wow, epiphany. You're the first person who is knowledgable about the admissions process who I've heard come out & say that. I've personally not seen any "perfect" Asian kid get rejected. Most high scoring Asian kids I've seen who miss out on their desired elite school had some kind of weakness or were simply one-dimensional. I guess I've absorbed the Asian discrimination story that is so widely tossed around. I'd like to hear more of your thoughts on why Asians are not the "new Jews."</p>

42

<p>I also wanted to address some comments of fizik's, earlier.</p>

<p>I will admit that when older daughter & I were looking into US colleges several yrs ago, we were appalled at many of the marketing messages that were being sent. I can remember that I was struck by how seldom some (even very top U's) mentioned anything about <em>academics</em> in their promotional material --- including even in invitational opportunities, such as local information nights held regionally, etc. At one point -- and that "point" lasted a long time, it was a possibility that she would attend college overseas, since by the standards of those overseas colleges she did qualify, academically.</p>

<p>It's probably good that we cooled off a little & that she decided she didn't want to overcome an additional hurdle of another culture as part of her undergraduate experience. When we began actually investigating US colleges, & she visited those she was most interested in, she did not find that the previous impressions were true. She found that the academic content was superb, the competition fierce, her competitors awesome. But all those applying to those colleges found that they had to meet BOTH the academic merit threshhold (as defined & perceived by the colleges) AND much more than that. In some cases, there were students who met that "more," too, but the college was seeking a certain spread geographically & economically, meaning bundles of acceptances would not be forthcoming to the same college from a single sr. class.</p>

<p>And btw, my daughter did get accepted to fine US Universities & is most certainly not an athlete nor an ethnic minority.</p>

43

<p>You need to read "the Price of Admission" before making comments on it. Maybe percentages of Asians should be a lot higher than the population representation because more are smarter (consider the immigrant pool) and/ or work harder than the typical European American. I totally disagree with Golden re foreign students but he raises many valid points about other areas. My son is 1/2 Asian, totally American. As a midwestern, middle class European American (I am "of color", my skin tones are pink- while I'm on a roll I may as well address another racist pet peeve), I had the same qualities and work ethic you ascribe to Asians, which I translated to a higher college degree. Not everyone feels being like the stereotypic American is the proper way to do things. For some of us college means an academic education, not a series of social events. I have a passion for science, my parents favored science- I am not surprised that many Asian Americans share their parents' predilection for the math/science fields nor the intensity I had in high school. Golden's book is not about "breaking news", that would be in newspapers or magazines. Most of us not living on the east coast do not usually read the east coast newspapers; we are unaware of him except as the author of a book. I must add that the rest of the country probably knows more about the east coast region than those people know about places outside their region; including colleges.</p>

44

<p>"Were you a member of a Finals Club? (or were you ever invited to join?)"</p>

<p>I was not. I was invited to join Hasty Pudding and didn't. It's weird even though I went to a well regarded girls prep school I've always been more attracted to public school types. It's not anything I did consciously. Also back when I was at Harvard the houses had more personality than they do now. I was definitely in the music house. My major definitely did not attract to many blue bloods. (Visual and Environmental Studies)</p>

45

<p>“Maybe percentages of Asians should be a lot higher than the population representation…..”</p>

<p>They already are. That’s the point. They are an overrepresented group, just as Caucasians were once even more overrepresented at these same colleges.</p>

<p>“……because more are smarter (consider the immigrant pool) and/ or work harder than the typical European American.”</p>

<p>I consider that comment not only a stereotype but a racist stereotype. There have been discussions on other threads as to whether high scoring equals “smart” or “smarter.” There’s no objective evidence of that correlation. As to “working harder,” I’ll address that in a separate post.</p>

<p>I do not need to read Golden’s entire book; what I have seen in many excerpts posted variously (on CC and elsewhere) makes me definitely not want to read the book because it tells me a lot about the author, who obviously has several axes to grind. And when I said “breaking news” I meant specifically news about college admissions. That news is readily accessible to people living in the midwest. The last I heard, the midwest does not have an internet blackout, which means they have access to the following:</p>

<p>(1) Internet forums about college admissions (CC and others)
(2) The New York Times online; The LA Times online, neither of which require paid subscriptions or coastal residency.
(3) Amazon.com and other internet book sites
(4) Brick-and-mortar book stores & newstands, containing magazines such as Atlantic Monthly and Harpers, which tend to publish articles about college admissions on a fairly regular basis.</p>

<p>“I must add that the rest of the country probably knows more about the east coast region than those people know about places outside their region; including colleges.”</p>

<p>I wouldn’t want to generalize based on CC, but I will say that there certainly are some parents on students on CC who seem to know little indeed about US colleges outside the Northeast. Whether the CC population can be extrapolated beyond the discussion board is another thing. If your statement is true, that may be because until maybe 5-7 yrs ago it was not always necessary to have wider knowledge. If one wanted to stay in the Northeast, it was likely that one would be accepted to at least a match school. And I could say similarly about the West Coast, btw. With greater population pressure on Western colleges as well – the flagship UC’s & even the top CSU’s, USC, Claremont Colleges, the Pacific Northwest, WC students are looking Eastward in some cases, and North (to Canada) in other cases.</p>

46

<p>Re: Asians are smarter. Years ago I read The Bell Curve. Memory is foggy, but I seem to remember certain Asian subgroups, as well as Ashkenazi Jews, did have higher I.Q.s. I also read Taboo, which explored the dominance of blacks in sports. Again, it's not our imagination. (West African ancestry = explosive sprinting speed, for example.)</p>

<p>We don't simply award Harvard acceptance letters to Koreans or NFL contracts to West Africans, though. We recognize the tremendous amount of work & commitment needed to hone those God-given attributes into a top student or athlete. They earn these rewards.</p>

<p>As far as working harder than "the typical European American," well, I think you have to define "work." This is purely anecdotal, but I have been amazed at the driven, focused pursuit of 99th+ percentile numbers among Asian kids. I remember a distraught Korean mom, telling me that she forced her d to take Latin because she "only" scored in the 96th percentile on vocab in Tera-Novas. Or the Chinese girl who had a live-in tutor this summer because she had 'failed" freshman English (with a 93 average.) Or the Taiwanese kid who is forced to attend sleep-away tennis camps and memorize SAT vocab words throughout the summer & see a math tutor twice a week all year long.</p>

<p>I could go on, but I bet you all know kids like this. Our '"sterotypic American" approach is to let kids "work" on being kids. Work hard/play hard. Achievement is great, but reasonable lifestyles are healthy and necessary.</p>

<p>My d took part in a sleep-away strings camp a few years ago. Midori's teacher is on the staff. You would not believe the crowd of "Midori wannabes" and their parents who were flying kids from Japan to New England for the privlege of lessons with this woman. Kids who practice violin 6+ hours a day. Needless to say, d never returned to the camp. She was hoping that the other campers would want to put their violins down & go for a swim or hop in a kyack. But there was a huge disconnect between the Asian kids and the non-Asians. You might argue that 6+ hours on a violin is simply a kid pursuing her passion, but to this "sterotypic American," it just doesn't sit well.</p>

<p>I do think that a one-dimensional, but brilliant kid, might often be rejected by the elites & leave the parents stunned.</p>

47

<p>I don't think it has anything to do with some subsets of folks with various Asian ancestry being "one-dimensional". (And we need to be careful with terms: are we talking about Mongolians, Guamians, 5th generation Japanese-Americans, Pakistanis, Javanese, Upland Hmong, Mien, Laotians, or Polynesians?)</p>

<p>But I do think there is discrimination against "Asians", but not as Asians, rather as fall-out from other admissions categories. They are much less likely to be football players (or recruited athletes generally speaking), much less likely to be legacies or developmental admits, and, with the exception of a few categories (upland Hmong and Mien), much less likely to be Pell Grant recipients.</p>

<p>To use my alma mater for example: upwards of 40% of matriculants are "scholar-athletes". 8% non-athlete Pell Grantees; 2-4% non-athletic developmental admits; 6-8% non-athlete legacies, 4% internationals. (I haven't even mentioned other URMs.) Add it up, and 60-63%% of the "slots" are already filled. The school is 12% "Asian-American", which means that Asian-Americans make up almost a third of the "non-slots". It likely means they are admitted at a higher rate than the average non-slotted applicant, but it doesn't help much. </p>

<p>But let's be clear: a violinist isn't worth (in admissions) even one-third as much as a defensive end at a prestige college.</p>

48

<p>Violinists are not worth as much because they are a dime a dozen. Academically qualified defensive ends with the strength and speed needed to play at the college level are rare. If I practiced six hours a day with Midori's teacher, I'd soon be capable of playing in most college orchestras. If I practiced six hours a day under the coaching of Bill Belichick, I would never be capable of playing in most college programs. (O.K. -- Cheating here a bit, as I'm a woman. But the same could be said about my athletic, 6'5" brother. If you turned back the clock about 30 years.)</p>

<p>Re: Asian subsets being one-dimensional. I never said that. I was referring anecdotally to Asian kids I know personally who are one-dimensional, and I am not making sweeping pronouncements about all Asians. </p>

<p>Various subgroups of Asians were discussed in The Bell Curve for the purposes of comparing I.Q.s. I'd have to drag the book out, but I remember several subgroups had I.Q.s far above the white average, and several were far below.</p>

49

<p>Last week I spent two days interviewing 15 students (individually) for a specialty scholarship at my Alma Mater. Anyone who has done this – or who has interviewed for admissions at a similar top college – can confirm that the admissions committes at HYPSM (throw in Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth Cornell, Penn, Georgetown, JHU, C-M, & the top LAC’s in the Northeast & Far West) are not lying or exaggerating: there are far more truly, exemplary, qualified students than spots available – whether that’s for scholarship money in this case, or a seat in the University in the other case.</p>

<p>When it came to making scholarship recommendations, it was about not who was qualified, but who was more COMPREHENSIVELY qualified. They were all “qualified.” They were there; they had been screened, had already made the first 2 cuts. And, btw, talk about “working hard.” These students – already in college – were holding down a full academic load, often working part-time on or off campus, sometimes very involved in serious extra curriculars on campus, and in a few cases, commuting. One of my 15 candidates was Asian. I saw no other Asians in the several other pools of waiting candidates between my shifts. That does not mean that Asians do not work hard, obviously. It means that many non-Asians work at least as hard. My candidates had very little time to indulge in “a series of social events.”</p>

<p>What this experience gave me was a peek into the difficult choices faced by adm. Committees. I would say that only 2 of my interviewees were a little one-dimensional – a little limited in the scope of their accomplishments. But that’s only a comparative statement. They were not too limited to get into a top-flight University, obviously. It was a question of both breadth & depth of accomplishment. Those who had BOTH the breadth AND the depth were the ones earning the highest recommendation. Five of my candidates demonstrated that, but all 15 of them had in one or several ways earned consideration. I can be PM’ed if anyone wants to know more details about whom I recommended, & their backgrounds; I just don’t want to post more identifying info publicly about the students. And 5 candidates is one-third – a far greater proportion than the admission rates to the above named institutions. </p>

<p>Another important detail. Sometimes I was a lone interviewer, sometimes paired, sometimes tripled. In one of my paired interviews, I recommended the candidate more strongly than my partner did. CC’ers forget how often this can happen in admissions as well. These are subjective calls, and a committee member’s opinion can be diluted by a contrary opinion on the committee. In our case (as with admissions) this was definitely a hair-splitting situation, and I do not know if the candidate will end up in the “accept’ or “reject” pile.</p>

<p>As you can see from my above statements, it was “not enough” to be accomplished in just a couple of areas. (Putting that in the context of college admissions – for example, GPA & scores.) You had to not only have the base qualification, you had to have much more than that merely because of what your competitors were bringing to the table – not because of an arbitrary standard set by a committee. My experience confirmed what I have seen elsewhere, in that I think the “lopsided” theory of admissions is overstated. In a few cases of Extreme accomplishment in a defined arena, that “extremity” can earn an admission, but mostly a singular area of accomplishment will be overshadowed by competitors’ multiple areas of accomplishment, academically, personally, on & on. The students showing up with multiple admissions tickets to “elites” on April 1 are the students who have it all.</p>

<p>Student A:
GPA 4.0 UW in most challenging curriculum, SAT’s 2400. Academic awards (but no other category of awards or recognition). Perhaps one consistent extra curricular of long standing, but nothing where the student is “celebrated” for individual accomplishment.</p>

<p>Student B:
GPA 3.97 UW in most challenging curriculum, SAT’s 2200. Academic awards. Leadership accomplishment, coupled with personal sacrifice on a consistent basis (i.e., a component of character). One or two e.c.’s of tremendous accomplishment & long standing – with awards or recognition in those e.c’s, including nationally.</p>

<p>I’m telling you that top colleges will tend to favor Student B. If you think that’s “non-meritorious,” I think you’re fighting a losing battle, & you should go enroll in a Univ. in this or another country that recognizes a limited definition of “merit.” And if Student B is from an under-represented area of the country & an under-represented economic group (vs. Student A), this is even a less difficult call for an admissions committee. </p>

<p>This does not account for URM’s. If Student A is a URM, all bets are off. It really depends on the diversity enrollment goals of the college, the financial needs of the student & the college’s available funds for that, etc. But I’ll just tell you that there are many URM’s who are the Student B model.</p>

50

<p>mini --- I don't get your numbers, They only work if you assume no Asian is an athlete, a developmental admit, a legacy, a Pell Grant kid, or an international. There must be overlap, no?</p>

51

<p>There IS some overlap, but not very much. Asian-Americans (and again, we need to be careful about categories) are much, much less likely to be recruited or "tipped" athletes at my alma mater, much less likely to be Pell Grant recipients, much less likely to be legacies, virtually unheard of as developmental admits, and international admit rates are at 6% and falling. And since, as a group, they do so well in admissions for the "non-slotted" places, they gain no traction as URMs either.</p>

<p>The point being there may be no overt discrimination, but there doesn't have to be to restrict admissions of Asian-Americans who, so-called "objectively", might be "better qualified" than those admitted. But by definition, admissions departments are admitting those they deem to be "best qualified", so it's a tautology.</p>

<p>(When I was admitted to my alma mater, there were 9 candidates from my high school, and I was the 6th most qualified. All of those rejected with better stats than I had went to Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. (none were EVER admitted to Princeton). I did discover why me. I was the only non-premed. There was an unspoken restriction on premeds from New York City. It wasn't a Jew quota - though they had that, too - but it might as well have been.)</p>

52

<ol>
<li><p>Changing the rules to exclude Jewish people is a very sad part of these elite schools history. How can we as Americans allow this to happen? Unfortunately there are other examples of this behavior, racism against black americans, the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, our current behavior towards Americans of middle eastern and south asian descent.</p></li>
<li><p>I am not sure that the solution is a return to a strict "numbers based" (ie grades, test scores, rankings) would help educate and produce smart students. That is, I have read that in Japan, students cram and "bust ass" to get into a TOP university. However, once some students get in to University they lose the motivation, ambition and drive to learn and excel. Therefore, I am not sure that I would want to create a pressure packed cramming environment for our young kids. I am not sure that is the way to go either.</p></li>
</ol>

53

<p>I enjoyed The Chosen a lot. It helped me to live with the fact that I didn't get into Radcliffe in 1966 (although I did get into Wellesley, Cornell, and Brandeis). I felt very proud of my fellow Jews for doing so well on tests that HYP had to design such complicated systems not to be overwhelmed by them. But nowadays Jews aren't working that hard, and Asian immigrants are. I do think, anecdotally, that there is some discrimination against Asians nowadays, from what my H tells me about where his HS students are accepted. But I don't want the US to go to a purely test-based system of accepting candidates into university like that in Asia. I've been having my students (first-year community college students) write essays about their high school experiences, and the Asian HS's are so depressing: no sports, no creativity, just study, study, study for the test. My Asian students are so envious when they hear about some of the projects and discussions and sports that their American classmates got to experience in HS.</p>

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<p>The lesson that I would learn from this is that it doesn't always matter who's got terrific numbers; if the character isn't there, the candidate won't contribute to the university. An excellent argument for the "holistic" system!</p>

55

<p>
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1. Changing the rules to exclude Jewish people is a very sad part of these elite schools history. How can we as Americans allow this to happen?

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<p>While reprehensible, they had changed the rules to let Jews in first. The SAT was invented so as to identify bright public school kids to join the East Coast boarding school kids that were already being admitted via the cozy relationships between prep schools and colleges. They just didn't get quite the mix they expected and backtracked. (Read The Big Test: The Secret History of the SAT for more.)</p>

56

<p>Nope. Just the opposite. They were overwhelmed by Jewish kids from Boston and New York who met their Latin requirements, met their Greek requirements, and were equal or better than equal for virtually every requirement they had on the books.</p>

<p>The purpose, not of the invention of the SAT, but its adoption by Harvard and then the others was to get public school kids FROM OUTSIDE THE NORTHEAST where the Jewish kids were concentrated. They weren't going to restrict their prep school admits, so they needed another population to reduce their Jewish ones. Had they used pure SAT scores, it is likely that Jewish kids from the northeast would make up more than half the student body. (Amherst came close to trying that circa 1967-1968, and the Jewish population (mostly from the northeast) of the campus soared to around 30%. That didn't last very long.)</p>

57

<p>re midwesterners- although there is the internet most people are not spending their time reading periodicals from the east coast; I'm willing to bet the same people who would have purchased copies or read them in the library are now doing so online. If the publications would widen their scope to include coverage of other areas, ie become national instead of regional in focus, they would deserve a wider audience. The underlying points they make may be valid but it is tiresome to only hear about one region- there is life away from the coasts. Every region is provincial.</p>

<p>re working hard-many EC's are not academic, but social in nature, requiring only average ability to succeed. "Leadership", politics, business may be important to most in our society but not to some of us. The traits possessed by the majority are most likely to be more valued and selected- consider the traits of those willing to have admissions committee jobs- social science/humanities grads, not scientists I'll bet. Typical does not mean the typical CC poster- look at the average American high school and its priorities. Compare them to the 1960's space race priorites. For those who utilize private college prep schools instead of the local public schools-why need to choose them, if the rest of society valued academics and working hard as much there would be no reason to.</p>

58

<p>The history of racial, ethnic, and cultural discrimination in this country and at Harvard, etc., is long and complicated, and not to be summed up in a few lines. All of these institutions have had proud and not-so-proud moments, some of them probably at about the same time.</p>

<p>I am Jewish, always have been. My son, if he went to Harvard, would be the fourth generation of my family there. The first was my grandmother, who was in the class of (I think) 1918 at Radcliffe (where she was "helpfully" assigned a Jewish roommate -- Felix Frankfurter's sister). Three of her brothers (and one brother-in-law) were later Harvard undergraduates. At the time, what was interesting about this was not that they were Jewish, because they were hardly the only Jews there, but that they were Russian Jews, and thus a big step down socially from the German and Sephardic Jews who had been attending Harvard for several generations already. Were there Jewish quotas in effect? Almost certainly. Was Harvard showing its progressive, meritocratic bent? Yes, that too. </p>

<p>There is a legitimate debate, which Karabell slights, I believe, about what constitutes a good person, a leader. Everyone values intelligence, but traditionally Americans, like the British, have valued other qualities as well -- athletic ability, idiosyncratic passion, "leadership", well-roundedness. Some of the discrimination against Jews was discrimination against Jews; some of it was bona fide difference of opinion about what a great student should look like. As Jews assimilated more, and as prejudices against Jews began to seem outdated, more Jews looked like top candidates to these schools, and the schools were willing to take a more diverse group of kids. Something of the same dynamic is happening now with Asian-Americans.</p>

<p>If Jewish enrollment at HYPS declined in the 80s and 90s, I would speculate that it was because WASP enrollment was declining as well. The schools aggressively pursued a vision of a global student body, instituted real affirmative action programs (especially for Hispanics, who were almost nonexistent in my day, except for some wealthy Cuban exiles), and began admitting many more American kids of Eastern European, East Asian, and South Asian descent. The student bodies at HYPS seem much more diverse today than in my time, the supposed heyday of meritocracy.</p>

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<p>The anecdotes you relate are accurate, and reflect precisely what Karabel says. There were lots of Jewish students at H (though not Y and P) post World War I, and that is precisely what precipitated "the crisis". They could see the trends, and those trends were clear that, using H.'s stated criteria, enrollment of Jewish northeasterners was going to soar. Something HAD to be done. Now, the Belgians might have had good reason to measure the bridges of people's noses in order to distribute societal goodies in Rwanda-Burundi too, and I'm sure there were differences of opinion regarding what a "great Tutsi" would look like too. (One could escape Hutu status, regardless of the width of one's nose, by owning ten or more cows. Sound familiar?) </p>

<p>"The schools aggressively pursued a vision of a global student body, instituted real affirmative action programs (especially for Hispanics, who were almost nonexistent in my day, except for some wealthy Cuban exiles), and began admitting many more American kids of Eastern European, East Asian, and South Asian descent. The student bodies at HYPS seem much more diverse today than in my time, the supposed heyday of meritocracy."</p>

<p>It's an interesting hypothesis, but the data is lacking. Karabel notes that there were more African-American students at Princeton in the early 70s than when his book was being published (2002?), and there are definitely fewer economically poor African-American students at H. today than there were in the 70s. Until recent changes at Princeton, I think the data would be absolutely clear that HYP are less economically diverse today than in 1980 or so (and even with P's changes, even there it is equivocal.) </p>

<p>The prestige schools ARE more global today than they were 25 years ago. The bank president legacy who used to have offices in New York might today have his offices in Geneva or Paris. And the percentages of kids whose parents are/were heads of state or foreign ministers has most assuredly increased. And there are lots of great kids from all over the world. </p>

<p>This is not a complaint, nor a rant. If I were HYP, I'd run the admissions department today in virtually exactly the same way. And I think it is delightful that, with the proliferation and improvement of great schools around the country, educationally it doesn't make any real difference anymore. Some 70% of the Pell Grant recipients at Berkeley and UCLA have the stats to be at HYP, and it is no great tragedy that they aren't.</p>

60

<p>wis, I'm not sure to whom, what your last post is referring to, but if you're responding to my reply #49 (about EC's being supposedly "non-academic"), then your comments would not be pertinent to anything I described. These were not "social" e.c.'s, so there's no need to separate yourself ("some of us") as if you care about academic achievement & others do not.</p>

<p>The students I interviewed studied -- & are studying -- extremely hard. The difference is (vs. the "typical" student) is that they did, & do, much more than that. Much of that involves initiative in activities that have an academic origin but go beyond that, often with global implications. The academic areas of these students include the hard sciences, political science, & many other subjects.</p>