<p>HBCUs exist because once upon a time (and not that very long ago) African Americans were (legally) banned from applying to many (now) elite universities particularly (but not exclusively) in the south. HBCUs were often founded by African Americans who somehow managed to obtain a high quality education in spite of the overt, constant, and oppressive discrimination in order to help other African Americans obtain the education they desired, but were excluded from by the white institutions that legally banned them from applying.</p>
<p>Many HBCUs are still underfunded and often operate on a shoe-string budget.</p>
<p>All HBCUs welcome applications from whites and ORMs, but receive very few applicants from these groups. There is no “barrier” to break if you are a white or an ORM who is willing to apply to and attend an HBCU.</p>
<p>Going to a school that only has the most qualified students would be boring as hell. In high school, as a white male, I was kind of jaded and annoyed by the whole AA thing. But now, on the other side of it, I’m really glad my school is not just “the smartest kids that applied.” There really is something to be said about diversity, not only in ethnicities, but in socioeconomic status, religion, whatever.
Right now, it sucks. And it’ll suck 10 times more when you are applying for jobs (I thought it ended in college, finance is way worse than college admissions in my opinion), but instead of looking at it as competing with these other kids, look at it as, the school has decided its target number of each group, and you are really mainly competing with kids like yourself.
Probably won’t make you feel better, but what can ya do?</p>
<p>Also, a college dedicated to overachieving asians alone would not be ideal at all</p>
<p>Is there any such college in the United States? Besides, if what you say is indeed true regardless of location, then it’s quite puzzling why Beijing, Qinghua, Seoul National, Tokyo, Waseda, and National Taiwan University, to name just a few top Asian schools, are so highly desired and prized.</p>
<p>Considering that I can’t read Japanese or Korean and am only partially literate in traditional Chinese, of course I would rather go to “HYPS,” where the medium of instruction is in a language that I comprehend both in speech and writing.</p>
<p>I reiterate my points. First, there is no “college dedicated to overachieving asians alone” in the United States. If you disagree, please give a counterexample. Second, there are many, many colleges that are de facto “dedicated to overachieving asians alone,” and there is nothing wrong with that. I’m sure the ones I listed in post 104 have some visiting or even full-time non-Asian students, but by and large, almost all the students are going to be Asian.</p>
<p>It bothers me when people raise the “broader situations” flag because few of these “broader situations” end up in HYP &c. The so-called “underrepresented” minorities at HYP &c are mostly from wealthy families, who are in the same socioeconomic class as “the kid whose dad is a bank executive, mom is a homemaker, family income is $300K…”</p>
<p>If you want to argue for “diversity” (ie. proportional representation), that’s fine. But please don’t mislead others into thinking that the “diversity” you get from practicing racial preferences includes very many of those “broader situations.”</p>
<p>I am confused by MIT’s application. Why are they including Caribbean in the Black or African American choice. Are they saying everybody from the Caribbean is African American? There are many people from islands in the Carribean that consider themselves White. If you check off White it looks as though you don’t know where your particular island is located. I am very confused.</p>
<p>The schools you listed in post 104 are national flagships for <em>Asian</em> countries. Hence, almost all of their students are <em>Asians</em> because almost all of their students are <em>citizens</em> of their respective countries. [And those countries are all substantially more homogeneous than the US.]</p>
<p>The (equivalent) top US schools are primarily dedicated to “overachieving US citizens,” the vast majority of which are NOT Asian American. Yes, our top schools typically have higher percentages of foreign students than other top world schools—but much of that is due to the fact that the US is still where large numbers of people want to come. And the vast majority of students at HYP and their US peers are US citizens. </p>
<p>As recent as 45 or 50 years ago, the vast majority of students at ivies were privileged, rich white (male) students whose families had been wealthy for generations, and not all of these students would have been considered as “overachieving” based on their prep school records. For a whole variety of reasons beginning the late 60s and early 70s, the ivies decided to shed their old image of being only for privileged, rich white (male) students whose families have been wealthy for generations and truly become dedicated to educating “overachieving US citizens” of <em>all</em> colors and <em>all</em> economic classes and <em>all</em> genders. The US population is NOT homogeneous and currently HYP and their ilk strive to make sure their undergraduate students are also NOT homogeneous, but reflect the best of the entire spectrum of the US population.</p>
<p>And for what it’s worth, the data that I could readily find on the Harvard web page and also on the College Board web site indicates that somewhere between 15% and 20% of the freshmen class self-identifies as “Asian American” and about 15% chooses to not indicate an ethnic background. Asian-Americans make up about 5% of the total US population. So I don’t think it’s credible to argue that HYP are not friendly enough to Asian American applicants.</p>
<p>So then you are agreeing with me that braaap’s assertion that “a college dedicated to overachieving asians alone would not be ideal at all” is a straw man because there is no such college in the United States, yes? After all, you omitted my “If you disagree, please give a counterexample” sentence from your quotation.</p>
<p>I think my original post (#104) has been misunderstood. I was expressing my strong disagreement with braaap that there exists any “college dedicated to overachieving asians alone” in our country as well as the very notion that there is something flawed with “college[s] dedicated to overachieving asians alone.” That was all.</p>
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<p>Are you familiar with [the</a> history of Jewish students at Harvard](<a href=“Getting In | The New Yorker”>Getting In | The New Yorker)? In 1922, more than 20% of the then incoming Harvard class was Jewish, and former Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell could not tolerate that. It’s quite interesting that you reference a 15% figure because coincidentally, 15% was the exact number that Lowell was at most willing to live with in regards to Jewish enrollment. To get Jewish enrollment to drop from 20% back to 15%, Lowell tried a series of unsuccessful solutions: quotas, restricted scholarships to Jewish students, and geographic preferences. None worked until Lowell had an epiphany: simply redefine merit. Thus, holistic admissions was born, and it didn’t take long until Jewish enrollment decreased to 15%.</p>
<p>“Overrepresentation” does not disprove discrimination.</p>
<p>I take it that this is a question about the very first post in this FAQ thread, with examples of college applications. </p>
<p>The way the question is asked, and the way the answer choices are grouped, there is no forcing of all Caribbean persons to be labeled as black. Yes, some people who live in the Caribbean are white or are persons who fit some other United States race category. But evidently the MIT admission office thinks it is meaningful to distinguish different applicants who all fit into the federal definition of the black race category, and that is something that colleges are permitted to do under the current federal regulations. So once an applicant has self-identified as black, the applicant is then asked to specify whether or not his or her black heritage is through some Caribbean heritage. (A white person can identify “other” as a detailed category that would include, by implication, the Caribbean.) </p>
<p>The best people to ask a specific question about MIT admission policy would be the admission officers at MIT (at least two of whom have College Confidential user accounts, posting occasionally on the MIT Forum here on CC). I have no particular idea why that question is asked the way it is asked by MIT.</p>
<p>As such statements are every time they are posted in a thread like this, correct. </p>
<p>At the very least, before deciding [what</a> overrepresented means](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1064853590-post14.html]what”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1064853590-post14.html), we should figure out whether we are talking about the whole national population, including persons who have neither desire nor ability to attend college, or whether we are talking about the applicant pool at each college, or what. It is perfectly possible for one defined subset of students or another to be subject to inimical prejudice in the admission process (as Jewish students plainly were between the two world wars in the United States) even while that subset appears to be “overrepresented” with regard to national population percentages.</p>
<p>Yes, braap’s assertion about a college dedicated to overachieving asians alone is a straw man as far as the US is concerned.</p>
<p>When I posted, however, I think I was confusing you and the OP. The OP (not you) seems to think that the existence of HBCUs is some how detrimental to an Asian American’s chances of being accepted at a tippy-top institution like Harvard. I apologize for mixing you and the OP up. And that’s why I continued the post with the rest of my comments.</p>
<p>Yes, I’m familiar with Harvard’s long-term attempts at limiting the number of Jewish students. [It is tied up with the creation of the SATs among other things and the beginning of Harvard’s policies of considering legacies and (highly) valuing athletic students as well.] But you have to recall that at the time of Lawrence Lowell’s shady efforts to limit the over representation of Jewish students, there were NO black students, NO Asian students, NO female students and mighty few Catholic students at Harvard. Lowell was attempting to find a way of <em>preserving</em> the overwhelming percentage of WASP NE preparatory school graduates in the Harvard student body. In other words, he was not discriminating against well qualified Jews in an effort to <em>diversify</em> the student body so that it included <em>some</em> of the best qualified blacks, asians, females, and Catholics as well as NE WASPs and Jews; he was seeking to restrict access to Harvard to make its undergraduate body even more homogeneous and wealthy and WASPy.</p>
<p>There is, in my humble opinion, a difference between Lowell’s discriminating against a minority in order to maintain a power structure that favors WASPy, wealthy whites at all costs and Harvard’s current use of holistic admissions criteria to create a well-qualified freshman class that at least vaguely looks like the country as a whole—in the sense that it contains some extremely bright, highly motivated, and clearly successful folks from all economic classes and all ethnic backgrounds.</p>
<p>The fact is that at HYP, there are so many well qualified applicants now, that they could admit their freshman class, toss all those admission letters in the trash and start over with the other 90% of applicants and easily find another entire freshman class that is equally bright, motivated, and talented while rejecting 80% of the original applicant pool twice. And you could probably even repeat the process a third time too.</p>
<p>One of my pet peeves is reading comments like “a college dedicated to overachieving asians alone would not be ideal at all.” braaap isn’t alone in voicing such sentiments; every incarnation of this thread has contained at least one such post. I don’t believe that eliminating racial preferences will cause universities to become “dedicated to overachieving asians alone.” As a real life example, no UC campus is like that. Even UC-Irvine, sometimes derisively pegged as the University of Chinese Immigrants, is far from being all-Chinese or all-Asian for that matter.</p>
<p>Based on my experience, many supporters of affirmative action draw a clear distinction between “positive” discrimination and “negative” discrimination. That is, to them, there is a world of difference between using discrimination to advance minorities and using discrimination to hinder minorities.</p>
<p>I respectfully disagree and opine that fundamentally, the two are no different. In both instances, we are discriminating on the basis of race. “We’re doing it for the greater good” doesn’t sway me from seeing affirmative action for what it is: positive racial discrimination. I personally am opposed to both positive and negative discrimination. I believe that individuals ought to be treated without regard to their racial classification.</p>
<p>I’ll renew a question I ask from time to time in threads like this: what have you personally experienced if you apply while self-categorizing in the American Indian or Alaska Native race category? Do colleges routinely ask for verification of that, or does that depend on what college you are applying to? What follow-up have you encountered in that situation?</p>
<p>My sister had to photocopy (or maybe fax, can’t remember but it was one of the two) her tribal ID card to Stanford. I think this was when she initially applied, which was a few years ago. I don’t think it was a follow-up-after-applying thing.</p>