Educational attainment of Asian Americans is highest with Indian Americans (72% with BA/BS). Vietnamese Americans are close to the US average (29% with BA/BS). Asian Americans with below average educational attainment are Bhutanese (9%), Burmese (25%), Cambodian (18%), Hmong (17%), Laotian (16%) ethnicity.
@ucbalumnus that’s interesting info. So are the Bhutanese, Bhurmese, Cambodian, Hmong and Laotian applicants given any kind of boost from AA or are they lumped with “Asian Americans”? I know the questions on the applications are more detailed now, so are the colleges using this info to identify which Asians are actually URM’s vs. ORM’s?
I’m sure there are similar problems with students considered “Caucasian”. I just don’t know how detailed they can get, but wondering if somehow a student that falls into an ORM category who actually is practically speaking is more like a URM can get that point across in their essays? Or would that not make a difference? I’m guessing it depends on the school.
“I’d add that it’s not only racial groups who can be underrepresented and given a bump.”
Absolutely right. But remember that it is really only race that is accorded “strict scrutiny” under Federal statutory and case law. Justice Thomas’ opinion in the Grutter case does a good job of describing why race preferences are so odious under our legal system. See pp. 349ff here: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/539/306/case.pdf
As always, what is URM/ORM/other is what the specific college decides it is (i.e. it can vary by college). Also, designating someone as URM/ORM/other does not necessarily affect admission to the college (it may make the designation for marketing or institutional research purposes only).
Some are perhaps defensive about athletic help in admissions due to their kid maybe needing that help, I understand.
The fact is almost zero Asian students are helped by LAX recruitment (1.2% of NESCAC and .3% men and .9% women on LAX teams in the ivy League are Asian, period).
And many Asian students are, in fact, flown into elite LACs for diversity weekends. I can personally name several. As with those of other races, it helps to have a second “tip” - first gen or low income.
Colleges usually - not always - make it very clear on their web sites for these programs who they are trying to recruit. Of those colleges and universities that offer diversity weekends, some include Asians in that group and some don’t. I’v e listed them in this thread before.
I’m not sure what you mean by “more like a URM” unless you mean first gen or low income? Of course there are ORM that may be either or both.
Remember, lots of students attend colleges that do not consider ethnicity at all. For example, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s Chechen ethnicity did not matter for admission to UMass Dartmouth, which does not consider ethnicity in admission.
@OHMomof2 Yeah, I guess that could include low income/first gen. I think my bigger point is that within these broad generalized racial groups there are sub-groups that are in completely different situations and have different needs, some much more disadvantaged than others. I guess the system isn’t perfect and not sure it ever can be. But I think we have reached that conclusion many times on this thread. I agree with the point that has been made before that perhaps the fairer way to look at these situations is more from a socio-economic standpoint.
Regardless of race/ethnicity, I do think, especially with the need blind schools, being low income can (and should) help some. Might help some groups more than others though.
It’s been researched to death. If schools switched from race preferences to socioeconomic preferences, there would be no way to maintain the desired racial diversity. The very large majority of students who benefit from race preferences are from middle- and high-SES groups.
So what would the top schools look like if they switched to socioeconomic, assuming the bump would be given to applicants from lower socioeconomic backgrounds?
@collegemomjam - No one knows for sure what the schools would look like if they removed race preferences and substituted preferences for low-income or otherwise low-SES applicants. Of course, to some degree there are already slight preferences for certain aspects of low-SES (especially first-generation college). Assuming that low-income white and (especially) Asian applicants did not displace already existing white and Asian students, I would expect that the schools would become much more Asian and white. Hispanics could also see small increases, because race preference bumps specifically for Hispanics are generally not enormous today, but that is not clear because there are many privileged, high SES students who do get some preferences based on being Hispanic today.
At a need-blind school, how various correlated-to-income aspects are evaluated can effectively favor or disfavor low income applicants. For example, if an expensive extracurricular impresses the admissions reader, that disfavors low income applicants. But if working to help support one’s family is the most impressive extracurricular, that favors low income applicants. Of course, some colleges do not consider extracurriculars at all.
Note that such admission policy choices are made by colleges with consideration for their financial aid budgets. I.e. they are need aware for the entire class, even if they are need blind for individual applicants.
The fact that no Asians are recruited for LAX is a personal choice. As I stated students with genetics from the Asian Continent are not what constitutes Asians in the elite admission discussion. It is a very misleading statement. Indians are also from the Asian Continent but no one is referring to them when discussing Asians in elite admission. The threads on College Confidential prove this point. Go back and read the thousands of posts and notice how the term is used. No one is talking about aboriginal people or Indians.
No. Indians are treated separately from Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese but yes they too face a higher standard. But yes they are Asians. That was my point.
The standard is similar but they are not treated as Chinese. I’m sure you noticed that they have not been suing Harvard. At any rate it’s a minor point. The issue I’m was addressing was the very misleading statement about elite colleges flying in Asians to recruit them. While technically possible in rare cases with aboriginal Asians these are not the groups of people involved in elite admissions. These people are historically illiterate and having nothing to do with the advanced cultures of Asia.
China is not a very highly educated country. As of 2009, only 6.1% of people age 25-34 had tertiary degrees (which includes the equivalent of associates and bachelor’s degrees). Chinese Americans largely are or are descended from a very highly selected (by immigration) sample of the Chinese population.
What does everyone mean by “they’re not treated the same as Chinese”? I’ve always been under the impression that they don’t distinguish what type of Asian you are on the application. Would it be easier for Indians? If so, how does that work? Indians are very very prominent in STEM it would be counter intuitive to give them a boost