Yes, many of the small liberal arts colleges have been giving men a large affirmative action benefit for years. Some of them say they do, so it’s not exactly a secret, except to people who want to believe that all affirmative action discriminates against men. But you can’t compare a large research University to a small liberal arts college.
Indeed, would anyone make the argument that since African-Americans are over-represented in the NFL head coaching ranks (17% vs. 13% of the overall population) and extremely over-represented in the NFL in general (over 2/3rds of all NFL players are black), then a black coaching candidate has no right to complain about racial discrimination because they clearly could not be discriminated against?
Mind you, I think that getting in to even one Ivy/equivalent is a terrific opportunity and someone driven can succeed at many schools, but that doesn’t mean that discrimination against Asian-Americans doesn’t exist.
Just like decades ago, when the Ivies blatantly and openly discriminated against Jews yet many Jews still managed to do well in all sorts of fields.
This is the mess we get into when we try social engineering. It ends up hurting everyone. It’s pretty clear to me and every Asian family that anti-Asian discrimination in alive and well in American academia. I didn’t realize the same applied to high performing women. This is not an isolated incident, I’ve seen the same happen to many family members - rejected by Ivy’s, accepted by Caltech. Our country cannot afford not to support our best and brightest regardless of their race or sex.
For someone named “mathy one”, it’s surprising you missed the glaring mathematical incongruity in the ivy admit numbers. << link to graph is in post#9 >>
In the 20 year period starting 1990, the number of college-age asian american kids doubled in the US. Caltech, which has race-blind admissions, saw a commensurate increase in the number admitted asian american students. The ivies, OTOH, saw a flattening or decrease in the percentage, inconsistent with the doubling.
There’s a number of possible explanations for the ivy asian admit paradox:
- the asian american applicants to ivies got dumber in the last 20 years
- the ivy schools changed their admit criteria (e.g., favoring even more white & URM legacies & athetes)
- the ivy schools have put a quota ceiling on the number of asian american admits
I cannot believe that an African American or Hispanic applicant with the same profile, even from a prosperous family, would have been rejected by six of seven Ivy League colleges.
The 20% number is irrelevant. What is relevant is the admit rate of each racial group, normalized for achievement level.
Hypothetically, if u blanked out the names & races and assessed the candidates holistically/u and rated them an A, B, C, D, E grade.
What is the admit rate for A-grade asian candidates vs other A-grade candidates? Are 15% of asian candidates being admitted vs 45% of similarly graded hispanic, etc. candidates? That’s what’s relevant in terms of under-representation.
Math and piano, 2 of his big strengths, are over represented among applicants. Italian and boxing might have been more interesting to adcoms. In any case, hard to shed tears over anyone who “only” gets into one Ivy.
Do people think Wang’s ECs are good enough to get him into more than one Ivy? What is the significance of singing at the inauguration? Was it a solo? Was it competitive to be chosen? Is third place in “a national” piano contest all that impressive? (I’m not a musician, so I can’t tell from these descriptions). And how about the “top 150” finish in math? There were 149 better than him, so maybe the Ivys took some of them instead. And his debate teams only made it to the finals; they didn’t win. All of this is impressive, I do not mean to denigrate it, I just think he would have a better argument if he had won some of those competitions.
It’s hard for me to feel sorry for anybody who’s whining about being rejected from an Ivy. Even when the person probably was discriminated against based upon his race. Why doesn’t he just shake the dust off his feet and find another place to shine? They don’t want you? Screw 'em! You’ve got a bright future without them, kid. Make them sorry they rejected you!
p.s. It occurs to me that this kid may have appeared too desperate or arrogant in his applications and perhaps his rejections weren’t racially motivated after all. That said, if elite colleges overlooked race, racial composition of its student body would undoubtedly be quite different.
According to comments I’ve seen about this story elsewhere, a lot of the accomplishments are exaggerated. So I don’t think it’s worth it to try to figure out why he was rejected, especially since there’s so much we just have no idea about (teacher recommendations, essays, etc.)
Also, I must say, it really bothers me when people use Caltech as an example of a school that’s easier for Asians to get accepted to. One of my good friends is Asian, and his profile fit the Asian stereotype possibly even more than Michael - all his ECs were math and science with the exception of violin. He was rejected early by Caltech, so apparently he was at the very bottom of their applicant pool, as most people are deferred to regular admission. However, he was accepted to multiple Ivy League schools.
@GMTplus7, you need to add to your list of possible explanations: Caltech needs only to fill its STEM departments with majors. Ivies are actually majority non-STEM departments and they need to fill all of them. Ivies also care about things like athletics, geographical distribution, etc. The US could be 90% Asian but if none of them play football and the Ivies need a class of 20% football players, they will never go over 80% Asian. Show me the graph of of Asians admitted to Ivy STEM departments compared to Caltech and compared to population trends. There may be a glass ceiling but the data you are showing doesn’t prove anything. It’s the same as saying the Ivies discriminate against men because they admit fewer than Caltech and Caltech admits on merit and Caltech admissions are the perfect and only possible measure of merit, so there is no other explanation than Ivies discriminating against men.
The accomplishments as described seem great to me (no, it wasn’t a solo), but we cannot know what the letters said or what kind of impression his essays gave. I think it’s more plausible that something about these landed him in the reject pile, since 6/7 of the schools agreed. If he should have been a shoe-in everywhere and there were a quota, why wouldn’t we have seen a more random accept/reject pattern depending whether the quota was already reached by the time his application was read? Why was he always at the bottom of the pile? Were all the other Asian students admitted more accomplished on paper than this guy? I suspect not. And how would we explain that?
It would be pretty difficult to create this data. I think empirical evidence suggests that there is a difference in terms of admissions between the races, but quantifying it exactly in this way can’t be done.
Again, you miss the math significance. It’s not the absolute percentage of asian american students at Caltech that is significant, it’s that the percentage of them at Caltech is INCREASING along with the increasing number of college-age asian american students in the US. And it’s not just California state that saw an increase in its asian population.
Here is the growth of Asian Americans in the US as a percentage of the population, for major population states on the west & east coasts:
(data from US Census)
** state | 1990 | 2000 | 2010 | 2014 | change from 2000 to 2014 **
USA | 2.9% | 3.6% | 4.8% | 5.4% | ← 150% growth
> CA | **** | 10.9% | 13.0% | 14.4% | ← 132% growth
> NY | **** | 5.5% | 7.3% | 8.5% | ← 155% growth
> NJ | **** | 5.7% | 8.3% | 9.4% | ← 165% growth
> MA | **** | 3.8% | 5.3% | 6.3% | ← 166% growth
I don’t have the 1990 break-down by state, but you can still see that the percentage of asian americans has been GROWING steadily on both the west and east coasts. In fact, the percentage of asians has actually grown FASTER on the east coast than in CA. Strangely though, the percentage of asian americans admitted at the ivies has been flat or in decline during that same period.
Student populations at the Ivies were never representative of the entire population, @GMTplus7 . That’s not their mission. You can show all the data you want, but the reality is they don’t have to, and clearly don’t need to or want to be, either. Get over it. Life’s not fair.
MIT published some of the information people are looking for in 2010, for the class of 2014, here - http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/9899004/#Comment_9899004. Asians made up a higher percentage of accepted students compared to the applicant pool as a whole.
@TooOld4School makes a good point about political power. The Economist article says:
“As Jerome Karabel’s study of Jews and the Ivy League (“The Chosen: The Hidden History of
Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton”) shows, it was only when Jews had
gained political power that the Ivies stopped discriminating against them. And Asian-Americans
are under-represented in politics as well as in business. Only 2.4% of the 113th Congress
were Asian-Americans; by one count, fewer than 2% of state legislators are.”
Lol, I absolutely agree. If the ivies made their populations representative of the entire population, then they would be only 5.4% asian, instead of 20%. I say make admissions race blind, and let the chips fall where they may.
The ivies can do whatever they want. But if they accept federal money, then they better be fair.
Why on earth would they want to do that? And lose the Daddy Warbuckses of this world that have made these schools what they are today? Earth to GMT: meritocracy doesn’t pay, but legacies do!
and yet:
(Brown is in fact 52% women and 48% men)