Exactly. I am Caucasian and my d is 1/2 Filipino.
She has not been raised with hardly any Asian customs.
My family has been one that emphasized the importance of education. My grandmother was the only female in the advanced chemistry classes at OSU during the depression. Other grandma was a teacher. Grandparents were PHD scientists/ professors and dentists. My father spent his life regretting he did not go to college.
so… College is important to our family. Both of my grandmothers advised me to not date until I finished college. Getting an education was emphasized as being all-important in the way I was raised. Horror stories about the depression were shared during my childhood. The importance of education in our family has little to do with d being 1/2 Asian.
My Asian spouse has not been that involved in her upbringing. He is second generation and never learned their native language. We relocated far from his relatives before she was born and she has had little contact with them.
The fact that people look at her and categorize her as “Asian” and place all sorts of expectations on her and judgements because of the color of her skin- I just don’t understand it.
She is as American as the rest of my family… why do people only see the color of her skin?
This is just one example of being stereotyped. I am sure that there are many others with different circumstances…
The above post is so interesting, if you can put yourself in the place of a Black or Brown person and think of the initial blinks that are applied to that person, then the answer to many of the questions constantly posed on these sites are a little easier to understand.
“The fact that people look at her and categorize her as “Asian” and place all sorts of expectations on her and judgements because of the color of her skin- I just don’t understand it.”
Is that a comment about society? Because she has the option to check While and Asian/Filipino- or nothing. Adcoms will read her full app to find the merits and attrnutes they want for their class.
Holistic admissions and Affirmative action are two very different things. Affirmative action is directly related to ethnicity and representation while holistic admissions is directly related to the individual qualities of a candidate beyond their objective data.
Truth is, without holistic admissions the ivy league would be crammed full of those “robots” ( we all know that kid with a perfect gpa and SAT but zero personality or involvement). I say crammed because there are too many academically qualified students for the spots available. How do you choose between 2400 and 2350? If the 2400 is a robot and the 2350 is involved in unique ways in their community the decision is cut and clear.
I think something that makes it especially difficult for Asians, particularly Chinese applicants, is the cultural uniformity of many Asian countries and their emigrants. Many Asians all hold the same values and the same priorities and because of this many Asian students have very similar profiles.
Many of them have impeccable grades, envy worthy test scores and a strong commitment to a music EC along with the standard National Honor society and school clubs. They also all tend to have their hearts set on a very similar set of majors. This is a stereotype but it is a stereotype for a reason. It is true of every competitive Asian applicant that I know personally. Their achievements are impressive but they usually have very little to distinguish themselves from other Asian applicants.
Holistic admissions is difficult to understand because it is so subjective. Very few applicants have the power to objectively evaluate their application. To see how standard and stereotypical their application is, how boring their essay might be, how run of the mill their EC’s might be. Holistic admissions is about admitting a person, rather than a test score or a GPA. For you to win at that system, your application must present you as a person, an individual.
I don’t envy the Asian applicant but I do not think it is a death sentence. The Asian population at UPenn is 27%, at Princeton it’s 20%, at Stanford it’s 21% and at Columbia it’s 22%. Most campuses have it as the second largest ethnic group on campus. It’s clear that top schools DO admit a significant number of Asian students, but they also snub a lot of Asian perfect scorers, but they also snub a lot of perfect scores from every ethnicity. I know someone personally, a white female with 3.9 unwtd 4.5 weighted 35 ACT 780 and 790 SAT II and an award winning pianist plus she had a medical research internship and yet she was rejected from every Ivy league school. It happens, it’s brutal. the first thing she did was write a letter about it in the newspaper, whining about being a white girl and how affirmative action ruined her chances. Buck up. Get over it. She ended up taking a gap year, then getting denied the year after to all but U of Michigan.
Don’t blame others for your rejection. This attitude and the way it was applied to other aspects of her life was probably the sole reason of her rejection. The way it impacts your life to live so bitterly is hardly worth it. Go to the school that you got into and make it your own personal Harvard. Take every opportunity you have instead of whining about the ones you missed and you will find yourself in a much better position in the long run.
@Nerdyparent “race blind” implies that race or ethnicity does not impact the education of a student. Ask any minority student, rich or poor and we will tell you that the color of our skin has impacted our everyday life and subsequently, our education.
I don’t see why everyone complains. At a typical elite university EVERYONE is impeccably intelligent. Regardless of race, regardless of income and regardless of ethnicity (except for maybe that developmental case). This comes back to how we measure intelligence. Test scores and grades are not necessarily a good measure. There is such a thing as physical genius, for example.
That being said, a typical University consists of about 40% white, 20% Asian, about 12% Hispanic and no more than 10% black with an other category and a ridiculously small Native American population. Whites and Asians are always the two largest majorities. At UPenn Asians are 27%!
No matter how you look at it, Whites and Asians are still being admitted at high proportions. They simply have a crap ton of applicants. Whereas a majority of blacks and Latinos NEVER even apply to begin with, how is that for racial equality? Many black and Latino families tell their children that education is not important because they will never be able to pay for it anyways. Many black and Latino students never recover their passion for education after that teacher asks them in front of the whole class if their father is involved in their live or if their parents are illegal. Many black and Latino students don’t apply to top schools because they have spent their whole lives being treated like they belong on the bottom. Their whole lives being treated like they are suspicious, like they don’t belong in those AP classes and like their education is less important because people assume that they aren’t going anywhere anyways.
Holistic admissions is not about race. Affirmative action is about race. Even so, I am really tired of the assumption that is in some way easier for minority applicants. Harvard does not admit anyone who has not worked their a** off. Yale does not accept anyone who is not highly intelligent. Stanford is not interested in a student who is not highly invested in their community. I am not interested in a school that does not practice holistic admissions because I want to go to a school that admits people, not test scores. There is a reason why all the top schools practice this policy, because it results in the most capable and functional class.
@brown1311917 if a “holistic” admissions process gives one applicant an edge over another using race as a factor, then the process is discriminatory - regardless of the moniker used to characterize it.
If the goal is achieving a process that is “post-racial” and treats everyone the same, then colleges should delete the race checkbox from college applications altogether.
Asians are a minority. and there is similarly a ‘glass ceiling’ in the corporate world for asians. So great, we get the same discrimination in the job market, and in life, but no AA/or any sort of special treatment :)) And you saying that all asians are uniform, and that stereotypes all exist for a reason then surely wouldn’t mind if I ratted out on the Black community by endorsing that all blacks are ‘angry criminals’.
I don’t think anyone has said Asians are uniform. What some posters have pointed out is that statistically Asian applicants are overrepresented in certain majors and in applications from certain states. I have yet to see any evidence that an Asian poet/saxaphonist from Texas or Asian political scientist/lacrosse player from Ohio is at a disadvantage in college admissions.