Oh no, you misunderstand me. 99% of what gets posted by white parents on CC is neither here nor there. I am only talking about the things that white parents post on CC that seem to me to have Asian bias. When that happens, I agree I don’t like it.
And I know that “white parents” don’t control admissions at elite schools. But white people in general do. And (overwhelmingly white) alums do indirectly.
Trying to follow the logic here.
Maybe I misunderstand, but it sure seems like you are suggesting that because (you believe) that “white people in general” control admissions at schools like Harvard and Stanford, that they must be acting on the biases you perceive in an extremely small minority of “white posters” on CC.
If not, then I don’t understand the point of your post. If so, then it seems you are engaging in the exact sort of overgeneralization and stereotyping that you abhor.
I’ve been to many countries in every continent and lived in a few. In every one of them, the majority (not everyone, of course) stereotypes the minorities in that country/society. US is among the better ones, but it isn’t an exception.
Yes in Antarctica the polar bears are shunned as apex predators by the penguins.
Attempt at adding levity to a serious discussion.
“If Stanford has an Asian quota, what is it? Last year Stanford students were about 25% Asian Americans, plus about 11% international students, many of whom are also Asian.”
That doesn’t mean Stanford doesn’t have a soft quota, which they and other universities probably do. Before the Harvard case, it was clear at least to Asians, that Harvard was targeting Asian American percentage at around 20%. Now it’s a little higher probably due to the attention around the case. Note these are soft quotas which are legal, so it could be 19% one year, 21% another. International students are a little bit different since ability to pay along with academics are the top factors.
Asian students definitely self-select, at least by gpa, test scores and rigor. Very few Asians apply without at least a 1500/35, bunch of APs, and over a 3.9 to the selective colleges. They do not apply in masse. Why do you think so many Asians on c/c ask should I retake a 34 or 1500?
Oh, let me clarify: Things like “What is better, Emory or Georgetown?” and “What mattress topper do you recommend?” make up 99% of the comments by white parents here on CC. So 99% of the time I don’t “take issue” with white parents here.
But when it comes to their opinions about Asian students, yeah, I do find myself taking issue sometimes. I would say that the majority of white parents on CC don’t seem to think that anti-Asian bias exists in college admissions. But based on my own experience with white people (and being white, I have a lot of experience with white people!) I do think it exists.
I have heard white parents in my own community complain about our district’s Exceptionally Gifted test-in magnet school’s high Asian percentage because “those kids are coached you know.” This while sitting on the pool deck watching our kids being literally coached in front of our eyes (our district has sent multiple students to Stanford, Duke, Cal, Michigan as well as ivys as recruited swimmers.)
That’s kind of like saying that “Women make 83 cents for each dollar men make per hour of work.” Naively true, but not meaningful by itself. Just as the difference in wages mostly disappears after adjusting for career and experience, the difference in grades and test scores between unhooked white and Asian kids disappears when adjusting for intended major.
You did not read this post - it was about British students that have the GPA (AAA on their A-level) necessary for admission. This is all it takes to pass the GPA threshold. There is no SAT, there is a university-administered entrance exam which is much deeper than the SAT given to students that apply. It’s a different system.
It’s obvious that there is a lot of frustration from the Asian parents on CC about the application process. Well, in my experience of a white immigrant family, there is a lot of frustration here too. Mostly with the UCs from which many qualified kids were shut out. Unhooked kids applying for Engineering and CS have a very high bar of acceptance regardless of race. And I certainly find the implication that the white kids are somehow lazier or academically unqualified biased and racist. I hope you are not passing this ‘wisdom’ to your kids. Thankfully, the kids born here are much more accepting than their parents in any direction.
At the UCs, there are few hooks, since race/ethnicity, legacy, and development are not considered. Engineering and CS majors are also not generally recruited-athlete-heavy majors (and most campuses’ large sizes mean that the recruited athletes are small in percentage terms).
However, when many people here write “the UCs are so hard to get into these days”, they really mean UCB, UCLA, and UCSD and maybe UCSB, UCD, and UCI, but consider UCR, UCM, and often UCSC to be unworthy for them to attend.
My offspring finished high school a long time ago. Even back then, it was well known that the Asian and Asian-American kids had to do more to get into top colleges.
But that wasn’t entirely because of discrimination per se. It was because many, if not most, Asians in the same high school class had similar applications.
So, while the young Asian and Asian American kids in the documentary were all individuals, from a college admissions point of view, they were all applying for the same slots.
Alvan, for example, seemed like an exceptionally nice kid. But he said he wanted to be pre-med. That is probably the most common career aspiration for the children of working class Asian immigrants. There’s certainly fine, but no college is going to want an entire class of pre meds and among the pre meds it isn’t going to want an entire class of Asian males.
Another policy that hurts Asians is geographic diversity. A couple of decades ago, Princeton was infamous for this. If you were from NYC and weren’t a legacy or recruited athlete, you had to walk on water to get into Princeton. From my offspring’s high school, Princeton was a far tougher admit that Harvard, Yale or MIT. When a Princeton faculty committee started investigating Princeton admissions, they found that the emphasis on geographic diversity was the #1 factor in explaining why Jews were a far lower percentage of Princeton students than comparable schools. Jews and Asians are not randomly distributed throughout the US. So, if you have a quota for New Yorkers, particularly one specifically for the City, or one for Californians, you are keeping out Jews and Asians. If you make sure to admit students from Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, South Carolina, West Virginia, Utah, and Wisconsin, it’s unlikely many of them will be Jewish, because in all of those states, the population is less than 1% Jewish. New York is over 9% Jewish; Washington, DC over 8, New Jersey over 6%. So, say that you don’t want NYers to be over X% of the student body, give preferences for legacies–at least a couple of decades ago-- and athletes, and without having an official policy of limiting Jews, you’ll do it. (For that matter, Yale had quotas for BOTH Jews and Catholics until the mid-60s and the ones who got in rarely attended parochial schools. So, in the 80s and 90s few legacies were Jews or Catholics.)
The Asian population is also not distributed evenly. Hawaii is about a third. (And unless things have changed radically, Stanford is the “dream school” of most top students in Hawaii who are Asian-American.)California is over 15%, New Jersey is 10%; Washington, over 9, New York,9.
Now, the states that have high percentages of Jews don’t entirely overlap those with high percentages of Asians, but there are a number of states which do. So if you limit the number of kids from New York, New Jersey, and California, you’ll manage to limit the number of both Asians and Jews.
I am neither Jewish nor Asian, but I think that in the aggregate Jews and Asians have higher GPAs and test scores than other groups. So, pushing geographic diversity ends up hurting those groups, whether or not that is the intent.
Exactly - race is not considered in admission in CA. The frustration is universal. And, I don’t think you have a kid in this cycle, but this affects not only the UCs but also San Jose State, Cal Poly, etc. UCSC is a fine college focused on undergraduate teaching. Several friends educated their kids there.
Lots of Asian immigrants in the last few decades came to the US on skilled worker or graduate student visas. Some of them stayed, and their US-born kids likely have both nature and nurture advantages over average people in either the US or the immigrants’ countries of origin when it comes to academic achievement.
This type of thing can also be noticed among immigrants from other places like Europe and Africa. But that often gets overlooked, because people from Europe and Africa coming on skilled worker or graduate student visas are small in number compared to the overall White and Black populations in the US, and most people look at obvious racial features first before noticing less obvious educational attainment features.
Like you, I believe that there is something going on regarding Asian admissions into elites. But from what I have seen from the CDS numbers, Asian and white admissions are decreasing in similar numbers in recent years.
I can tell you from my experience as a mom of an unhooked white boy in an elite high school, the past few years have been comparatively brutal admissions-wise for his demographic, too. As someone said above- I chalk it up to schools selecting FOR something else, not selecting AGAINST a demographic. As my crass (white) DH bluntly put it: “it’s ok - we white men have had a good run”. I think the difference may be that Asians never had that “good run”. It seems less fair to have Asian admit rates be lower when there isn’t the track record of preferential admissions historically white men enjoyed. But looking strictly at the past couple of years, I don’t think the results are all that different for average excellent (manufactured) unhooked white students and (manufactured) Asian students. And I don’t think there is a difference for the the authentically uber pointy between the two groups, either. Historically advantageous admissions isn’t relevant to answer what is happening now.
My hunch of what is going on is that once schools have their lot of white lacrosse players and swimmers, etc. there just aren’t a lot of spots left for other qualified white boys. Same thing might be happening for Asians, once the spots for math competitors are filled (and other areas where Asians dominate), there just aren’t a lot of spots left for other qualified Asians. The schools’ goal of diversity end up reinforcing the stereotypes, and the pool of white lacrosse players or Asian math competitors will continue to be saturated. The authentic uber spikey kids will fill most of those remaining spots, regardless of race.
The debate about the role legacy, sports, coaches, money, etc play permeates multiple threads here on CC, and I don’t want to repeat it. The forces at play are complex and several cultural shifts are happening in real time. It is going to be a while to we can say what is happening right now.
You are comparing apples to oranges here (sorry for the tired metaphor). Look at the age distribution for all European countries. All of them have a much smaller proportion of college age kids. For all of them the number has been consistently falling, whereas the USA has only had a drop in the last couple of years. Moreover, I already showed that British students are just as obsessed with attending an “elite” university, and, as a result, are just as stressed as American students (look at my citations above)
You are also very Eurocentric. “College” is not something that just exists in Europe and the USA.
The situation in India is MUCH worse, with acceptance rates to the the IITs being around 1%-2%, and the number of applicants keeps on rising. India has more college bound students than all of Europe combined, and the pressure to attend one of the “elite” IITs is even worse than the pressure here to attend an “elite” colleges.
The situation in China is even worse than that in India.
China has it’s own version of “tiger parents”, who they call “Chicken Blood Parents”.
So not only this a phenomenon across the world, it is, in fact, FAR worse in China. To remind everybody, China has what some people here would consider the ultimate “Merit Based Admissions” - a single entry test.
I guess that “merit based admissions” doesn’t actually work to reduce stress…
It does, however, ensure that students stop doing anything but prepare for the entrance exams…
At Harvard’s admissions trial, the Dean supported your belief of geographical diversity in recruitment. However, it was also revealed that Asians in ‘sparse country’ were left out of this recruitment, including multi-generational Asians who may be ‘more American’ than their first-gen peers of other races. It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that Asians are discriminated.
It’s not hard, but that doesn’t make the conclusion correct at this time.
Just like the millions of other immigrants who arrive in the past couple hundred years. There are reams of paper written on this. My paternal grandparents were immigrants and refugees who came with nothing (on my mother’s side it was my great-grandparents). My father was first gen, as were many of his childhood friends.
I truly hope that this is merely your impression, and not the reality. I am also pretty sure that this is not an actual reflection of attitudes among most Asians. This is, in all honesty, pretty scary. It demonstrates a toxic atmosphere and an indifference to the mental health of kids. It looks like parents are trying to assuage their own fears and insecurities at the expense of their kids’ health and wellbeing.
From the fact that they do not care about the high school education other than as a way to attend an “elite college”, oh sorry, a “good school”. The fact that the parents seem to believe that high school should not be about education and growth, but about “work and sacrifice”. Does not match any of the Asian families that I have known
As a person who is actually “battle tested”, I cannot express just how much this horrifies me and, at the same time, is cringe inducing.
High school years are not a war and classrooms are not battlegrounds, and kids should not be suffering from mental breakdowns and PTSD from what their parents are asking from them.
If there are kids “cracking” under the pressure of their parents demands, those parents are awful abusive parents. I find the idea that this is not only acceptable, but that some people think that it is laudable to be absolutely horrifying.
There are thousands of kids in this country who have actually lived through war, through violence in poor communities, and through domestic violence. These kids are “battle tested” and it does not help them in college, but the opposite.
Your use of “battle tested” and in your comment “Some kids will crack” come across as blasé, I don’t think you meant it to be so, but please be aware of what you are writing.
PS. My kid got into a competitive college without going through a process that could make her “crack”, and she is shining there. So no need to be “battle tested”.
For many people high school is a miserable experience that is just endured.
True, but parents should be helping, not making it worse
You are unliky to convince parents that their priority of academic achievement is misguided, just as presumably some parents value highly athletic achievement or musical accomplishments or whatever. It might be wiser to focus on expanding the notion of success from top 5 to top 50 or 100 and diminishing the winner take all aspect of our unequal society.