I just want to add that I also recall exactly what you are referring to above. Since several posters seemed to have heard “looked” the same, I assumed I had missed that word. I agree it can be a significant difference, with the phrase “looked the same” being far more egregious.
That having been said, I am not implying Stanford or any other school does or does not have quotas on the number of Asian students.
Whether they said that the “looked” the same, or “were” the same, they were still being racist.
I’m not sure an exact comparison can be made here. In my own experience (admittedly back in the stone ages) but also based on the current day experience of the high achieving Asian kids of friends and colleagues, many students don’t even consider applying to Stanford, for financial reasons alone, and instead seek out the UCs, Berkeley in particular.
Yes, if by “were the same” they were referring to race. But that’s not a given. As @mtmind said, there are more possible interpretations of “were”.
Yeah, certainly not an exact comparison. It was an estimate. I’m not sure that they make the numbers public. There may be better estimates people can/have come up with from other public data.
They have 2 different populations. UCB is primarily a California school and Stanford is a national school.
True. I don’t think they are completely different. But it would possibly be better to base the numbers of ivy applicants.
Actually, I think one of the main points of the movie was that they were being stereotyped. It wasn’t about their looks. It was because they were all seen as being the same. That is still racist.
How many Lowell admits to Stanford is the right number? Is it realistic to expect more than 1-2? We know Stanford accepted at least one Lowell Asian male in one year and one white male the next year. Not sure how that is racist, regardless of the poor wording allegedly used by a hypothetical AO someplace else some time ago (which sounded to me a lot like the oft repeated line about college admissions “you can’t build an orchestra with just oboes” - is that statement racist?).
Besides, we don’t know the outcomes of any but a handful of the Lowell students. If Mr. Stanford/Harvard wasn’t directly profiled, I bet there are some other students who got into Ivy+ schools we don’t know about. The profiled students were probably cherry picked from many that were filmed because they furthered the overall theme of the documentary and were archetypes of particular student story arcs.
All that said, I don’t doubt for a second that Asian stereotypes work against Asian applicants, and the movie shows the complexity of that unfortunate reality.
Oh, and Rachel totally deserved to get into Brown, standing on her own merits. Period. Full stop.
The reality is that none of us know how many Lowell kids actually go to Stanford. One might think that the counselor who made the presentation suggesting that they wouldn’t get in has a better idea of that than any of us (or the kids). However, I would say that if an AO did equate Asians (or any other racial group) to just the oboes in an orchestra, that would in fact be racist. If an AO were to simply say that colleges wouldn’t select everyone with the same major that is not the same thing. The point is, racial groups are not monoliths and shouldn’t be judged as such.
I just went back and double-checked. I had remembered the “to be" verb tense wrong but got the gist, and he definitely did not say “look the same." The scene starts at 23:30: The student said the Stanford rep said “Raise your hand if you want everyone at your school to be the same.”
True, but I have a good idea of where top kids from different high performing California school ended up for a recent year, and top Asian students seem to have done relatively well. For example, four kids who graduated with honors attend Stanford, and three of the four are Asian. Five kids who graduated with honors attend Yale, and all five are Asian. Six kids who graduated with honors attend Harvard, and two are Asian. This from a class where around 40% kids who graduated with honors are Asian. (Not every top academic student attends an HYS, and I am sure some were initially disappointed to not be accepted at their top choices, but that seems to apply to Asians and non-Asians alike.)
Unless legally prohibited, many elite colleges consider race, gender, major, etc. in admissions to achieve a balance in each of these categories they desire. Whether it’s social engineering or not, it certainly has some desirable social benefits. However, if you’re an Asian male student who intends to major in CS, your odds of admissions to such colleges are likely longer than any other demographic groups.
Asian kids from my area do well at getting accepted top schools because they are a tiny percentage of the large school district. They aren’t competing against a lot of applicants from the same school.
Besides the five students who were the main focus, college admissions for a few others were mentioned. The one who got in EA to Harvard was apparently well known as the top student in the entire school. Some other student was apparently disappointed about going to UCSC. But not many others.
Race, ethnicity, and gender are also presumably considered in the context of colleges’ marketing to potential future students (and perhaps donors).
Intended major is a much more straightforward thing to select for or against, because departments do not want to be stretched thin by having more students in the major than they can teach. However, some colleges manage that while admitting new students to the college, while others do it by having secondary admission for students already enrolled, and still others do a combination of these. But it seems that many students are not too aware of this type of thing, other than perhaps for nursing, computer science, or engineering majors.
This is definitely the prevailing mantra around here, but I wonder how it would hold up if we controlled for other factors such as geography, SES, regional demand for major, competitiveness of the high school attended, etc.
Would an unhooked white male from a high performing Bay Area high school really have a significantly better chance at admission to a top CS program than an unhooked Asian male with the same or similar qualifications and non-race characteristics? I don’t know the answer, but anecdotally, looking at the high performing school with which I am most familiar, it doesn’t seem so.
From my perspective, it looks like these types of communities and schools have a surplus of students with exceptional grades, rigor, test scores, ECs, etc, and who want to study CS at an “elite” CS school, and makes admissions especially difficult for all unhooked kids from these communities, not just the Asian students. To over-simplify, at top Bay Area high schools, there are disproportionally large numbers of excellent unhooked students who want to study CS at an “elite" CS schools. These kids (many but not all of whom are Asian) may face significantly longer admissions odds than kids (few of whom are Asian) from rural areas with disproportionally lower numbers of excellent students who want to study CS. But if we compare two equally qualified students from the same school, SES, etc., I don’t know.
Some people here seem to need a course in logical inference. The line of reasoning that I see here repeatedly is “popular colleges should accept by these criteria that I think are the most important. If they did, based on some anecdotal evidence from some video shows, more Asians would be accepted. Ergo, the criteria that these colleges use are racist”
The main reason that these kids are suffering is because their parents and the society around them demands that they either attend a HYPSM or they will be considered a failure.
If their parents and their parents friends and neighbors would stop with this toxic attitude, not only would these kids be able to have a real life, Kids would be able to have real friends, kids would be able to explore their interests and passions, kids would be able to be who they were born to be, instead of some persona curated to maximize their chances at being accepted to Stanford (or some other place). Moreover, fewer would choose to apply to that same small set of “elite” colleges, which would make admissions easier for kids for whom these colleges are actually a better choice.
Do people REALLY think that accepting three more Asian kids a year from Lowell is going to solve the problem? DO people here really believe that all of the Asian (and White, and Hispanic, etc) kids who are destroying their lives to satisfy their parents need for prestige will ALL be accepted to HYPSM? We already know that 80% of the qualified kids are being rejected from those places, and changing criteria will do no more than change that to the rejection of 70%.
I do not actually think that a single person here has thought any solution through.
A few facts of life:
The “elite” colleges will not increase their enrollment unless they need to for financial reasons. If they did, they would likely collapse and be destroyed, so no, HYPSM will not start accepting all of the students who are qualified to be accepted. So forget that solution.
Starting to accept students purely by some “academic criteria” will only achieve the following - A. increase things like grade inflation, especially at private and wealthy high schools,
B. more test accommodations for the wealthy,
C. more private tutoring for the wealthy,
D. more focus on teaching to the test and on doing better on tests instead of on education.
E. Increasing income disparity as poorer people are increasingly shut out of education.
F. The segregation of higher education by income, which will lead to cutting funds to the colleges which educate the poor, just like happened to K-12 education.
Also, it is important to know the reasons and the social context in which Jews were shut out of private colleges, before making a comparison to what is happening today. The Jews that were being shut out, despite acing the entry exams, were almost all poor, first gen, refugees of WWI, the Eastern European wars that followed WWI, or the Russian Civil War, and were living in the tenements of NYC, or recently managed to find another place to live. It was also part of the set of polices which was also blocked the admission of Jewish Refugees from Europe even as Hitler was rising, a policy which continued, BTW, throughout WWII. Just throwing it out there.
Or study CS at some schools not generally considered “elite”. See admission thresholds here:
with the formula calculated as shown at
IMO, no. Admission chances for any unhooked person is quite low.
Of course that brings up the question whether hooks should exist, but let’s leave that alone for now.
Colleges don’t break down admit rates by race or ethnicity, so we have to rely on our own observations. My observation is that Asian American students (particularly Asian American male students) apply disproportionally to STEM majors (especially CS major) so these few majors become fiercely competitive among this demographic group. They also tend to be concentrated in a few geographic regions, making their admissions even more challenging.
Most students are less aware that even for colleges that don’t admit by major and where admitted students can freely choose their majors, many of them do try to infer what applicants’ likely real intended majors (or areas of studies) might be and act accordingly.