<p>@toughyear: Your anecdotal evidence doesn’t provide strong support for your statement.</p>
<p>In order to say it’s more difficult to get into Harvard (vs. other U.S. colleges) as an Asian American applicant, we would need application statistics broken down by ethnicity for Harvard and all the other U.S. colleges. We would also need to take a look at mean GPA and SAT/ACT scores for Asian American vs. other ethnicities within the Harvard “accepted” applicant pool. As far as I know, the Harvard Admissions Dept. hasn’t released such statistics to the public.</p>
<p>The Harvard undergraduate student body is incredibly ethnically diverse. For what it’s worth, when I was an undergrad (mid-90s), approx. 15% of the Harvard student body self-identified as “Asian American.” I believe that the percentage of the current student body that is Asian American has increased to 17%. Anecdotally speaking, I’m a half-Asian male who was valedictorian in high school (not nationally ranked).</p>