I understand the argument that you don't want your school full of one-dimensional bookworms, but on the other hand, grades and test scores are the most objective aspect of an applicant's profile (assuming that high school ranking and socioeconomic-geographic factors are taken into account). When private schools put more weight on the other stuff, that opens the door for more subjectivity, which critics say is just a way to mask preferential admissions for the children of alums, big donors, and/or the rich and famous. But of course the over-arching question remains: how does one really evaluate a student's overall merit and potential to succeed at a particular school and beyond? If we went purely by demographics-blind academic numbers, it's possible that Cal's or even Harvard's class of 2015 would be 70% Asian. Is that bad for the university? Apart from the obvious benefits of a Harvard education and degree, would even the parents of an Asian student want their child to live and learn in such an environment? How do you balance diversity with academic achievements?
Bottom line, as any student adviser would tell you, it's all about making your application stand out from the pack. There are just so many talented students with good numbers competing for a finite number of Ivy spots. But if admissions boards and the general public think of Asians as a homogeneous group (which is racist and ignorant), it's harder to stand out. Every Asian-American is basically a short, skinny Chinese person from Orange County with glasses, who wants to go to medical school, plays the piano, and parents own a restaurant (or are software engineers), right? There are actually some people out there from Mongolia and Bangladesh (yes, those places actually exist!), who may be great electric guitarists or baseball pitchers, and want to study theater or geology, you know? Well in CA for example, there have been some interesting developments. After voters passed Proposition 209 in 1996, outlawing racial preference and other affirmative actions, black/Latino enrollment at the top UCs plummeted, while whites and especially Asians rose (13% of CA is Asian, but now account for 40% of the UCs). Now that the UCs have become "too Asian", admissions offices are planning to reduce guaranteed UC admission from the top 12% of a high school's students to the top 9%, and remove the SAT II subject tests from the application. Some faculty and Asian groups are quite upset (probably the test-prep industry isn't too happy either). The state won't admit that this is in response to the Asian skew, but some predictions suggest that Asian enrollment will decrease due to the changes. This is obviously due to the fact that Asians score better on the SAT II than other races, so they are losing an advantage area. The UCs fire back the guaranteed admission only applies to UC Merced (successful Asian students rejected from Berkeley don't want to go there anyway), and that the SAT II doesn't provide much extra information over the SAT I to guide admissions decisions.
They don't just want to admit good test takers. Regardless of alleged racism, it can't just be about grades and scores. Interning at a lab and getting your name on a patent/publication, or winning an award from your city for organizing a beach clean-up, are probably much better than taking a test-prep course to boost your score by 10%. There are only so many hours in the day. If Asian kids are devoting a huge amount of time to projects that only improve their GPAs and test scores, then they have less time for extra curriculars, if they are even interested in any. I know it's a lot harder to convince Asian immigrant parents that drama club or volunteering at the senior center will help them get into an Ivy as much as studying harder, but it's the truth. Maybe some parents don't let their kids go out and prefer they study all day. That's definitely the way it is in Asia, where college admissions are even more competitive, kids just normally study all the time, and extra curriculars barely factor in since the entrance exams are everything. So maybe that culture clash is now holding back some of the top Asian-American minds? I just hate it if kids of any race pursue extra curriculars just to improve their admission chances. I know it's a practical reality of the system, but I'd rather people do things because their heart is in it and they want to help others and do their best, not because of how it can help them later. And I'm sure many savvy Asian parents force their kids to pursue ostensibly beneficial extra curriculars that their kids actually despise. I am so glad I am not a teenager now faced with these dilemmas.
I have more gripes with Asian-Americans than your average Klansman, so I am not bringing all this up from an "Asian pride" standpoint. As precedent, the Ivies discriminated against Jews during the 1950s-60s (well, for centuries even rich white women and the smartest black guy in America weren't allowed at Harvard), and a generation later Jews are now vastly over-represented in both the student body and faculty. And of course over time, as Asian immigrant families get more established in America and grow their wealth/influence, more Asian students will be similarly admitted. Independent of that, the Asian population percentage is expected to increase from 5 to 9% by 2050, so there will be more Asians applying everywhere.
Based on a 2008 US Census update, 68% of Americans are non-Hispanic whites, 15% are Hispanics, 12% are blacks, and 5% are (any) Asian. Although most schools do not admit students based on affirmative action (but do give preference to some under-represented students), clearly the percentage of Asians in top schools exceeds their population representation. So what's the problem? Well in a typical Ivy applicant pool, maybe 1/3 of students deemed "worthy of admission" are Asian, yet the number of Asians actually given an admission letter is lower. Stanford's class of 2013 is 33% white, 23% Asian, 15% Hispanic, 10% black, 8% international (not sure if that includes Asian non-Americans), and 3% Native American. But this may reflect California's Asian-heavy population (relative to the rest of the US) and Stanford's admissions policies. In contrast, Harvard's 2009 student body was 43% white, 13% Asian, 6% black, 5% Hispanic, and 20% international. So why are more worthy Asians getting turned down? Extra curriculars? Well in many cases, Asians with top scores/grades also have above-average extra curriculars, recommendations, and essays. So why the discrepancy? Most of us would agree that the biggest discriminating factor for top university admission is not race, but family wealth. Even many of the under-represented minorities going to top schools do not fit the typical economic profile of Americans of that race.
In a recent book from a Harvard grad and Bloomberg editor, The Price of Admission, Daniel Golden explores how money buys elite college admission. We all suspect this implicitly (look at the example of George W. Bush), but he actually provides concrete evidence. A 1980s Justice Dept. investigation concluded that Asians had a harder road to Harvard admission that whites, but this was permissible because Harvard had the "right" to favor athletes and legacy students (Harvard claims to have done away with this policy in the 1990s, but the numbers show it still persists). The Ivies admit outstanding kids, we all know that. Often legacy kids or student-athletes/artists do fit in the school's typical academic profile, so just because an Asian had a 5% higher GPA, it's defensible to select a non-Asian violin protege or gifted swimmer over him/her.
But what about the legacy students who really are one or two standard deviations below the median academic profile? Harvard, for example, unofficially encourages rich parents of weaker students to join their Committee on University Resources (COUR). I'm not sure that Cmte. actually does anything, but requires a $1M donation for membership. And as you would expect, members' children enjoy a disproportionate acceptance rate, making parents' COUR membership statistically more advantageous on your Harvard app. than a perfect SAT score. The Ivy League turns away students with perfect test scores and GPA every year, but a disproportionate number of them are Asian, propagating the sentiment that Asians need to go above and beyond the other races to prove their worthiness for Ivy admission (an Asian guy with a perfect SAT sued Princeton over this, but lost). Princeton sociology prof Thomas Espenshade's study showed that in 1997, a black student with 1150 SAT, a white with 1460, and an Asian with 1600 all had equal chances of attending a private college (he did not have access to the extra curriculars and essays of those students in his study though). Why is that? My theory is that someone has to make room for the legacy students and other VIPs. Or more innocuously, when the admissions pool doesn't quite reflect the ideal freshman class profile that the school is hoping for, someone has to draw the short straw and provide the wiggle-room. Asians are the next most abundant applicant group by race, and assumed to be fairly interchangeable, so it's just more likely that they will get the boot in place of Malia Obama or a poor Latino. I don't think it's a deliberate targeting of Asians, but just probability. If under-represented minorities were getting passed over (they are already, but say at the same degree as Asians), it would cause a much bigger civil rights controversy. But with Asians, the university can claim that they already admit a double-digit % of Asians, so what's the problem?
We all know that the rich get richer. Well-to-do families who went to good colleges have the know-how to prepare their kids to replicate their successes. They also have the resources to provide the best schooling, tutoring, materials, and other opportunities to help the kid maximize his or her pre-college potential. And if all else fails, they can write a big check to the endowment. All the kid pretty much has to do is not screw up (and even cheating or drugs can be wiped from the slate, and least in the pre-Twitter days). Bill Gates would have been some mid-manager (at best) at Oracle if he grew up black in Richmond, and maybe I could be a Senator if I was a Kennedy. Talent and drive are some of it, luck and help are the rest. I just think it's too bad because the American Dream and our economy are built on the assumption of meritocracy, and many times it holds true. It's what makes us different than Nigeria or Russia where you don't get anywhere without family connections and bribes. American education is one of the truest meritocracies we have, and if we taint that with actual or suspected corruption/favoritism, then it's just like steroids in baseball. Well, some studies suggest that there is actually more social mobility in former European monarchies than the US, despite their history of classism and our supposed history of equality. But enrollment at an elite university is one of the few ways that poor or minority people can advance in America. The rich don't need that assistance; even if Bush went to TCU, his dad still would have gotten him a high position at Arbusto. So the rich, who don't need to go to Ivies to make it big, still are and thereby prevent other less privileged students of color from using that conduit to land more prestigious jobs later (and in turn help their kids follow in their footsteps, which ironically is the exact problem their co-minorities are criticizing). :(
http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/
http://www.unc.edu/cr/
http://www.dailyprincetonian.
http://hpronline.org/blog/
http://www.usnews.com/mobile/
http://www.forbes.com/2007/10/
http://www.forbes.com/2007/10/
FYI from boston.com:
Yale’s class of 2013 is 15.5 percent Asian-American, compared with 16.1 percent at Dartmouth, 19.1 percent at Harvard, and 17.6 percent at Princeton.
More from Espenshade's study:
Espenshade found that when comparing applicants with similar grades, scores, athletic qualifications, and family history for seven elite private colleges and universities:
- Whites were three times as likely to get fat envelopes as Asians.
- Hispanics were twice as likely to win admission as whites.
- African-Americans were at least five times as likely to be accepted as whites.
- Athletes were more than twice as likely to get in as non-athletes with similar qualifications.
- Students from private high schools were twice as likely to receive acceptance letters as similar students from regular public high schools.
- Students from highly regarded public and private high schools were three times as likely to win admission as others.
- Students in the top 10 percent of their high school classes were about twice as likely to get in as students in the next 10 percent.
The unfortunate news is that the children of poor American families end up being poor adults far more often than the children of poor Danish or Norwegian or Canadian families. And that chips away at the cherished myth that America is a land of opportunity for all.
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