Lanya Olmstead was born in Florida to a mother who immigrated from Taiwan and an American father of Norwegian ancestry. Ethnically, she considers herself half Taiwanese and half Norwegian. But when applying to Harvard, Olmstead checked only one box for her race: white.
“I didn’t want to put ‘Asian’ down,” Olmstead says, “because my mom told me there’s discrimination against Asians in the application process.”
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Studies show that Asian-Americans meet these colleges’ admissions standards far out of proportion to their 6 percent representation in the U.S. population, and that they often need test scores hundreds of points higher than applicants from other ethnic groups to have an equal chance of admission. Critics say these numbers, along with the fact that some top colleges with race-blind admissions have double the Asian percentage of Ivy League schools, prove the existence of discrimination.
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Asian students have higher average SAT scores than any other group, including whites. A study by Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade examined applicants to top colleges from 1997, when the maximum SAT score was 1600 (today it’s 2400). Espenshade found that Asian-Americans needed a 1550 SAT to have an equal chance of getting into an elite college as white students with a 1410 or black students with an 1100.
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In the end, elite colleges often don’t have room for Asian students with outstanding scores and grades.
That’s one reason why Harvard freshman Heather Pickerell, born in Hong Kong to a Taiwanese mother and American father, refused to check any race box on her application.
I think there might be a tendency to hold Asians to a higher standard, because of the “model minority” stereotype. I remember when I was in 7th grade that my math teacher threatened to kick me out of my advanced math class because I wasn’t “doing as well as you could do” even though I was nowhere near the bottom of that class. (And I wasn’t being lazy or causing problems either.) It’s like, because I was Asian she expected me to be consistently get 100%.
I am not aware of the issues raised by the OP, but wanted to mention legacies. If your Mom or Dad graduated Old Ivy, that school gives you preference in admission. This is to encourage alumni giving and whatnot. Of course the other impacts it has are less desirable.
It is backdoor racial discrimination as fewer applicants from recently-arrived minority groups qualify. It also encourages the further establishment of the American Ruling Class. The right sort of people somehow get into the right schools and then into the right jobs.
(It is worth noting George Bush the Lesser could not get into Yale even being a legacy.)
I don’t know if this is racism, but it is a racial discrimination.
I’ve shared this story before, but here goes. At my graduate school, there was definitely discrimination against Asian (specifically Chinese) students. The labs were full of Asians, as well as all the TA rosters. These were kids from overseas and their English was not great at all (despite having fantastic test scores, which is suspicious to me). Those who spoke English had very thick accents which made it difficult for their students to understand them.
Professors were getting frustrated because their students were complaining about their TAs. There was also major tension because graduate students were unable to communicate effectively with their advisors. Imagine coming into your own laboratory every day and being unable to understand the chitter-chatter, being unable to relay instructions, or do any real advisement. Seminar courses were stunted because students couldn’t really discuss topics. The failure rate of the comprehensive exams was astronomical because papers couldn’t be written and oral exams were close to impossible to give.
Some professors started to ban Chinese from being spoken at all.
And the application of American students were weighted more heavily. I also have no doubt that at the individual level, professors were rejecting Chinese students if they felt they had reached a critical threshold (some researchers had nothing but Chinese students). Discrimination was definitely happening, but I’m still unsure if this was a bad thing.
I think schools certainly should look at non-merit-based metrics when evaluating students. I think diversity is good; a school with nothing but bookish valedictorians wouldn’t be a very interesting place. But I am uncomfortable with the idea of schools tossing applications in a wastebasket just because of the applicant’s last name or the box they check off.
Colleges take more than just test scores into account, especially these days. If you have a bunch of extra-curricular activities, do volunteer work, play sports, or other things, this can affect your elligibility. Perhaps the Asian kids are not as “well rounded” as the white kids, and so don’t appear as desirable to the college at a given test score level.
At any rate, any study that looks only at test scores is going to miss something because colleges don’t look only at test scores.
Racism is generally a belief in racial characteristics and actions predicated on this belief.
I have heard that, particularly on the west coast and particularly in engineering and the sciences, Asian students are vastly over-represented. They do not receive the preference for under-represented minorities. It is also true that average SAT scores are higher for admitted Asian students than for admitted white or black students. Some of this has been described as due to “soft factors” which may be discouraged by Asian families in favor of scholastic focus, but I think there is more going on. It may add up to discrimination against Asian applicants.
At my undergraduate, I was told that they tried to build a freshman class each year, and being different from the rest of the class definitely boosted your odds. This worked for factors like home state, urban vs rural, rich vs poor, and extracurricular activities. Also of course your intended major. The admissions office seemed very pleased that my class had a record high percentage of women, and I got the impression that they were very embarrassed that our class had fewer African American students than foreign black students. They told us that they believed a diverse class benefited from that diversity. I think also that the admissions staff has an easier job when a walk through the campus shows no group to be dominant or absent (or nearly absent). I expect that they actively pursue black and female applicants, and it may be harder for Asian applicants to stand out.
Of course, my undergraduate expected to have about 200 freshmen, and was generally picking from the top 10% of HS classes. I don’t know how other schools work.
In the 80s when I was at university in Toronto, there was definitely talk about imposing official or unofficial discrimination against Asians, because of the perceived dominance of Asians in certain fields such as engineering and math. Dunno what came of it. Hard to imagine being able to do it officially and directly without offending against human-rights legislation, but perhaps it was don indirectly by boosting requirements to be ‘well rounded’.
A similar system of discrimination was imposed against Jews in the middle of the last century, because of their perceived dominance in medicine.
Needless to say, I’m not in favour of such measures.
Colleges looking at more than just test scores could very well include race… and I don’t blame them. A diverse student body is desirable for a campus setting. I would not have wanted to go to a school that was mostly Asian, and I’m Asian.
The idea that Asian-Americans are lacking in extra-curricular activities or are not as well rounded as white kids is not credible. There is no reason to think this. In fact, the open knowledge that colleges and universities are looking at more than just test scores actually pushes Asian students to pursue more activities. (We’re crazy like that).
While it surely is a point of stress for current Asian high school students, I don’t feel that the racial discrimination against Asians is “serious.” As long as the reason for the discrimination is because the school is trying to be diverse, I don’t have a problem with it. It isn’t as though schools are rejecting all Asian students or even keeping the Asian population super low. At least in my experience, there certainly are more Asians at my undergraduate and graduate schools than there were at my high school.
Sure there is. I don’t know if you are first generation American or not, but we have a large number of ethnically Asian kids in this country who are, and that can lead to cultural differences in terms of what the family perceives as important things for their kids to spend time on. Many kids cannot excel at the highest levels academically and have time left over to participate in a full range of outside activities.
You can’t just hand waive that away, and I would challenge any study that shows disparity in test scores that did not take pains to normalize for other factors. It is simply sloppy research not to do so.
I got into MIT for undergrad despite checking “Asian” and having pretty mediocre grades. On the other hand, I didn’t go to MIT because I didn’t want to compete with hordes of Indian and Chinese students who were more focused than I was.
It’s certainly true that Asian-origin students are overrepresented in higher education generally, though, so it follows that any affirmative action-type program is going to “discriminate” against us.
John, IME Asian students are better rounded than their peers (except athletically). The kids you’re talking about all play the violin and participate in student government and build backyard particle accelerators. I don’t see any meaningful way of controlling for extracurricular activities, anyway. Do you assign points, or what?
Just to be clear, I’m not saying that they are less “well rounded”. I’m asking if that might be a reason. So far, all I get is dismissal of the question. No evidence. I’m asking the OP if the study he is bringing to this debate controlled for non-academic factors and if so, how.
Yes, we all know about the stereotypical Asian kid with a 4.5/4.0 GPA who played violin at Carnegie Hall at age 3, but that is a stereotype, not the norm. And there’s a difference between mastering the violin and spending a summer in Central America helping to build a school or health clinic.
So… you get a 5 point bonus for playing quarterback, 3 for water polo, 1 for every 5 hours of community service? “Extracurricular activities” covers such a broad swathe of stuff that it seems impossible to correct for them in any meaningful way statistically.
There probably is a bit of discrimination against Asians, but checking a different box is not really gonna make a big deal. First, many schools do interviews, which would mitigate any benefit towards checking the wrong box, and could possibly raise some red flags if the application had any outright “lies”.
Second, Harvard’s admissions data indicates the test scores are as follows:
Test Scores – 25th / 75th Percentile
SAT Critical Reading: 690 / 800
SAT Math: 700 / 790
SAT Writing: 710 / 800
Harvard is not in the position of having to admit incapable people regardless of race, so I doubt casting your lot with another group improves your odds that much given that they are mostly just using subjective criteria at that point. As much as someone wants to think a higher SAT score and slightly better grades entitles them to admission to any school they want, they need to appreciate that that does not make them “better” than most of the other people applying.
If racial diversity is part of what’s being sought (as seems clearly to be the case) then the admissions process you describe meets your definition of racism.
Well, that depends on how they define “diverse”. Sometimes it means “represented proportionately to representation in society as a whole”, and sometimes it just means “we need some color up in this bitch”.
Asian families aren’t stupid, and they talk to each other a lot. I’d wager that Asian parents with children in junior high or high school talk about colleges a whole bunch more than non-Asian parents. I don’t actally know this (of course), but the joke is that Chinese parents talk colleges, SAT, and grades like most people talk about sports. So even a family straight from China would get a quick lesson in how-to-get-into-college from all the other Chinese families in the area.
Anyway, Asian families are acutely aware of the intricacies of college admissions. They know that John Chen got a perfect score on the SAT and didn’t get into Harvard. They know that Julie Shih got into Yale despite her B+ average because she ruled her high school with an iron fist. (Oh and by “talk” I mean “boast.” :D).
I suppose there might be some Asians that don’t understand the concept of “well-rounded” college admissions standards, but there would also be some Caucasians and Africans that make the same mistake. The assertion that these test-only Asian students are the majority or even numerous enough to explain the admissions skew is not credible.
