On the one hand, it makes sense - colleges want a student body of a certain “mix/blend” and while they may want a “60% white, 40% non-white” college, they don’t just want any “40% non-white” - even that has to be a specific blend. It can’t be 30% Asians and 10% black/Hispanic/Arab/etc. folks, that’s out of whack, in their minds.
But as mentioned elsewhere, this ties into a broader political notion (usually held by the left, but also by some on the right) that Asians aren’t a *real *minority, and don’t have to be regarded the same way as black/Hispanic/Native American/etc. people, etc.
It’s not just affirmative action. In Hollywood, it’s perfectly fine to have Asians be the bad guys and black guys the good guys in a movie (i.e., Jaden Smith in Karate Kid), but if the races were reversed people would scream racism. In the LA 1992 riots, people looted Korean shops and the media shrugged. Tookie Williams killed Asians and people were calling for his pardon. So for colleges and universities to say “Well, let’s have fewer Asians” raises fewer eyebrows than “Well, let’s have fewer blacks or Hispanics.”
(I’m not writing an anti-black attack, just so I make myself clear - I’m just pointing out that Asians do not get the “true minority” treatment in the USA by the media, etc. the same way other minority races do.)
This was all debated to death here a couple of years ago (not the Trump angle, but the alleged Asian discrimination angle).
The short version is that the very competitive schools that are in question here go far, far beyond straightforward academic criteria in evaluating candidates. The process can involve an astounding degree of personal and sociological assessment – I may have posted this article before. Whether one agrees with their process and criteria is a different question, but it makes them necessarily discriminating, which is not the same as discriminatory or prejudiced.
Affirmative action in college admissions has involved itself in this process on the rationale of trying to address historically disadvantaged minorities. Such an intervention in my view should be cautious and minimal – it certainly doesn’t have as its goal the creation of some predetermined demographic profile allocating a percentage for every imaginable race, color, and creed!
Can the OP clarify something for me: Are you agreeing with Trump’s policy or disagreeing with it? I honestly can’t tell. You seem to be characterizing it negatively (using the term “wedge”, for example), but you seem to agree with the substance.
Solely socio-economic preference is my solution, and I think it would work great. Poverty in this country is so closely tied to race you’d end up with a diverse class anyway.
Having just completed the college application process myself, it made me really sad and uncomfortable to hear some of my Asian friends talking about trying to take a picture of themselves that looked more white to pass as biracial in order to not have to check the dreaded “Asian” box. It’s weird that they experience more racism in their lives than me (a white person) and yet are more discriminated against in the college admissions process.
At the same time, I’m unhappy Trump is turning to this as he’s such an idiot and will no doubt screw it up. In fact, he already is by obviously using Asians as a playing piece to appease his base, who love anything that hurts African Americans and Latinos. Despite this, I think discrimination against Asians in the college process is an actual issue.
(Also, as an aside: people always focus on AA, but never on legacy cases and preference given to the children of the wealthy. In 36 of the top colleges in the US, there are more students from the 1% than the bottom 60%.)
I submitted a photo of myself on the Common App; I don’t recall which schools exactly use them, but some “allow” them and people say you should do it as it makes you look like more of a person or whatever. There’s no mandatory requirement, but it’s one of those things guidance counselors advise. Or maybe it was just the one at my school (she was a bit of an odd bird, not gonna lie).
(Edit: also, given that you attend interviews, you can’t really outright lie about race, photo or no photo)
On Wednesday evening, the department said the posting was not an indication of a broad policy change but rather an effort to prioritize a complaint filed by Asian Americans in May 2015, alleging discrimination in university admissions.
During the Obama administration, Asian Americans filed a discrimination complaint. Three years later, the Justice Dept. is finally getting around to seeking justice for Asian Americans. How is this a bad thing? Don’t Asian Americans deserve justice? Should the Justice Dept. continue to ignore the Asian American discrimination complaint because some people simply don’t deserve justice?
Hmm. Maybe things have changed, and given that my experience dates to the time prior to the invention of photography, I’m probably just not hip to the new process. We didn’t do interviews, either. Too far to travel on horseback.
It would seem to me that if schools wanted to be race neutral, they will not allow photographs to be used at all. Interviews could be conducted by an independent agency or group that specifically left out any mention of race. Sometimes your name gives it way, though, and I suspect most of the “Asian” students here fall in that category.
I am sure that if race was omitted from applications and interviews were conducted by an independent agency that left out any mention of race, a sudden epidemic of legal name changing to Anglo-sounding names would suddenly occur in the 17-18-year-old Asians. I wouldn’t blame them.
I think there is discrimination against Asians and it needs to be addressed. I think a lot of DOJ career folks had their minds made up before the suit was even filed. They accepted arguments to explain away the disparity in Asian admission that they would never have accepted if they were trying to explain away disparities in success rate among blacks or Hispanics. If a doubling of black applicants to the Ferguson police department over a 20 year period led to no increase at all in the number of black policemen hired, they would not have accepted an explanation that there were some intangibles that the white policemen had that the black policemen lacked and left it at that but they effectively did this when it came to Asians in college admissions.
I also think that they are trying to recharacterize the Ivy League’s discrimination against Asians as a facet of affirmative action in favor of blacks and Hispanics when in fact its mostly just discrimination against Asians. Its not malicious but its there.
I like others would be happy to see most aspects of racial affirmative action replaced with socio-economic affirmative action. I would also like to see the elimination of legacy preferences and limit athletic preferences unless they start offering athletic scholarships with that preference (these two things give wealthy white applicants a huge advantage over their poorer non-white peers). I have no problem with a slight bias towards underrepresented minorities, but right now what we see is affirmative action that seems to help more black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa than African Americans whose ancestors were slaves.
They may also be a cynical attempt to court the Asian vote. The electorate is pretty evenly split with vey few swing voters. There are a lot of Asian swing voters, AFAICT a lot of Asians are Democrats because the Republicans seem like racists. If the Democrats are standing up for everyone BUT the Asians, Republican racism might not be as repellent as it once was if the Republicans are making the admissions process fairer.
IMHO, if the Trump DOJ gets rid of the discrimination against Asians in the college admissions process, and there is a feeling that Democrats would reverse that, then I think a lot of Asians are going to vote for Republicans.
How does the Justice Dept. prioritize a case it had already dismissed? Wouldn’t the Asian Americans then have had to re-file their complaint with the JD? AFAICT, the Obama administration’s JD let this case languish in bureaucrat limbo. I wonder why?
Is it possible that Asian Americans have spent the last three years lobbying for justice?
Of all the minority groups in America, Asians would probably be the easiest for the GOP to win back. Asians voted Republican by a slight margin up through 1988, the election of Bush Sr., but in 1992 and afterwards turned blue. (No cite, sorry, it is a trivia factoid in my head that I cannot recall the source for.)
So with a shrewd, precise and well-tailored strategy, the Republican Party could conceivably flip Asians back to light red. It would be very difficult, though, Asians are increasingly liberal in America and with every year that goes by they are baked deeper and deeper blue. And Trump is about as counterproductive a person for winning back minority votes as it gets.
I used to read applications for people applying for jobs (not students) for a University. The form had no place to indicate race or ethnicity. In the beginning they did ask for gender. They always asked for citizenship.
But I then had to fill out a mandated form to indicate what fraction of those who applied, got an interview, got offers were various minorities, females etc. Fortunately they had an unknown category. I always wondered how they used those statistics.
Call me cynical, but I doubt Trump et al cares all that much about discrimination against Asians in colleges. I’m not a fan of AA, but I’m suspicious of the motivation of the administration.
AA based on socio-economic factors does make more sense to me. Especially since the way we fund schools in the US puts poorer folk at a distinct disadvantage.
I’m sorry. You’re right. I looked back at this thread:
And it was the Department of Education Civil Rights Division that reached the conclusion on a separate suit involving Princeton. They concluded that there was nothing shady going on.
