The assembled school admissions counselors attending the annual meeting of the National Association of College Admission Counseling for some reason seemed surprised — no, make that Shocked! Shocked! — that Asians are discriminated against in college admissions.
Many counselors — during and after the session — said that they have little doubt that when applying for undergraduate admission to research universities, white applicants are getting admitted with lower test scores and grades than Asian applicants are. One high school guidance counselor told the panel of experts that a sign of the distrust of the system is that he is increasingly asked by Asian American students if they would be better off applying to college if they declined to check the race/ethnicity box on the applications.
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The prompt for the discussion was an article that ran last year in The Wall Street Journal about “the new white flight.” The article reported that white families were leaving some nice suburbs with great public schools — or sending their children to private schools — as districts became “too Asian,” apparently meaning districts where after-school academic programs are more popular than soccer. While the school districts about which the article was written have criticized the piece, many at the NACAC meeting said that the attitudes quoted in the article were real — and were playing a big impact in college admissions.
[Jon] Reider [a counselor at University High School, in San Francisco and former admissions officer at Stanford] said he thought the article and the question of “Too Asian?” that it posed was “shameful” and said that he was “embarrassed” as an American that such a piece would appear today. He asked whether anyone would think of publishing an article called “Too Latino?” and compared the bias to the kind of bigotry that for decades limited the enrollment of Jewish students at top private universities. “This is a racist question,” he said.
Fearing that a student body is, or is at risk of becoming, “too Asian” is no more (or no less) racist that fearing that it is not black or Latino enough, and the discrimination against Asians that occurs is the inevitable, predictable result of the discrimination in favor of blacks and Latinos.
Being surprised or shocked about that is like being surprised at gambling at Ricks or pool right here in River City.
I wonder if there is a financial reason why asian students are not considered as desirable. I suspect that many top ranked universities believe that asian alumni do not give as much as whites.
I also suspect that many of the things that middle America considers part of the college experience: sports, greeks, clubs, etc are not supported by Asain students as much as whites. Thus, a university could reach the tipping point where if it become “too asian” that most other students will stop attending.
On a another line of reasonsing, I wonder if the “anti-asian” idea is why more universities have started admitting students based upon what their declared major will be. It would be easy admit more whites, blacks, or hispanics if each department had its own admission criteria. Admit low performing blacks to the sociology program or the african-american studies program while having a much more selective admission to the chemical engineering or the biochemistry department. thus, a university can check the “diverse box” while also checking the high graduation rate box and the high mean SAT score box.
Any program that figure in race or other nebulous factors like participation in sports and clubs are just poor excuses for discrimination. “Preferred minorities” don’t like the fact that Asians have consistently outperformed even caucasians who, who represent the majority, at least for now, in this country. Many Hispanics and Blacks like to use discrimination as a crutch to cover for their own laziness and lack of achievement. But it’s very hard to do this when Asians have proven that this is not a barrier to academic performance. Because other races, including Caucasians cannot compete against Asians, based on long established academic standards and measurements, these groups try to game or change the system to emphasize other factors, which is ridiculous since schools, Univeristies, etc… are, above all else, institutions of learning. In the end, through these discriminatory programs, you will only tarnish you own reputaion in the world, and make your country less competitve. You’ve have also just given Asians the excuse to discriminate against you in their countries.
At Cornell University, the Admissions Office is very proud of their diversity success. The university has de-classified Asians as minorities since 1990s so that a boosted admission policy will favor Black Americans, Latinos. These underrepresented minorities have Admission (SAT/GRE scores) across the board for competency. (i.e. overall, these groups have 200 lower average scores than Asians admitted to Cornell). The Cornell Asian Alumni group fully knows that they do not benefit by checking off the Asian “box,” for Admission applications. This includes S. Asians; both groups cover the campus for pre-medical programs in science, engineering, and mathematics. ( In the New York region, they’re flatly giving less money back to Cornell as a result). Racism is not a preferred policy since this never happened to Jewish, who also were ‘overrepresented’ in the Cornell applicant — and Admitted — pool across campus.