Is Harvard Unfair to Asian-Americans?

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From The New York Times:

Is Harvard Unfair to Asian-Americans?
By Yascha Mounk
Novmber 24, 2014

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. ? NEARLY a century ago, Harvard had a big problem: Too many Jews. By 1922, Jews accounted for 21.5 percent of freshmen, up from 7 percent in 1900 and vastly more than at Yale or Princeton. In the Ivy League, only Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania had a greater proportion of Jews.

Harvard?s president, A. Lawrence Lowell, warned that the ?Jewish invasion? would ?ruin the college.? He wanted a cap: 15 percent. When faculty members balked, he stacked the admissions process to achieve the same result. Bolstered by the nativism of the time, which led to sharp immigration restrictions, Harvard?s admissions committee began using the euphemistic criteria of ?character and fitness? to limit Jewish enrollment. As the sociologist Jerome Karabel has documented, these practices worked for the next three decades to suppress the number of Jewish students.

A similar injustice is at work today, against Asian-Americans. To get into the top schools, they need SAT scores that are about 140 points higher than those of their white peers. In 2008, over half of all applicants to Harvard with exceptionally high SAT scores were Asian, yet they made up only 17 percent of the entering class (now 20 percent). Asians are the fastest-growing racial group in America, but their proportion of Harvard undergraduates has been flat for two decades.

A new lawsuit filed on behalf of Asian-American applicants offers strong evidence that Harvard engages in racial ?balancing.? Admissions numbers for each racial and ethnic group have remained strikingly similar, year to year. Damningly, those rare years in which an unusually high number of Asians were admitted were followed by years in which especially few made the cut.

The most common defense of the status quo is that many Asian-American applicants do well on tests but lack intangible qualities like originality or leadership. As early as 1988, William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard?s dean of admissions, said that they were ?slightly less strong on extracurricular criteria.?

Even leaving aside the disturbing parallel with how Jews were characterized, there is little evidence that this is true. A new study of over 100,000 applicants to the University of California, Los Angeles, found no significant correlation between race and extracurricular achievements.

The truth is not that Asians have fewer distinguishing qualities than whites; it?s that ? because of a longstanding depiction of Asians as featureless or even interchangeable ? they are more likely to be perceived as lacking in individuality. (As one Harvard admissions officer noted on the file of an Asian-American applicant, ?He?s quiet and, of course, wants to be a doctor.?)

The contribution Jews made to American life in the decades after they were maligned as unoriginal, grasping careerists speaks for itself. There is no reason to believe that today?s Asian-Americans will leave less of a mark.

For all the historical parallels, there?s one big difference. In the days of Lowell, Harvard was a bastion of white Protestant elites. Anti-Semitism was rampant. Today, Harvard is a patchwork of ethnicities and religions; 15 percent of students are the first in their families to attend college. In seven years as a student and teacher at Harvard, I have never heard anyone demean Asian-Americans.

So why is the new discrimination tolerated? For one thing, many academics assume that higher rates of admission for Asian-Americans would come at the price of lower rates of admission for African-Americans. Opponents of affirmative action ? including the Project on Fair Representation, which helped bring the new suit ? like to link the two issues, but they are unrelated.

As recognized by the Supreme Court, schools have an interest in recruiting a ?critical mass? of minority students to obtain ?the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.? This justifies, in my view, admissions standards that look favorably on underrepresented groups, like African-Americans and Latinos. But it can neither explain nor justify why a student of Chinese, Korean or Indian descent is so much less likely to be admitted than a white one.

Conservatives point to Harvard?s emphasis on enrolling African-Americans (currently 12 percent of freshmen) and Hispanics (13 percent) but overlook preferences for children of alumni (about 12 percent of students) and recruited athletes (around 13 percent). The real problem is that, in a meritocratic system, whites would be a minority ? and Harvard just isn?t comfortable with that.

Admission to elite colleges is a scarce good. Deciding who gets an offer inescapably involves trade-offs among competing values. Do we make excellence the only criterion ? and, if so, excellence in what? Should we allocate places to those students who will profit most from them? Or to those who are most likely to give back to the community?

There isn?t one right answer. But that does not mean that there aren?t some answers that are unambiguously wrong.

It?s perfectly fair to consider extracurriculars as an important factor in admissions. But the current system is so opaque that it is easy to conceal discrimination behind vague criteria like ?intangible qualities? or the desire for a ?well-rounded class.? These criteria were used to exclude an overachieving minority in the days of Lowell, and they serve the same purpose today. For reasons both legal and moral, the onus is on the schools to make their admissions criteria more transparent ? not to use them as fig leaves for excluding some students simply because they happen to be Asian.

Yascha Mounk, a political theorist and a fellow at New America, teaches expository writing at Harvard.
 
Nothing wrong with it in my opinion. If they are allowed to favor "legacies" then they should be allowed to balance their class in other ways too (including race).
 
We all know what the IVC of the east would look like if every applicant was anonymous.  20% Asian is woefully small.
 
Again...this goes back to the belief that test scores and GPAs are the best gauge of college students.  Also, having a diverse student population is important.

Additionally, I don't know about Harvard but it may depend on what majors the students are trying for.  At the UCs, you have to have a higher GPA/SAT to get into engineering schools.  Somehow, I doubt that many of the high achieving Asian applicants are trying out for English Literature.

 
Asian students in Harvard crossing the 20 percent threshold by 1993, but from that year forward, the Asian numbers went into reverse, generally stagnating or declining during the two decades which followed.  The official 2011 figure being 17.2 percent. 

So what are the reasons for stagnant or declining number of Asian student in Harvard?

....the approach subsequently taken by Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell and his peers was to transform the admissions process from a simple objective test of academic merit into a complex and holistic consideration of all aspects of each individual applicant; the resulting opacity permitted the admission or rejection of any given applicant, allowing the ethnicity of the student body to be shaped as desired.

The Myth of American Meritocracy
 
lnc said:
Asian students in Harvard crossing the 20 percent threshold by 1993, but from that year forward, the Asian numbers went into reverse, generally stagnating or declining during the two decades which followed.  The official 2011 figure being 17.2 percent. 

So what are the reasons for stagnant or declining number of Asian student in Harvard?

....the approach subsequently taken by Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell and his peers was to transform the admissions process from a simple objective test of academic merit into a complex and holistic consideration of all aspects of each individual applicant; the resulting opacity permitted the admission or rejection of any given applicant, allowing the ethnicity of the student body to be shaped as desired.

The Myth of American Meritocracy

Which is pretty much how reality works.  Why even have job interviews?  Just figure out who scored the highest GPA in college.
 
334 Asians were admitted this year. I know you think the best feeder schools are all in Irvine. Open you eyes folks there are many other great Asian populated schools outside of Irvine that feeds into Harvard such as San Jose, Milpetus, Cupertino, Private SF schools, Fremont Mission, Troy, Whitney, Granada Hills, Thousand Oaks, San Marino, Arcadia, Diamond Bar High, Walnut, Peninsula High, PV, Sunnyhill and Oxford. I know I forgot a few. These are just CA. What about Houston, Dallas, New Jersey, Johns Creek, Virginia, Connecticut, New York, queens and other Asian hot spots. All competing for 334 spots. Asians then break down to Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese and etc. Harvard is also looking for equal representation in the Asian ethnicities by reviewing the last names. Your children by the senior years will be so burned out by the competitions, back stabbings, and Chinese bribes Cal State Fullerton, Chapman of SF State are their future.

I also forgot the princelings from China, Indonesia, Philippine, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan.
 
Harvard also likes poor underdog Asian ghettos like El Monte, Mark Keppel and Lincoln High and pluck a few from there to mix in with the over entitled Asian kids. All these top schools need a few humanitarian poster child in different races for PR.
 
I know some of you think that I BS a lot about other schools outside of Irvine have an advantage over Irvine and especially those ghetto public schools. Ivy schools like Harvard and Yale love underdogs. Mark Keppel in Alhambra and Arroyo High in El Monte are consistently the feeder schools to the Ivies. Ivies love poster child.

If you don't know or even heard of them then you still have a lot to learn outside of your cocoon.

http://yuso.yale.edu/about-us
 
irvinehomeshopper said:
I know some of you think that I BS a lot about other schools outside of Irvine have an advantage over Irvine and especially those ghetto public schools. Ivy schools like Harvard and Yale love underdogs. Mark Keppel in Alhambra and Arroyo High in El Monte are consistently the feeder schools to the Ivies. Ivies love poster child.

If you don't know or even heard of them then you still have a lot to learn outside of your cocoon.

http://yuso.yale.edu/about-us

All I got to say, there are other schools out there that don't: choose not to choose Asians.
 
private schools are not subjected to taxpayer's scrutiny. Schools see each students as investment. As an investor it is best to diversify the portfolio. Riskiest are the Asian stocks. History has shown Asian graduates contributed very little to future school endowment. White stocks and Legacy stocks are proven to be good stocks with excellent yield of return. These stocks are likely future CEOs of large corporations and presidents of this country. 14-17% of Asian stocks are recommended. Why sue the investors for not buying more risky stocks?
 
UC schools are funded by tax payers so the schools must choose the best GPAs and highest test scores regardless of color and race. This is why Asian population is around 50%.
 
I took a glance at Harvard's Financial Statement for FY 2014 looks like they received sponsored support from the federal government.
 
Yes, it is true. Harvard is unfair to Asian Americans in college admissions. There are many brilliant Asian Americans who get turned down.  Many reasons for that.  For one, the Ivies are very much tired of the exact Asian American "formula" they see over and over on college applications: overemphasized top academics (with a symbolic string of community service, obviously for resume value only) + concert-level violin/piano skills (yawn) + dance maybe = looking for admissions mostly in science, engineering, pre-med fields.  That's usually it (of course, there are exceptions).  Yes, there are some "extracurricular activities" but they are not very impressive as compared to other applicants.  Plus, many Asian American applicants are considered "risk-averse" which is a turn off for many top college admissions officers, who are looking for leaders, not well-trained overachieving robots. Besides, there is a widespread stereotype that many Asian American kids are seeking Ivy admissions for label/resume value only (and to appease their overachievement-oriented parents), not for the true opportunities the school offers (and most of them cannot really articulate why Harvard and not, say UC Berkeley, given comparable academics).  Sadly, the relentless quest for perfection is working against them in college admissions.  I think this approach is very unfair to Asian Americans who work hard, but now have to work against the stereotypes created by their predecessors. 

P.S. If you are Asian American who speaks fluent Farsi and seeks to study Persian Literature, that might get you into the "maybe" file.  If u went to a weekend Chinese school want to study premed?forgettaboutit, unless u invented a better version of iPhone while you were in middle school.  Good luck!!!
 
So it's not really Irvine that is preventing kids from getting into an Ivy... it's the Irvine racial profile.

So IHS' daughter was doomed from birth... qwermexican has the right advice to have his kid check the Habla Espanol box on the college application.
 
irvinehomeowner said:
So it's not really Irvine that is preventing kids from getting into an Ivy... it's the Irvine racial profile.

So IHS' daughter was doomed from birth... qwermexican has the right advice to have his kid check the Habla Espanol box on the college application.

yes, but the racial stereotyping is worse if you're at a school that's comprised of 50% of the same race.  I do alumni interviews and I can attest to this. Better move to villa park instead. Get a nicer house in the bargain too :)
 
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