Asian-Americans and Affirmative Action in Higher Education
The WaPo's Jay Matthews concedes points to an Asian-American critic of racial preferences in higher education. Leftist Asian-Americans often make shocking arguments about standing aside for those who have suffered more discrimination. In other words, Asian-Americans should not protest discrimination in favor of blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans. Matthews' interlocutor, Ed Chin, M.D., lacks such generosity: "I am convinced that one reason why Chin's well-reasoned complaints have not led to massive demonstrations and legislative reform is that the students of Asian descent who are rejected by the Ivies get educations just as good in other colleges. College admissions cannot be fair for anyone when, as happens at some schools, there are ten applicants for every place in the freshman class. The test score differences that Chin emphasizes are only one measure of quality, and although they predict college grades fairly well, they don't have that much to do with success in life. [But isn't such success dependent on connections obtained through prestigious institutions? What should be the function of elite universities in the production of a "natural aristocracy"?] "But there is one part of his argument, a reference to a sad era in American history, that is hard to ignore. Many selective colleges before World War II had quotas on Jews. They turned down many brilliant applicants in favor of non-Jewish prep school students with lesser records. They didn't call this striving for diversity, but it was a perverse form of affirmative action, and it left a bitter taste for decades. [Let's just call affirmative action a form of discrimination.] "Chin calculates that with those quotas gone, about a third of Harvard undergraduates are Jews, who make up about 3 percent of the U.S. population. About 17 percent of Harvard undergraduates are Asians, who make up about 4 percent of the population. Since the percentage of Asian Americans at schools of comparable quality that do not practice affirmative action are much higher -- 40 percent at Berkeley, 50 percent at selective New York high schools such as Stuyvesant -- Chin says the Asian American percentage at Harvard and other Ivies would go up significantly if the rules were changed." The conclusion does not necessarily follow; Harvard is a national university, Berkeley a California institution of national reputation, naturally drawing from those in its geographic region. But Chin's criticism remains unanswered by the higher education establishment, not to mention Asian-American apologists for racial and ethnic preferences. Ken Masugi |