Posted on 12/03/2011 2:53:51 PM PST by Steelfish
Some Asians' College Strategy: Don't Check 'Asian' JESSE WASHINGTON
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." For years, many Asian-Americans have been convinced that it's harder for them to gain admission to the nation's top colleges.
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.
The way it works, the critics believe, is that Asian-Americans are evaluated not as individuals, but against the thousands of other ultra-achieving Asians who are stereotyped as boring academic robots. Now, an unknown number of students are responding to this concern by declining to identify themselves as Asian on their applications.
For those with only one Asian parent, whose names don't give away their heritage, that decision can be relatively easy. Harder are the questions that it raises: What's behind the admissions difficulties? What, exactly, is an Asian-American — and is being one a choice?
Olmstead is a freshman at Harvard and a member of HAPA, the Half-Asian People's Association. In high school she had a perfect 4.0 grade-point average and scored 2150 out of a possible 2400 on the SAT..
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
And in some school districts, Asians are seen as overachievers. So they don’t get into certain schools because there’s too many of them.
This has been cited within San Francisco school districts and others in the Bay Area.
Well, I hope so. How else is an 18-yr-old kid from Billings who has decided to major in math, say, going to compete academically against a Chinese ringer; i.e., a 30-yr-old math professor from China?
Saw it with my own eyes. Couldn't believe it.
How do I know they were math professors? Because they freely admitted it. They had no shame about it. Corruption and cheating is the norm in China. They knew the material as well or better than the professors at the American university where I went to graduate school.
I once had three or four of them in the same small graduate math class with me. It was very discouraging and us native-born American students were definitely at a huge disadvantage. I dropped that course right away so I wouldn't have to compete against them. Screw that noise.
Did he apply for the United Negro College Fund, also? LOL!
Smart parents would simply go through a legal name change. Or perhaps the admissions process redacts names to reduce the chance of the people doing the deciding noticing the name of a friends kid.
I did a software gig to set up a school’s financial aid system. The FA officer there told me that the scoring system that the Dept of Education uses is secret, but it is widely suspected they tilt the scales.
The FA told me that your best bet is to always check the box ‘Mixed’ or ‘Other’ for race on your FAFSA application. Never check the box for Asian/Pacific or Caucasian.
Hey, you might have a half-Cherokee great-grandmother on your father’s side. Who’s to say otherwise?
The Federal IPEDS database groups student cohorts by race, gender, and age. Schools obsess about IPEDS because Title IV funding can be taken away if too many students in the ‘wrong’ groups attend your school. Mixed/Other allegedy gets a neutral scoring on the IPEDS.
My son just marked “other” on one of his forms and wrote in “American.” Now he is getting literature from tribal colleges and Native American programs.
"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.'...I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."-- Martin Luther King, Jr., "I Have A Dream" speech, August 28, 1963
Well, I hope so. How else is an 18-yr-old kid from Billings who has decided to major in math, say, going to compete academically against a Chinese ringer; i.e., a 30-yr-old math professor from China?
30-year old math professors are competing for undergrad spots in US universities? Sure they are.
LOL, love it...
Not only do I think this is BS but I also think americans in general feel the OPPOSITE in that asians are harder working than some ethnic groups.
I would be way more prejudiced against someont who lies in order to get what he wants.
Not in the colleges I see in Boston. That is a fact...
Maybe it is elsewhere, but I don’t see it up here.
When I meet someone who’s a hundred times better at a subject than me, I look to them as inspiration. That you got discouraged and dropped the course so you “wouldn’t have to compete against them” speaks a lot about you.
I always wondered what would happen if I put "Hispanic" on an application. Really, that's such a bogus distinction because Hispanics can look White, Black or Asian. How would they know that my mother's family wasn't named Gomez or Gonzales?
Imagine if we had 10 million illegal Asian immigrants instead of Hispanics? Think the country would be a little different?
Maybe if they just had a separate parking lot
Yep... the let in all those affirmative action kids that never make it past the sophomore year when all the remedial classes end... use our Tax dollars and take space that some disadvantaged but ambitious white kid could have had..
I was taking a spanish class when the instructors daughter had a baby..he had a white dad.. she told us she advised them to put hispanic on the birth certificate for future affirmative action benefits..
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