To check or not to check the Asian box? That is the pointed choice faced by Asian-American students applying for admission to what are supposed to be the most tolerant places on earth, the nation’s colleges.
The Associated Press ran a report on Asian students of mixed parentage checking “white,” if possible, on their applications to avoid outing themselves as Asian. The Princeton Review Student Advantage Guide counsels Asian-American students not to check the race box and warns against sending a photo.
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In a culture that makes so much of celebrating ethnic heritage, especially of racial minorities, and that values fairness above all, Asian-American students think they need to hide their ethnicity because the college admissions process is so unfair. If African-American motorists fear that they will be pulled over by the cops for the phantom offense of “Driving While Black,” these kids worry about what will happen to them when “Applying While Asian.”
Studies have demonstrated what every Asian parent and kid knows: Asians are discriminated against in the admissions process. They are disadvantaged vis-à-vis other minorities and perhaps vis-à-vis whites. In 2005 the Center for Equal Opportunity, a think tank opposed to racial preferences, looked at males applying to the University of Michigan from within the state who had no parental connection to the school. If the applicant had a 1240 SAT score and a 3.2 GPA, he had a 92 percent chance of admission if black and 88 percent if Latino. If white, he had only a 14 percent chance, and if Asian, a 10 percent chance.
Thomas Espenshade, the Princeton University academic and co-author of the book No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, examined applicants to elite private schools with comparable grades, scores, athletic abilities, and family histories. He concluded that whites were significantly more likely to get admitted than Asians.
This accounts for what must be the first mass effort of a minority group to “pass as white” since Jim Crow. If nothing else, you can see the emotional appeal of favoring black applicants over whites as a tiny, belated step toward making right a grave historical injustice. (Of course, the white applicants did nothing to deserve this mark against them.) But what have Asian-Americans ever done to anyone else? Do the sons and daughters of Asian immigrants immediately arrive on these shores and begin repressing Caucasians with their famously diligent studies and high test scores, such that the panjandrums of higher education must redress the imbalance with pro-white discrimination?
All of this is done to promote a “diversity” of a crude, bean-counting sort. The private California Institute of Technology doesn’t use quotas; its student body is 39 percent Asian. The University of California at Berkeley is forbidden by law from using quotas; its student body is more than 40 percent Asian. Only a bigot would believe that these schools are consequently worse learning environments, or that they are places characterized by monochromatic, lockstep thinking because so many students share a broad-brush ethnic designation.
The author of The Price of Admission, Daniel Golden, calls Asian-Americans “the new Jews,” a reference to the 20th-century quotas that once kept Jews out of top schools. The difference then was that Jews collectively didn’t stand for the policy, now a watchword for disgraceful bias. Stephen Hsu, a professor of physics at the University of Oregon and an outspoken critic of current admission practices, laments that Asians seem strangely accepting of the unfair treatment of their children. The official Asian-American groups tend to support anti-Asian quotas because they are captives of liberal orthodoxy before all else.
The Obama administration’s misnamed Justice Department has joined with its wishfully named Education Department to urge schools to get creative in circumventing Supreme Court limits on affirmative action. It’s not quite “Asians need not apply,” only that they should expect their ethnicity to be used against them should it become known to the authorities.
There are Asians named "Hernandez"- many are Filipino. In fact, most Filipinos have Spanish surnames. This is the danger of placing people in neat little ethnic boxes.
There are Asians named "Hernandez": they are Filipino. In fact, most Filipinos have Spanish surnames. That's the danger of boxing people up in tidy little ethnic groups.
I'm whitebread umpteenth generation American. My husband is Chinese by way of Malaysia. We met at the same elite college. The discrimination against Asian students is an open secret--everyone Asian knew, or at least suspected, that it was the case. It's part of why my husband and I have decided to hyphenate my WASP last name with his (thankfully) not terribly ethnic sounding Chinese surname. We don't want our children, 20 years from now, to be hurt when applying for college, should saner winds have not prevailed.
Malaysia actually presents an instructive example. In Malaysia, about 25% of the population is Chinese, and government quotas which require a certain number of ethnic Malays win university places and jobs mean that Chinese students much earn much higher scores than Malay students to win university slots. The result of this is that academic expectation for Chinese students get ever higher, while those Chinese Malaysians who can afford it try to send their kids abroad. It's not an accident that my husband wound up at an American university--it's the result of my in-laws driving him for years to get him there.
And therein lies the rub. My husband comes from a country where racial quotas are explicit, published, and protesting them will cause the government to retaliate. (Malaysia's government recently essentially outlawed freedom of assembly.) Elections are rigged, and everyone knows this. The government has forged an ethnic, institutional and religious alliance to repress the Chinese population. My husband is still surprised that Americans are willing to openly speak out against and protest against the government.
Many Asian immigrants are only recently removed from governments that do not invite the opinions of their citizens. It takes time to learn, really learn, that it is acceptable to demand accountability of institutions and of governments, and I don't see that happening overnight.
But it is happening, slowly. Every Chinese American I've talked to of college age knows about these quotas, and I don't think these first generation Americans will stand for their children being treated in the same manner.
Um..you need to get a clue. Asians are 20% plus of Ivies, and only 5% at most of the population. They take up many more spots than they should. It's actually conservative, red-state whites that get truly discriminated against, as has been shown in studies. In AMERICA, we don't decide college admission solely on the Math SAT - personality and character and accomplishment matter as much. Asians generally fall short in these areas, and if they don't like it, they (including your husband) can go home where they can cram for tests all day.
Asians actually get preference over whites for certain government jobs and in law. It's absurd, and hopefully Americans will wake up and do something about it.
JackTripper, you need to be informed about how the admission process really works at Ivies: First, priority is given to legacy students (mostly whites whose parents are alumni). Second, priority is given to under-represented minorities (all non-whites who are not Asians). Third, priority is given to applicants with high test scores, as the test scores of the first two groups are below the target average of the incoming freshman class. I'll leave as an exercise for you to figure out which priority is given to Asians.
As for your comment that Asians are test crammers who fall short on character, I'll just respond by saying that a person who at least has the motivation to cram has more character than one who doesn't.
Supposedly Governor Ronald Reagan was about to sign a bill that would have banned racial discrimination in the admissions process to state schools. Advisors "warned" him that if he signed the bill (now long-since watered down or ignored), the top tier of states schools, Cal and UCLA, might become almost exclusively Asian.
Without blinking, he responded, "So?" and signed the bill into law.
When I was at Caltech in the 80s it was about 35% Asian, though we always used the term Oriental. It wasn't just that PC was only then coming into fashion. It was that there were so many other Asians there - Indians, Pakistanis. Iranians, Russians, Israelis, etc. - that reserving the word Asian to mean fifth-generation Chinese Americans from San Francisco and denying its use to people who were actually from the continenet of Asia seemed bizarre, arbitrary, and unfair, just as it does today.
It's as if Nordics suddenly declared that only northwestern Europeans were allowed to call themselves Europeans. Actually, things akin to that have happened, and they weren't very uplifting.
Patrick J - When I was an undergrad at Caltech in the early '70s the proportion was about the same as you experienced. Nobody cared what race you were, only how smart you were.
How about if the schools just let the best students in without regard to their race/ethncity etc. etc. based primarily on test scores but also considering such things as leadership and outside activities?
Many states require public schools track race of its students, schools oblige and will hunt parents down until the paperwork is completed. Department of Education orchestrates this as a tool to fund school programs. Usual of liberal nonsense it sounds like a good idea but…
You don’t even have to scratch the surface, just touching it you realize this is wrong on so many levels…oh I’d wax on but who wants to read a 30 page screed?
I’ll just share one anecdote.
My friend who emigrated from Turkey as a child has declared on the myriad of government forms from driver’s license, health insurance, education, job application, etc, which come our way his ethnicity. Turkish is never listed so he checks Asian only to be scolded at some point by a clerk or functionary that he is white, not Asian. He’s then berated to amend the form. Now the wiser he just checks white.
Just another marker proving the pursuit of progressive liberalism is nonsensical at best. For it is the height of folly to force arbitrary definitions of difference upon us for the sole purpose of ensuring we are all the same.
I may not look it but mitochondreal DNA proves that I am an African-American.
Seriously, this cr*p is totally infuriating. When my kids brought home the form RobL is referring to, I left it blank, signed it, and sent it back. I was then told that an educrat would then make a guess for us. Now I check "mixed" if there is such a box or write it in otherwise.
Many school district bureaucrats try to collect data about homeschooled children that they have no legal authority to collect. They do this by sending out “registration” forms with blanks for data they want, including race.
In our state, the law doesn’t require us to “register. ” It requires us to notify the Superintendent and requires only three bits of data on the children; name, address, and DOB. We ignore the homeschool coordinator’s forms. We provide exactly what state law requires in a letter addressed to the Superintendent that goes about as follows: Statute XYZPDQ requires us to notify you of our intent to establish a home education program and provide the names, address, and DOB of our children – here is that information.
Would it mischievous of us to fill out those forms to “register” our children and check the “African American” block (based on the Mitochondrial DNA evidence, of course) in hopes that they might enjoy some advantage from having a long record of being “registered” as “African American” students?
I am ethnically German. But if my great grandfather and his five brothers had decided to emigrate to Argentina instead of the US and if my ancestors had only married other ethnic Germans and I had been born in Argentina of pure ethnic German heritage I would be considered Hispanic by the US government based on my "country of origin".
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