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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am quite sure this is not as widespread as the pyschos on this board suggest.[/quote]

Plenty of Asian parents are fed up with their kids being discriminated against and being held to an impossible standard.  The system is rigged against them, why not play the game?[/quote]

Have you seen the make up of Ivy campuses? My kid was admitted to several T15. [b]Asian kids are over represented. [/b]At one Ivy, Asian was the majority race of the admitted students group that day. Stop playing the victim.  Many Asian families think there is some recipe to a T15 and now claim discrimination.  It's holistic admissions,  and every T15 campus has a large cohort of Asian kids. Much larger than population percentages would suggest. Even if these schools filled all their spots with Asian kids, it would still result in overwhelming rejection for most Asian kids. [/quote]

DP: You are a vile, racist person. People are people, not mere members of a supposed race.[/quote]

I did not intend this to be any judgment on race, and it was not intended to be a subjective statement.  It's just the data. Sorry if the syntax came across as subjective here. I meant that if you look at percentage of Asian students on these campus compared to Asian students in overall population,  the percentage is much much higher. That's what "overrepresented" means here. It was not meant to be a judgment! Just to say that Asian students do very well in top tier admissions.

I do think there is a cultural (but not racial)  component in when it comes to this notion of a "recipe" for Ivies and expectation that high stats equates to best qualified. [/quote]

I understand what you are saying, and the data is in your side. Asians, particularly East and South Asians, are represented at colleges and universities in percentages that exceed their proportion of the national population. At some of the nation’s top magnet high schools—TJ in Virginia and Bedford-Stuy in NY—you can see what happens when there’s aren’t holistic admissions but rather admission decisions based solely on stats/test scores:  Asians occupy more than half (I think 70%) of slots at Bedford. TJ was pressured to revamp their admission policies because Asians were nearing 50% (or more). A massive outcry has followed.

The US is the only country that practices “holistic” college admissions, rather than stats- and test-based admissions. The historical reason for that was to limit the number of Jews, starting around the 1920s, admitted to top universities, especially the Ivies. They, too, were over-represented based on their percentage of the national population. All of this was linked to immigration policies at the time, which originally were more lax and then became more restrictive for Chinese (1881) and later Asians generally and Jews. So this issue is a long-standing one for whites. Fareed Zakaria captured this in a documentary a couple of years ago. A NY Times op-ed this week addressed the topic as well (9/23 “stop making Asian-Americans pay the price for campus diversity”). Asians, much like Jews in the past, are up against informal quotas that holistic admissions practices mask. A friend’s kid is Asian/white, and that student will be checking the white box on their college application to improve their admission odds.

I don’t know what the answer is, but for those who focus on fairness in admissions, this strikes me as a broken and unfair system. On the other hand, the system is also rigged against other minority groups—often in low-income zip codes—who have less access to quality education in k-12 and who are now benefiting from a less test-based set of admissions criteria. What they have experienced in their schools for 13 years before college isn’t fair either. Dumping the (income-biased) standardized tests is helping them (to a modest degree) gain admission to top universities. It’s not as much as it seems when you review each university’s common data set. But it’s better than it was. This is and always has been such a vexing public policy issue. We want diverse representation on campuses at the aggregate level, but at the individual level, we want each student who is exceptionally qualified to not have informal quotas working against them.

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