Reply to Asians are suing Harvard and UNC - Chapel Hill for use of quotas

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]College admissions in the US is not the gaokao and it shouldn't be.  Testing is not everything and even the Chinese and Koreans and Japanese are debating how to reduce their reliance on college admissions testing because it stifles creativity and ignores the multiple sources of excellence.

As a first generation Chinese-American with two Ivy degrees, I am just fed up with the whining about admissions to the Ivies. There are simply no race based quotas. Since only 1 percent of college students can go to an Ivy, the debate is largely inconsequential to improving the life options of Asian Americans. Fight the discrimination that affects the other 99%.

After interviewing scores of applicants, it is pretty obvious that there are lots of students with good grades who test well, but have almost nothing else.  The profiles are often remarkably similar: math/science excellence, limited intellectual depth in literature and the arts, few ECs besides classical music training and occasionally individual sports like golf or tennis. Worse, they present themselves as pretty ho-hum with no passion or excitement for learning. It is as if their parents are all reading from the same book on how to raise a child who gets in to Harvard.

Another thing to remember is that the Ivies are all liberal arts colleges! A hugely disproportionate share of Asian-American applicants are in the STEM fields. Since Harvard is choosing students to fill all its majors, Asians are largely competing against other math and science students applying to Harvard, not the historians, lit majors, artists, or football players.  Which also means they are largely competing against themselves.  That is why the test scores look skewed and why the admission rates are lower. Caltech does not need to find students to fill its philosophy department, while Harvard does.

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Thank you for such a coherent discussion of what is a really going on.  It is so easy to get caught up in numbers and test scores, when, as you so rightly point out, liberal art colleges, in particular are not simply about STEM or who is a math whiz.

Sometimes I think part of the problem and the onus behind this lawsuit is the intensity of the Asian obsession with the Ivy League.  Certainly, they're not alone in this, but when I lived in China and India you would have thought that Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT and Princeton were the only schools we had in this country.  Everyone, regardless of their background, needs to realize that only a miniscule fraction of kids who could succeed at these schools get a chance to go to them.  It's a crapshoot regardless of your ethnicity and the numbers tell only part of the story.  I'm constantly amazed that with so much obvious brainpower, Asia hasn't done a better job of developing elite institutions on par with Harvard et. al.[/quote]

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