Reply to Harvard's odd quota on Asian-Americans

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[quote=Anonymous]There seems to be a lot of misinformation on this thread beginning with it's title.  I'd like to see actual evidence of Harvard's "quota" on Asian Americans.  So far, neither posters, nor the lawsuit (which I've read) have presented any.  There's a lot of innuendo and assumption based on increases in the Asian American population and their historically high GPAs and test scores -- not to mention anecdotal evidence on similarly impressive extracurriculars and leadership positions, but again no real proof that a private school that is notoriously difficult to get into is doing anything other than selecting the most interesting, unique and accomplished student body it can get.

People have compared Harvard to an academic lottery for good reasons -- of all the hundreds of thousands of amazing students in the world, they only accept about 2,000 and I think the freshman class this year ended up being around 1,600.  For the class of 2018 they had 34,000 + applicants, so I would imagine they turned away plenty of remarkable students of all sorts of di ethnicities.  The one difference seems to be that instead of accepting that Harvard is a tough place to get into and moving on, a collection of Asian groups has decided that it is a conspiracy and that by virtue of their academic superiority and sheer numbers, they are entitled to make up a bigger share of total admissions.  We don't know what unique talents these rejected students brought or what they said in their essays, we only know they were discriminated against because the math says so.

A lot of folks point out that Asians make up the majority of the student body at public magnet schools (often science and math-based) like New York's Stuyvesant and TJ.  Although it's not popular to say, I know from personal experience that that has also changed the culture at some of these schools.  TJ has become a different place -- more of an academic factory than the place of exploration it used to be.  This, not intimidation by higher achieving Asians, is the reason the number of white applicants has gone down.  My oldest child grew up in Asia and doesn't even really see race ( in fact he's all for race-blind admissions), but he was very turned off by the dog-eat-dog mentality he found there.

Private schools such as Harvard can and should be able to accept whoever they want and cultivate the community they think is representative of their academic mission. .  If they are turning away too many people of any race who would bring more esteem to the institution, then they are only hurting themselves.    [/quote]

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