Asians may face tougher college admission process, study finds

I wonder if this will drive more people towards distance education at some for profit schools where the admissions process is a little less rigorous?

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2009/10/12/24103/

Asian applicants may face discrimination in the admission process at many elite universities, according to data from a recent study conducted by sociology professor Thomas Espenshade GS ’72.

According to the data, not all races are considered equal in the college admissions game. Of students applying to private colleges in 1997, African-American applicants with SAT scores of 1150 had the same chances of being accepted as white applicants with 1460s and Asian applicants with perfect 1600s.

The results of the study come three years after Jian Li, a rejected Princeton applicant, filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. He alleged in the complaint that he had been discriminated against based on his race when he was denied admission to the University.

Espenshade noted that he did not initially use the word “discrimination” when discussing the results of his study. Though he found a 140-point SAT score discrepancy between accepted white and Asian students, he did not have access to what he called “soft variables,” like extracurriculars and teacher recommendations.

“The data we had is only part of the data that admission deans have access to,” Espenshade said. “If we had access to the full range of info, it could put Asian candidates in a different light. This so-called ‘Asian disadvantage’ does not necessarily mean that Asian applicants are being discriminated against.”

Also, since the study used data from 1997, “it would be desirable to replicate the study on more recent data,” Espenshade said. “It’s kind of hard to know how and to what extent things might have changed in the meantime.”

When asked about University admission policies in light of Li’s complaint, University spokeswoman Cass Cliatt ’96 told The Daily Princetonian in September 2008 that “Princeton does not discriminate on the basis of race, color or national origin, and our admission policy is in full compliance with Title VI of the [Civil Rights Act of 1964].”

Because his study did not include research done about Princeton’s admission policies, Espenshade said that he had “no empirical basis for having an opinion” about whether or not any possible discrimination occurred at the University.

Espenshade also noted that Li’s complaint does not mark the first time these concerns have been raised.

A look into Harvard’s admission policies in the 1990s showed that, after preferences for legacy students and athletes was removed, there was no discrimination against Asians based on race.

Still, Espenshade said he was surprised that Li decided to file a complaint against only Princeton, as Li was also rejected by Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Penn.

Yet Li’s sentiments are in line with Espenshade’s perceptions of the feelings of the Asian members of the University community. Espenshade explained that his informal conversations with Asian have led him to note the general feeling that they are held to a higher standard in college admissions.

“When Jian Li filed his complaint, it reinforced in their minds that they have to be twice as good as everyone else,” he said.

Espenshade also found in his study that low-income minorities, but not necessarily low-income white students, had an edge in admissions.

Also, according to the results, which will be published in a book to be released in December, the very richest applicants generally had lower acceptance rates than similarly qualified but less wealthy students.

Though Espenshade said he doesn’t know what could account for discrimination in admission policies, he noted that a lot depends on what universities are looking for in the perfect candidate.

“What I have concluded is that every university has in its mind an ideal shape of its entering freshman class,” he said. “If the shape of the applicant pool differs, then there is sculpting that has to be done.”

 

Interesting Comment

All other things being equal, being a black applicant is worth 230 points on the SAT scale (out of 1600). Being Hispanic is worth 185, white is 0, and being Asian will PENALIZE you 50 points. By comparison being a legacy is only worth 160 points. Put it another way, black acceptees score 230 points below the mean, etc.

One thing I'd love to do sometime is to ask an admissions officer why non-Asian minorities get a 200-250-point boost on the old (1600) SAT. Their stock response will be that they include many factors, including "intangibles" that conveniently can't be measured to hold admissions officers accountable. Then I'd ask them if whites and Asians were singularly deficient in these "intangibles." Of course logically that must be true, but admissions officers are PC-indoctrinated to pretend there are absolutely no differences between racial groups. The resulting logical black hole would make their heads explode.

It doesn't stop at college admissions. Graduate school, when you'd assume that the massive affirmative action boost will have given non-Asian minorities (NAMs) more than an equal opportunity to prove themselves, show even greater differences in ability by race, which of course need to be smoothed out by reverse racism.

http://opr.princeton.edu/faculty/tje/espenshadessqptii.pdf

Link to PDF of a study:

The Opportunity Cost of Admission Preferences at Elite Universities
by

Thomas J. Espenshade, Princeton University
Chang Y. Chung, Princeton University

 

This is the absurdity of race being given any consideration or even being known by university admissions officers. Here is a way to make it "fair." Put names of all qualified applicants in a pool, unweighted (one chance per applicant) for all qualified applicants including athletes and legacies, and draw them like a state lottery. Hell, let the state lottery officials pull the names so the undeserving legacies don't benefit from having influential parents.

Won't that damage the athletic programs? Who cares, collegiate sports were originally supposed to help students' growth and development as leaders of the future, not provide a free training ground for professional teams. Most of the elite schools have sh***y athletic programs anyway, besides students are there for an education, not as gladiators through whom the wealthy alumni live vicariously.

 

Just 2 cents in the discussion.

It makes no sense to put "latino" in the same classification of Black, White, Asian.

I know is almost pointless to try to argue about his with americans, but here it goes: Latino is not a race.

Latinos can be of any race - so 99% of those studies that put latino in statistics about race are just crap.

 

Isn't that everyone treated as equal? I mean if you're good then you're good. For example, I am Asian, and I am not smart at all. Therefore, if my academic is average, then I should be categorized as average. I think that is unfair! I see lot of smart African-American; then should not get any extra special.

oh, well!!

 

It is not reverse racism to consider ethnicity in the admissions process.

There is a problem of "equity"... Those who were members of the dominant culture have been the primary beneficiaries of unfettered access to social and educational systems, and the beliefs held by the dominant culture about minorities are not evolving positively quickly enough. (Sometimes the dominant culture is referred to as the white supremicist culture, but there is no value in accusing whites of trying to be or remain supreme.)

Hence, it is necessary to help some members of minority cultures with greater access, especially to educational systems. This greater access (and associated achievement in society) will help undo the past negative beliefs about minority cultures.

Now, to the presenting issue, the Asian ethnicity doesn't actually exist; it is a very broad agglomeration of cultures and traditions, as there are dozens of Asian (and Pacific Islander) countries from which immigrants are still arriving.

In sum, the "model minority" Asian stereotype that arose 20 or 30 years ago is wrongly being generalized on a vastly different group today.

 

Good grief Tek you owe me a new keyboard, I spewed Coke when I read this.

 

ahaha, don't blame on me when Grunt is in the office using computer.

ooppss. hold on, you have additional MOS 0151.

Oh another thing... I don't believe one race is smarter than another.

 

I never understood this concept. If they want to live vicariously, they should just pick up a video game. That would allow for much better vicarious living than simply watching a game over which they have no control.

 

It's asinine that Asians are penalized, based upon the color of their skin and the slant of their eyes -- neither of which they can help because they were born that way.

 

One could say the same thing about whites not receiving preferential treatment because, well they're white.

 

Well, its too bad you were born white. Because apparently the only way for an injustice to be undone, is do that very same injustice to the descendants of the other race.

Do we have a time-line for true equality? Where does it start? Emancipation Proclamation? 13th Amendment? Civil Rights Act of 1964? Election of a Black President?

There's more than one Asian race? Brilliant. That still does not account for the fact the some Asian's are penalized for being born Asian.

We are either all the same or we are not.

 

To expound, there is no "Asian race" with respect to education; there are many countries and cultures.

However, there is still the problem of "equity" to counterbalance "access" and problems with societal beliefs, especially toward African-Americans who suffered the injustice of slavery.

Still, I have to ask why you think it is more unjust for you to be denied admission to a university than an African American student who along with their ancestors never had "access" to the proper environments and institutions to excel?

In other words, why is your minority's marginalization any more "important" to society than any other minority's marginalization?

 

If memory serves, the dissolving of affirmative action at the University of California was initiated by a lawsuit from an Asian student who was denied entry, while a less-qualified "white" student was admitted, due to the "over-representation" of Asian students within the UC Grad School.

 

I was just watching "Race and Intelligence", a quite recent documentary by the BBC. (Should be available through the obvious download sources...) Quite interesting, they also interview Richard Lynn, who developed a globale lague table of intelligence. After this standpoint somehow the IQ meashurements indicate slightly lower averages for people of african and slightly higher ones for asian decent. So in the end the admission process might even level this out.
Buf of cause highly controversial, major factors parents and enducation, yada yada yada

 

Read up on Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences:

http://www.infed.org/thinkers/gardner.htm

 

Another fascinating and very controversial look at race and intelligence was the book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Hernstein and Murray.

http://www.amazon.com/Bell-Curve-Intelligence-Structure-American/dp/0029146739

Here's the wiki on the book, along with some critiques:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve

All I know is that I am of average intelligence and that I coasted through most of my studies. Now frighteningly enough my oldest son, 8, is showing the same proclivities that I did. He's doing just enough to get by, it makes me wake up in a cold sweat at night. How can a coaster, teach a son not to coast? I want him to have opportunities too but he is so common (like me) that we'll get lost on the shuffle. White, normal, average, and I suppose in the end he'll end up like me and a lot of others that are described by two quotes:

1. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation
Henry David Thoreau
2. The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we're passing one another without a look of recognition.
Henry Miller

 

As the prior poster alluded to, how well one scores on tests doesn't necessarily determine how hard that person actually works...it just means that person can score well on tests.

Asians have been stereotyped as being intelligent, hard working, but lacking creativity. Please note that I said stereotyped. I actually feel that creativity does come out of of Asia (Best example I have on the top of my mind: Nintendo))

My stance on the issue is that in a perfect world, race would not matter.

However, it is very true that race does matter. Otherwise, there would be no significance to a black president (whose citizenship was questioned).

Who your parent is does matter. (Did anyone else hear the term legacy student?)

How much money you have does matter. Otherwise, the cost of college would not be an issue.

Who you learn around does matter. (Otherwise, there would not be much to say for the networking opportunities on college campuses, as the main networking opportunities are with the other students, not the instructors.)

Now, people coming up nowadays may have more opportunities to be exposed to other things, but if the weird, rude comments you see on forums and articles prove anything (not referring to this site, the comments I am referring to are usually posted by Facebook or Yahoo users on articles), it proves that even in the information age, people maintain their myopic viewpoints, and/or are easily influenced by what the "news" tells them, rather than researching things and finding out the truth for themselves. [I'm not an English guru, please forgive the long sentence.] Basically, lots of exposure available, but people still only look at a little. I remember hearing one guy complain about how Google is such a good search engine, it's a negative, as people get exactly what they were looking for, and people do not browse the web like we used to, and get that full experience of seeing and learning new things. Modern day web browsing is usually "google a term", go to the best hit, and there you go. There isn't the old school "crawling" where you'd hop from one link to another, and before you know it, you're at something you had not heard of before. The web changed a lot when they invented tracking technologies and decided to give you "more of what you looked at before". It might work for some, and maybe I'm ranting on a totally unrelated issue at this point.


Back on topic, for those who are enlightened and realize that everyone's blood runs red, then I am happy for them. The truth is that people come up in different environments. Though created equal (in value), we do not have the same gifts, or the same experiences.

The ideal admissions setup would simply not ask questions about Date of Birth, Gender, Race, Address, Name, etc. (The same things that don't matter in an online learning setup, but would in an in-person setup.)

Let the applicant review pool look at anonymized (made-up-word) data sets, and decide from there. The only way to know that they're not considering those factors is to not use those factors in the first place. In an ideal setup, one would not know the race of the student until one saw them in person.