“Harvard’s Chinese Exclusion Act” is a Wall Street Journal article about how Harvard discriminates against Asian applicants. Here are a few excerpts:
How much harder is it for an Asian-American applicant? Mr. Zhao and the complaint cite 2009 research by Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade that found an Asian-American student must earn an SAT score 140 points higher than a white student, 270 points higher than a Hispanic and 450 points higher than an African-American, all else being equal.
“Our children have to study much harder,” Mr. Zhao said late last month at a news conference. For young Asian-Americans, the perception that they must strive more than others only intensifies the competition for college admission. Then come the complaints from colleges that Asian-Americans focus too much on academics, and the cycle goes on.
But being half-Asian might be an advantage. Last fall I toured a prestigious liberal arts college campus with two friends (very comfortably retired from the financial services industry; dad is white and mom is Chinese-American) and their son. A student assured the boy that “there are a lot of special programs here for science students of color.” He checked “mixed race” on the application and was not only admitted, but was invited to an all-expense-paid summer program for “mixed race students.”
Is “never put down ‘full Asian'” a variation of the Tropic Thunder principle?
Kirk Lazarus: Everybody knows you never go full retard.
Tugg Speedman: What do you mean?
Kirk Lazarus: Check it out. Dustin Hoffman, ‘Rain Man,’ look retarded, act retarded, not retarded. Counted toothpicks, cheated cards. Autistic, sho’. Not retarded. You know Tom Hanks, ‘Forrest Gump.’ Slow, yes. Retarded, maybe. Braces on his legs. But he charmed the pants off Nixon and won a ping-pong competition. That ain’t retarded. Peter Sellers, “Being There.” Infantile, yes. Retarded, no. You went full retard, man. Never go full retard. You don’t buy that? Ask Sean Penn, 2001, “I Am Sam.” Remember? Went full retard, went home empty handed…
One reason universities may be reluctant to admit asian students is that in my experience there is a huge push for them to become medical doctors or some other high earning professional. This might hurt a university’s enrollment in their less useful/lucrative areas….gender studies?
I know some people that had to work in admissions offices, who read writing samples. Many students simply wrote something along the lines of “I would like to go to this university so I can make a lot of money.” The passionate admissions office was not as sympathetic toward this focused mentality, though they should be when they are charging record tuition!
Before Tiger Mother, there was a book called “Top Of The Class” by two asian women who wrote about the secrets of asian student’s success, a few stuck with me:
http://www.amazon.com/Top-Class-Asian-Parents-Achievers–/dp/0425205614/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1434129067
Secret 11 – Forget the “Do Whatever Makes You Happy” Mentality…
Secret 12 – Keep Your Money in Perspective
Conveniently, the same techniques perfected to prevent Jews from getting into the Ivy League before WW2 could be repurposed to blackball Asian-Americans (as opposed to overseas Asian-Asians) starting in the 80s. As for mixed-race, it is basically a consequence of limited IT – it was probably intended for people like Obama who are half of a “good” minority, as opposed to “bad” minorities like Asians or poor rural whites. It probably helps your friend’s dad is the white one and thus he probably does not have an Asian-sounding surname, thus eluding detection by the racial quota police.
That reminds me of a story I read in “Le Nouvel Obs” about a Frenchman who was interned by the Nazis. He was simultaneously Jewish and a Freemason, both categories eligible for the concentration camps, but since their IBM-supplied IT could not handle multiple categories, he was classified as “freemason dignitary” (more specific) and thus assigned a lower extermination priority than if he were Jewish alone, and that’s how he survived.
How do universities treat the other/prefer not to say answers to the racial questions? It seems like there is no motivation for anyone to ever check the white box. Taking that to the extreme, why doesn’t everyone applying for college identify as African American. It’s not like there are union cards to be checked or thresholds for color pigmentation before becoming eligible for the benefits.
I’m looking at these two comments and it raises an interesting question. What is the reason that Harvard and other elite universities limit the number of Asian students that they accept? It seems unlikely that the people who run those institutions harbor feelings of visceral racism similar to the anti-Semitism that was common in Europe before 1945. I read somewhere many students are admitted as legacies in Ivy League schools. For example, George W. Bush was the fourth generation in his family to go to Yale, which one of his daughters also attended. If most of the Asian applicants to these schools are immigrants or children of immigrants, few of them are likely to have the family connections.
I’m not sure I buy this story. Affirmative action is usually reserved for “NAMs” – Non-Asian minorities. Being 1/2 white and 1/2 Asian doesn’t normally get you AA unless there was some sort of bureaucratic foul up. Fazal may have a point – perhaps the father’s non-Asian name and the “mixed race” checkbox led them to the wrong conclusion. Maybe there were no other clues in the application as to what his non-white 1/2 was. Many consultants for Asians trying to get into college now counsel their clients to do non-stereotypically Asian things – play the electric guitar instead of the violin, join the football team instead of the chess club, etc.
Also as Fazal pointed out, this is all just a repeat of what happened to the Jews in the 1920-1960s period. For Jews, there was an obsession with the idea that some Jews were getting in by “passing” as non-Jewish, having changed their names, etc. so colleges went to great lengths to sniff out “hidden” Jews – asking for photos, the names of parents and grandparents, etc. Karabel’s book is very eye opening:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Chosen-Admission-Exclusion-Princeton/dp/061877355X
The whole present American “holistic” college admission system, where you don’t just look at grades and test scores, but for “well rounded” individuals, was created expressly for the purpose of keeping down the # of Jews admitted. When I first read this I was shocked and didn’t fully believe it. Holistic admission seems so ingrained in our college admission process that it seems like it must have always existed and could not have been cooked up for such a venal purpose. But Karabel makes a convincing case that it was. In the days when Harvard was almost 100% WASP, they didn’t care whether you were a well rounded WASP or not – you sat (in those pre-SAT days) for the Harvard admissions test and then they took the top applicants in rank order. This is still how its done in many countries that are racially homogeneous (e.g. Japan). But when “too many” Jews starting showing up on the list, suddenly they wanted to consider other things, especially things that Jews were not that good at such as contact sports.
And then the same system was seamlessly repurposed for increasing the # of NAMs and keeping the # of Asians down. It’s a clever system because it’s so opaque – you can disguise all sorts of discrimination inside that “holistic” black box.
This is a situation calling for some creative gaming. Some ideas off the top of my head.
1. bluff a’la Rachel Dalezal the white woman who got herself appointed head of the Spokand NAACP chapter by insisting she is black even though she is blond haired with two very white parents. Phil’s illustrious US Senator Fauxhontas Elizabeth Warren also comes to mind. She claimed 1/16 Indian blood and got some racial preference points in her job at Harvard.
2. Go deep undercover. Change your first name to Latasha or Trayvon or maybe Barack and claim to be of mixed race. If the application requires pictures send in one wearing a football helmet with full face shield or a beekeepers mask and get double points for having a weird hobby.
3. You may have to set up a mailing address in a ghetto community. Here in the Frisco bay area it would not do to claim to be black and list Atherton as your address but a PO Box in East Palo Alto right across the 101 freeway would work fine.
Izzie L. is correct. The whole time intensive and confusing “holistic” admissions thing was invented solely to keep down the number of Jews in certain universities, and kept around, after the elites decided they liked Jews, to be used against other racial groups. There are a surprising amount of American institutions that are just accepted that were created originally specifically to defend slavery or some sort of bigotry.
Bob and some of the other commentators are incorrect in assuming that these institutions want Blacks, or anyway ghetto Blacks. They don’t. The system is designed to get as many upper middle class and wealthy Blacks from Atherton in as possible. They don’t want anyone from East Palo Alto. Someone like Obama with his banker grandmother and family CIA connections would be ideal.