
Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian' - thomasgerbe
http://news.yahoo.com/asians-college-strategy-dont-check-asian-174442977.html
======
brandnewlow
I would advise an asian college applicant to an elite school to strongly
consider not checking the "asian" box. It is absolutely true that they're in
competition against the other asian applicants. It's also absolutely true that
the asian applicants have extremely common profiles in terms of activities,
test scores, grades, and points of view.

When I was an admissions office for a short time, my advice to asian
applicants looking to be noticed was to go to clown school, perform as a semi-
professional magician, or even excel at sports.

Violin, cello, piano, essays about translating for your immigrant parents,
computers, math, science...all that stuff blends together after awhile and
makes it hard for an admissions office to remember you when sitting around the
table voting on applicants.

~~~
yangez
I'm curious. In your experience, was it just those activities (Violin, cello,
piano, etc) that were beaten to death and no longer desirable, or was more
about the uniformity of Asian applicants?

For example, if a white kid had the same piano + math achievements as an Asian
one did in the same year, would he stand out more?

~~~
brandnewlow
The white kid might stand out a bit more, but he'd probably get lost in the
crush, too. There's got to be a twist, there's got to be an angle.

So a kid with incredible credentials who plays the violin and is awesome at
math....who grew up in an igloo is going to get extra attention.

That same kid who went to a math/science academy in NYC has a tough path in
front of him.

------
anatoly
I was 13, I think, when I went to compete in the all-Ukrainian math olympiad,
back a bunch of years ago when it was called a "republican" olympiad because
Ukraine was a republic in the USSR and not a separate country. It was a long
event: delegations from all the regions came and were housed in a sort of
summer camp for two weeks. As we were getting registered, one of the
organizers who was getting everyone's details for the official forms told me
she needed to know my ethnicity.

I was pretty naive, and after thinking it over for a few minutes I decided to
ask her for advice. I said to her: "Well, I'm really not sure what to tell
you, see, my mother's Jewish, and my father's Ukrainian. Can you write them
both? Or am I supposed to choose somehow? What do you think?" I'd actually
thought it through a bit more and was ready to continue telling her how my
parents were divorced and I was living with my mother so I should probably
choose that side... but I decided to wait for her response first.

She looked at me a bit funny (I think now that she was trying to see if I was
being ironic. I wasn't). She held a pause. And then she said firmly: "Let's
just write you up as a Ukrainian, shall we?"

~~~
jpdoctor
It reminds me: I believe in Feyman's day, Jews were fighting a similar problem
to Asians now.

I'm pretty sure that SAM (a Jewish frat?) was gone by the 80s at MIT, as a
calibration point.

Edit: I was a little confused, he was turned away from Columbia for being
Jewish. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota>

~~~
neutronicus
I remember reading an article in ... I believe it was the New Republic ...
that said that the "holistic admissions process" of today, with the essays,
activities, etc. supplanted the earlier more test-scores / grades-centric
approach at the Ivy League precisely in an attempt to admit fewer Jews.

~~~
tokenadult
_I remember reading an article . . . that said that the "holistic admissions
process" of today, with the essays, activities, etc. supplanted the earlier .
. . approach at the Ivy League precisely in an attempt to admit fewer Jews._

The much-cited article on the subject is by Malcolm Gladwell, and was first
published in the New Yorker.

<http://www.gladwell.com/2005/2005_10_10_a_admissions.html>

The article is a review of a book by Jerome Karable, which gives many details
of the history of admission policies at selective United States universities.

------
localhost3000
I recently went through the b-school admissions process (admitted to several
'elite' schools but, ultimately, decided not to enroll). It was a remarkable
experience. Remarkable in that it made me feel completely inadequate and
commoditized...and I was a successful applicant! There's an entire industry
built upon the panic and stress of young over-achievers who believe their life
will be defined by the rank of their school. It's called admissions
consulting...and the rates they charge. oh, brother.

I feel supremely sorry for any 16-year-old trying to get into a top ranked
school right now. As a fairly stable 26-year-old it made me depressed like
nothing before. It's a broken process that's been spoiled rotten by the bottom
feeders who will tell a kid "you won't get in unless you pay me five grand to
help you." (i couldn't afford it...)

If you want to see some people really freak out over race and admissions, talk
to some Indian B-school hopefuls (note: I am not Indian). They are absolutely
bucketed and compete against one another.

~~~
mrfairladyz
As a 16-year-old who will be applying to these elite schools next year, I can
vouch for the things you're saying. The competition is insane, and it puts the
prospective applicants through a lot.

On the topic of race - It's no unusual occurrence to hear some HYPSM reject at
my school (pretty average/ordinary California high school) say "I was rejected
because I was Asian/White/Indian/whatever." It really bothers me because these
kids never had a shot at those top schools anyway. They were above-average at
an ordinary high school. They really had nothing to differentiate them from
any other applicant. It was the same "Smart kid with good grades and an SAT
score above 2000 who was loosely involved in a club or two."

The mentality is, if you get a 2000+ SAT score, then certainly you are some
sort of genius who belongs at Harvard. You participated in _two_ clubs?! Wow!
You got A's in a few of your AP classes?! Look out Stanford!

They think there is some formula to admission, where it's just a stats
competition. If you have the right stats, then you're in. But their goal
numbers are weak, and they detract from what really matters, and that is being
amazing and following your passion (see here -
<http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/esse-quam-videri>).

And when they get rejected, their first reaction is to blame the black kid. It
bothers me because there were other people of their race accepted, and they
were accepted because they proved their worth to that college, just like the
black kid did. The sore losers complaining don't see that they offered nothing
unique or notable to the college that any one of the other thousands of
Regular Genius Kids(TM) didn't. All things considered, and race not
considered, it's the _amazing_ and truly notable kids who get accepted.
Whether white, black, Asian, or whatever, those amazing individuals proved
that they themselves could offer something truly valuable to the college, and
they were accepted as a result. There are no average Asians at MIT. There are
no average black people at MIT. There are no average anyone at MIT, they're
all amazing in some way.

EDIT: Disclaimer, I'm white.

------
narkee
I don't understand why they require ethnic proportions to stay close to
population averages.

They don't reject high-performance black athletes for lower performing, asian
athletes. I've never once heard anyone complain that their university's
football team had a disproportionate number of non-asian people.

Serious double standard there.

~~~
sirclueless
When someone offers the opinion that rejecting high-performing Asians is a
"serious double standard" I ask myself a few questions.

Do Asians have considerably higher academic performance than most other ethnic
groups? Yes, they do.

Do I believe Asian people are inherently more intelligent and capable? No, I
do not.

Do I think that colleges should admit students based on academic performance
or intelligence and capability? I think intelligence and capability are
clearly more important qualities.

The only conclusion I can draw is that academic performance is clearly a bad
indicator in some ways, if it so severely favors one racial group. Therefore
colleges' unwillingness to judge Asians with the same standards of academic
performance is a reasonable policy to me.

~~~
doktrin
This is plain silly.

How do you plan to measure "intelligence and capability"? By this logic, a
brilliant-slacker-underachiever should be the most sought after candidate. Who
cares about results, after all, when all that matters is someone's raw
intelligence (regardless of whether or not it has been or will be applied to
anything at all).

------
estevez
Stories like this irk me, because they overlook the larger injustice of
continuing to think about elite schools as meritocratic institutions, when
they are plainly not. At Harvard, for example, the bottom half of the income
distribution makes up 6.5% of students.[1] When we consider the most selective
schools in aggregate, we see that nearly _three-quarters_ of incoming freshmen
at those schools are drawn from the top quartile of incomes.[2]

The illusion of merit that graduation from these schools imparts leads to a
false sense of mastery amongst those who've been able to scale the pyramid of
achievement, a self-deception that has had pretty profound consequences for
the country since, oh I don't know, say 2008 or so.

[1]: [http://chronicle.com/article/Pell-Grant-Recipients-
Are/12689...](http://chronicle.com/article/Pell-Grant-Recipients-Are/126892/)

[2]: [http://books.google.com/books?id=4JyQus8r9JYC&pg=PA150&#...</a>

~~~
jwingy
According to this study ([http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-
scores-and-...](http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and-
family-income/)), there's a clear correlation between students from high
income backgrounds having higher scores versus students from lower income
backgrounds having lower scores as well.

~~~
estevez
I suggest this piece [1] by David Leonhart. As he points out in the final
paragraph:

    
    
        [...] all else equal, a low-income applicant was no more likely to get in than a high-income applicant with the same SAT score.
    

[1]:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/business/economy/25leonhar...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/business/economy/25leonhardt.html?pagewanted=all)

------
albemuth
> "Not to really generalize, but a lot of Asians, they have perfect SATs,
> perfect GPAs, ... so it's hard to let them all in"

Why is asking for ethnicity even legal?

~~~
fungi
ive never seen anything like it, is it a compulsory question?

we often have "are you a aboriginal or torres strait islander" but that is
always clearly marked as optional and only used for measuring progress in
improving the absolutely disgusting state of education for indigenous
australians.

really i always thought america was better then this... TIL

~~~
waffle_ss
They have always been optional in my experience (hence the whole point of the
linked article). Perhaps you don't see questions like this as much because
Australia is less diverse (92% white)?

------
temphn
According to PBS, Race is an Illusion:
<http://www.pbs.org/race/000_General/000_00-Home.htm>

Jared Diamond concurs:
[http://www.learntoquestion.com/resources/database/archives/0...](http://www.learntoquestion.com/resources/database/archives/001377.html)

If you believe their arguments, there is no scientific basis for categorizing
someone on the basis of race. Appearance is particularly hazardous.

Therefore, why can't Asians mark black on the application? Who is to say they
are not black if they self-identify as black? According to PBS, Jared Diamond,
and many sociology departments, it is impossible to administer a genetic test
that distinguishes African Americans from Asians, so self-identification is
the only measure that matters.

So: why would Asians simply self-identify as white? Why not self-identify as
black?

If race just a sociocultural construct, well, many Asian Americans certainly
are into rap music and cultural markers that are associated with socially
constructed category of African American. So why aren't they black?

~~~
narkee
I haven't read much on the subject, but the idea that races can't be separated
based on genetics is either false, or due to the fact that we don't have
enough sensitivity in the measurement.

Phenotypically, I can easily identify a black person vs. an asian person, with
nearly 100% accuracy. What I'm seeing are phenotypic differences in hair type,
skin colour, facial structure, etc. that are all defined by genetics.

It's ludicrous to think that I can't sort people into groups based on these
apparent differences(and I'm talking broad racial categories, not Ukranians
vs. Russians or anything). Ignoring that might be PC, but it's definitely not
realistic.

Just to be clear, I'm not insinuating anything about intelligence, ability, or
whatever. I'm just saying that to deny that there are distinct categories that
humans can be classified into is unrealistic. There may be edge cases, but
nobody would mistake one of China's 1.6 billion people for an east African.

~~~
temphn
You are 100% correct, and anyone can verify for themselves that you can
predict geographic ancestry from saliva to an incredible level of detail:

<https://www.23andme.com/ancestry/origins>

Nevertheless, if you take for the sake of argument the fallacious concept that
"geographic ancestry has no connection to genetics", then there is and should
be nothing stopping an Asian American (or a European American for that matter)
from self-identifying as an African American. Is a university going to start
administering blood tests?

------
wallflower
My friend (Asian wife) hopes that his son might get into MIT. His son is not a
superstar but has done quite well in math competitions. His son was a pretty
good baseball player until they had to decide between Math competitions and
sports. I always tell him that his son has to become more interesting - less
one-dimension Math/Science stud - like Cal Newport talks about on his blog.
And that some schools for MIT could be looking for a few good baseball
players.

The interesting thing is that the cutthroat high school his son is enrolled at
- the AP weed-out courses, the hardest ones are the humanities. Courses like
Modern European History.

> For these students, extracurricular activities play a different role than
> for their peers. They don’t use activities to signal their qualities, they
> use them instead to transform themselves into more interesting people. In
> other words, what’s important about an activity is not its impressiveness,
> but its impact on your personality.

[http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/02/18/want-to-get-into-
harva...](http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/02/18/want-to-get-into-harvard-
spend-more-time-staring-at-the-clouds-rethinking-the-role-of-extracurricular-
activities-in-college-admissions/)

------
cyrus_
Serious question: Is there any reason not to just lie about your ethnicity?
Why not put "black" or "native american" on your app to really up your
chances?

I mean, I'm sure the school would reject you if they knew you were lying about
it, but there really isn't any way for them to tell, is there?

~~~
andrewflnr
They'll know when you show up for class. At best, that seems like a bad start
for the year, if anyone from admissions happens to match your name and face.

~~~
forensic
This isn't true. Lots of people don't look their race for one thing

~~~
sirclueless
Not to mention how politically incorrect it would be to try to call someone
out on it: "Hey, aren't you Louis Smith? You said you were black on the
application, but you don't look black at all!"

I can't imagine it happening.

~~~
andrewflnr
No, they're not likely to _say_ it, but they'll know you lied about it, and
that will color their perception of you. It just seems to me like a bad idea
all around.

~~~
cyrus_
It seems unethical, sure. But a "bad idea"? Consider that all of the following
must be true for it to affect how you are perceived by a non-trivial number of
people:

1) someone on the admissions committee must come to know you (that is, match
your face to your name)

2) they must then remember that you were one of the people who identified as
black on an application

3) they must then assume that you aren't actually black based on appearance
alone (knowing that there are indeed many half-black people who don't look
obviously black)

4) they must then decide to tell other important people about this

This just seems really unlikely in any reasonably sized school. If you really
want to be careful, find out who is on the admissions committee and avoid
them.

------
BlackJack
Full disclaimer: I'm a sophomore at Yale, my adviser last year was an
admissions officer, and a friend of mine works in the admissions office. I'm
also friends with the girl photographed, but that's irrelevant :)

This is roughly how admissions works at Yale:

1\. An officer reviews your application for 20-25 minutes. 1a. Some kids are
clear rejects. 1500/2400 SAT and a 2.7 GPA, with no activities usually does
the trick. The director (or an experienced officer) reviews these. 1b. Some
kids are clear admits. These are incredibly rare - something like 20 kids out
of 26000 I think? The director also reviews these but they're pretty much auto
admits - think multiple gold medalists at IMO, IOI, and IPhO, stuff like that.

2\. The officer writes a summary sheet that contains what the officer feels
about you, good points, etc, if they like you. If they don't, you get put in
the "no" pile. 2b. I believe most of these "no" applicants are reviewed by
another officer, but not as deeply. The goal is to find false negatives - most
people in the "no" pile stay there.

3\. The application goes to a committee of 3-4 officers. They all read your
profile and debate about whether or not to let you in. Your admissions officer
is supposed to argue in your favor, and the others can argue for you or
against you. Usually, most candidates at this point are solid, so the officers
argue about possible negatives.

Something like 70% of applicants are qualified to attend Yale, so it usually
breaks down to what you'll contribute to the campus community, what kind of a
person you are, etc. A lot of admissions officers were former Yalies, so I
imagine they even ask "would I hang out with this person?".

4\. If you're accepted, you're golden. If you don't make it past committee,
you usually don't get in. Some people get waitlisted. They also review several
of the "no's" to avoid false negatives, and some people might be brought to
committee again. If you're borderline between "admit" and "reject," you will
usually be rejected or waitlisted. There's just too many really good
applicants.

There is no EXPLICIT comparison of Asians to Asians. Nobody looks at your
application and says "Oh, another Asian, let me turn on my asian scale!" What
happens, subconsciously, is that the stereotypical asian profile is "high
scoring, high gpa, piano/violin, tennis, math/science."

So a lot of qualified asians get rejected because their admission officer
can't find enough good arguments for them. Regardless of how qualified you are
individually, Yale is trying to build a diverse class, so if you do the same
thing as 1000 other candidates, it's very hard to vouch for you. "What do you
bring to the campus that this other kid doesn't? , and that's the end of it.

I don't think checking "Asian" or "not Asian" makes a huge difference, because
in the end, it's your activities, recommendations, and essays that
differentiate you. Once your scores are high enough, nobody is going to say
"well Bob and Melinda are both cool, but Bob has a 2310 while Melinda has a
2270, so we should clearly go with Bob." That's just absurd - they always go
with the person who will contribute more to Yale.

I hope that dispels some of the myths you see and hear. Correlation does not
imply causation. People don't get rejected because they ARE Asian - it's
usually the lack of differentiation. Again, I don't represent Yale or anything
like that, and this is just what I've heard, but I believe it's fairly
accurate, and for most Asians, they'll figure it out by your name, so a box
isn't making a huge difference.

Edit: Legacy students (parent(s) went to Yale), recruited athletes, and under-
represented minorities have higher admission rates than the overall pool. I
don't know why or by how much or anything like that. This exists at almost
every elite school.

~~~
patio11
Yale has an explicit, declared policy to discriminate by race in admissions
and hiring decisions. Sorry, it felt at least a little relevant towards the
question of whether Yale racially discriminates.

You can review, but not make copies, of this written policy. It is kept at - I
kid you not - the Office of Equal Opportunity Programs.

~~~
mikeknoop
Don't most admissions discriminate? For example,
<http://yale.lawschoolnumbers.com/stats/1011/>

Play around with the year/school. Clicking on data points shows self-reported
profile information. It's pretty clear there is a shifted standard in many
cases.

~~~
homosaur
Yes, they do. The university I attended for undergraduate studies, Tulane in
New Orleans, had a minor blowup when I went there because they were very much
trying to make the school less lilly white and explicitly declared they had a
pro-diversity admissions policy. Now they can do whatever because it's a
private school, but it was still very controversial. It was actually heavily
based on the Yale policy.

------
clvv
An asian high school senior here. I'm currently in the process of applying to
colleges. In most college applications, demographics are listed under the
section where they say the information you provide won't hurt your change of
getting in. I have not and will not lie about my race on any of the
applications. I understand that, statistically, it will hurt my chance of
getting into a top-tier college, considering I don't have perfect SAT score
and GPA. But I believe that the admission officers would be wise enough to
evaluate a person as a whole instead of just puting "tags" on him/her.

~~~
gwern
> I understand that, statistically, it will hurt my chance of getting into a
> top-tier college, considering I don't have perfect SAT score and GPA. But I
> believe that the admission officers would be wise enough to evaluate a
> person as a whole instead of just puting "tags" on him/her.

Er... what? So you believe putting the wrong tag on yourself will hurt your
evaluation by the admission officers; but you also believe they are wise
enough to not just put tags on yourself.

You're saying something here, but I don't know what it is.

------
vaksel
I don't see why colleges should even be allowed to ask that on applications.

~~~
brandnewlow
No one has to answer.

~~~
winter_blue
But can they figure out by inspecting your parents (as it says in the article)
?

Additionally if they have a pic that would it give it away.

~~~
veyron
Historically that's why many schools asked people to submit a picture

------
jklp
> "Not to really generalize, but a lot of Asians, they have perfect SATs,
> perfect GPAs, ... so it's hard to let them all in," Olmstead says.

I didn't know there was a quota on how many Asian students a college could
accept.

And besides, doesn't a college want the best students in their college,
regardless of ethnicity?

~~~
localhost3000
'best student' != 'best score/gpa'

~~~
gujk
Thank you. It is insane how many people think college admissions is the
official scoreboard oof high school, and not something to do with choosing
students who are well matched to the college.

~~~
fatjokes
It's not insane. It's simply objective. How do you define "best match"? The
gut feeling of the admissions officer? You need an objective measure.

------
dennisgorelik
I wonder how it would work out if Asian applicant self-identifies herself as
African-American?

~~~
nivertech
This guy "won him the title of president of the Black Student Union, despite
not being, well, black" [1]

[1] <http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/160/bill-nguyen-startups>

~~~
dennisgorelik
Thanks. So Bill Nguyen proved that it's possible to self-identify yourself
under different race.

University Admission Committee may not mind such "self race re-branding"
practice too, because university ratios of admitted minorities would be
improving as well.

~~~
nivertech
The article talking about high school, not college.

Anyway I find, that Americans a little bit confused about things like race,
ethnicity and nationality.

Asking to fill nationality in official documents is legitimate. Asking for
ethnicity is borderline. Asking to fill a race is barbaric.

~~~
Duff
Have you ever dealt with an academic bureaucracy? Barbarism is a good
description!

------
markvp
I went to a high school in NYC with an Asian plurality, and it was pretty well
known among the students and the counselors that being Asian was not something
that would help you get into college.

In any case, there's a suit 'Fisher v University of Texas at Austin' which
experts think will be heading to the Supreme Court sometime in 2012, and may
have a good chance of bringing education a little closer to the meritocracy it
should be: [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/sunday-review/college-
dive...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/sunday-review/college-diversity-
nears-its-last-stand.html)

------
keiferski
Seeing that it is optional to report your ethnicity, I'm kind of surprised
that _anyone_ (other than those who get an advantage) would do so. The
admissions system is already arbitrary as hell.

~~~
fuzionmonkey
If your last name is Asian then would omitting your ethnicity gain you
anything? I would doubt it.

~~~
saryant
I’ll admit that I know nothing about the college admissions procedures as far
as the selection process, but it seems to me that applicants should only be
known by an arbitrary ID number. That is, admissions committees simply
shouldn’t have access to this sort of (possibly discriminatory) information.
Name, ethnicity, etc.

Why not just hide it from them? I suppose there are certain parts of an
application which could give away information that’s meant to be hidden—being
president of the Asian-American Student Club would pretty well give away the
applicant’s ethnicity.

~~~
jpdoctor
> _but it seems to me that applicants should only be known by an arbitrary ID
> number._

And then there's the whole "legacy admit" thing.

~~~
troels
Thanks. Haven't heard about [legacy
admit](<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences>) before - That's some
serious nepotism at play.

------
Sukotto
When asked for your race, answer "mongrel"
<http://yarchive.net/risks/mongrel.html>

Quoting from the anecdote:

All of my known forebears came from Europe, mostly from Southern Germany with
a few from England, Ireland, and Scotland. A glance in the mirror, however,
indicated that there was Middle Eastern blood in my veins. I have a semitic
nose and skin that tans so easily that I am often darker than many people who
pass for black. Did I inherit this from a Hebrew, an Arab, a Gypsy or perhaps
one of the Turks who periodically pillaged Central Europe? Maybe it was from a
Blackfoot Indian that an imaginative aunt thinks was in our family tree. I
will probably never know.

As an arrogant young computer scientist, I believed that if there is any
decision that you can't figure out how to program, the question is wrong. I
couldn't figure out how to program racial classification, so I concluded that
there isn't such a thing. I subsequently reviewed some scientific literature
that confirmed this belief. "Race" is, at best, a fuzzy concept about typical
physical properties of certain populations. At worst, of course, it is used to
justify more contemptible behavior than any concept other than religion.

In answer to the race question on the security form, I decided to put
"mongrel." This seemed like an appropriate answer to a meaningless question.

------
reader5000
I think the basic thing is, if you are of race X, you would prefer it if race
X continues getting admission in reasonable numbers to the status-branding
factories of America (i.e. colleges). That preference is thoroughly, whole-
cloth racist, but I think it is valid.

If it happens to be the case that race Y dominates admissions (or race Z can't
seem to get a leg up), whether that domination be through genetic or cultural
factors (or both), it is arguably racist to handicap admissions by appeal to
soft factors. But consider:

Let's imagine (e.g.) global warming has destroyed US agriculture so all the
gringos in the US have to migrate south to Mexico. The University of Mexico is
(say) the premier university of Mexico, the Harvard all the best Mexican
students want to attend. Historically, whites outperform latinos on admissions
numbers (SAT and GPA). Would it make sense then for the University of Mexico
to cease accepting latino-Mexicans (or substantially decrease their admissions
rates) in favor of the new white-Mexicans with higher numbers? Would that be
the fairest thing to do? Or would the U of M admissions board say things like
"yeah whites have good numbers but they all kind of look the same to us. All
from the same middle class families, all played tennis and hockey in high
school, all want to be business/psych majors and join greek fraternities. We
look at other things than just numbers."

I'm not entirely sure it's unfair to handicap asians, or assist blacks, if
we've essentially industrialized the production of status-signalling - fixing
the recommended amount of prestige and job offers a person should receive for
the rest of his life at age 18 - and have to determine some means of doling it
out.

------
TheCowboy
I think race acts as more of a red herring when it comes to this matter. This
entire thread just sounds like privileged or talented people(nothing wrong
with being either) fighting over admittance to elite universities. After all,
people qualified to get into Yale, and this is a large number of applicants,
will still get into a very good university.

Maybe the problem is that going to an elite school matters too much for
arbitrary social reasons. We've all heard and read about how hiring at places,
such as elite financial institutions, will simply discard any application from
a person who didn't go to an elite university. No one wants to lose out on
opportunity.

Why can't elite universities increase enrollment to increase the number of
opportunities? They have the endowments for it. I'm not aware of any Ivy
struggling to pay its bills.

If society thinks that people who attend these schools are a better value,
then wouldn't it be of benefit to try to expand capacity?

It seems like an artificially created scarcity. Do top schools feel their
brand is diminished if they start accepting 2k students vs 1.5k?

~~~
greiskul
Because their brand CAN be diminished if they start accepting more students.
More students need more professors, and it might be hard fighting over who
gets to hire the best professors. It might also change the student community.
I go to a university that is considered prestigious in my country, and what I
like the most about it is how it's so easy to find incredibly smart people on
the campus, with which you can have great intellectual discussions. If there
were more people, it could be harder to find who these great people are. It's
a Brazilian public university, which means it's free, and while recently it
was created a quota for black and public school students, the majority of
students is accepted in a completely color, name, cultural blind manner.

~~~
TheCowboy
The university system has created a surplus of people with phds who are
qualified and intellectually capable of being university professors. There are
a lot of good articles about how the job market for those wanting to become
professors is terrible.

------
tokenadult
"Race/ethnicity unknown" is the fastest-growing category reported for enrolled
students in United States colleges and universities, with more than 1 million
students so reported to the federal government in the most recent year.

[http://www.acenet.edu/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Programs_and_S...](http://www.acenet.edu/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Programs_and_Services&TEMPLATE=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm&CONTENTID=42703)

The federal regulations on the subject

[http://www.ed.gov/legislation/FedRegister/other/2007-4/10190...](http://www.ed.gov/legislation/FedRegister/other/2007-4/101907c.html)

require all colleges to ask, but no students to tell, which of the federally
defined race or ethnicity categories

<http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/fedreg_1997standards>

they belong to. A growing number of students decline to answer the questions,
which are clearly marked as optional on all college application forms. Harvard

<http://members.ucan-network.org/harvard>

reports 12 percent of its enrolled undergraduates as "race/ethnicity unknown,"
and several other selective colleges have higher percentages of students
reported as unknown race or ethnicity. Several state university systems, by
state law, may not consider student race or ethnicity at all as part of the
admission process.

The definitive online FAQ on the issue of race and ethnicity self-
identification in college admission in the United States

[http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-
admissions/12282...](http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-
admissions/1228264-race-college-admission-faq-discussion-9-a.html)

links out to other relevant laws and official definitions and news stories,
and gives links to reported enrollment figures for a wide variety of colleges.

After edit: A comment at the same comment level as this comment appears to be
referring to a college's claimed rationale when it says:

 _I don't understand why they require ethnic proportions to stay close to
population averages._

They don't. Indeed, it is strictly illegal to have admission quotas by race,
since the Bakke decision decades ago. If you look at the actual enrollment
figures, linked to from this comment, you will see that that is not what
happens in practice either.

Another comment mentioned an applicant's view that he should not "lie about
his race." This view motivates my children NOT marking anything on the forms,
because the form questions are optional for applicants, and because my
children think it is a lie to describe themselves as belonging to any narrower
category than humankind. (From an old-fashioned American point of view, my
children could be described as "biracial," but we prefer the term "human" and
accept the term "postracial.")

I'm a baby boomer, which is another way of saying that I'm a good bit older
than most people who post on Hacker News. I distinctly remember the day that
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated--the most memorable day of early
childhood for many people in my generation--and I remember the "long hot
summer" and other events of the 1960s civil rights movement.

One early memory I have is of a second grade classmate (I still remember his
name, which alas is just common enough that it is hard to Google him up) who
moved back to Minnesota with his northern "white" parents after spending his
early years in Alabama. He told me frightening stories about Ku Klux Klan
violence to black people (the polite term in those days was "Negroes"),
including killing babies, and I was very upset to hear about that kind of
terrorism happening in the United States. He made me aware of a society in
which people didn't all treat one another with decency and human compassion,
unlike the only kind of society I was initially aware of from growing up where
I did. So I followed subsequent news about the civil rights movement,
including the activities of Martin Luther King, Jr. up to his assassination,
with great interest.

It happens that I had a fifth-grade teacher, a typically pale, tall, and
blonde Norwegian-American, who was a civil rights activist and who spent her
summers in the south as a freedom rider. She used to tell our class about how
she had to modify her car (by removing the dome light and adding a locking gas
cap) so that Klan snipers couldn't shoot her as she opened her car door at
night or put foreign substances into her gas tank. She has been a civil rights
activist all her life, and when I Googled her a few years ago and regained
acquaintance with her, I was not at all surprised to find that she is a member
of the civil rights commission of the town where I grew up.

One day in fifth grade we had a guest speaker in our class, a young man who
was then studying at St. Olaf College through the A Better Chance (ABC)
affirmative action program. (To me, the term "affirmative action" still means
active recruitment of underrepresented minority students, as it did in those
days, and I have always thought that such programs are a very good idea, as
some people have family connections to selective colleges, but many other
people don't.) During that school year (1968-1969), there was a current
controversy in the United States about whether the term "Negro" or "Afro-
American" or "black" was most polite. So a girl in my class asked our visitor,
"What do you want to be called, 'black' or 'Afro-American'?" His answer was,
"I'd rather be called Henry." Henry's answer to my classmate's innocent
question really got me thinking. Why can't individual human beings have the
right to be treated as one more member of the general human race?

~~~
steve-howard
> She used to tell our class about how she had to modify her car (by removing
> the dome light and adding a locking gas cap) so that Klan snipers couldn't
> shoot her as she opened her car door at night or put foreign substances into
> her gas tank.

I doubt there are many young people today who have that kind of dedication. I
wish I did.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
People rise to the occasion. There isn't much need for that kind of dedication
domestically today. As for abroad, most of the thousands killed in various
military adventures over the last decade were pretty young. Whether you agree
or disagree with the greater view of those adventures, many of those young
people gave their lives for what they viewed as something worth dying for.

Disclaimer: I served in the US Navy and have many friends and family members
who served or are serving in various branches.

------
JohnLBevan
If a few Asians don't tick Asian as their ethnicity when asked, that's going
to reduce the stats for the number of Asians attending the university,
effectively creating a negative feedback loop.

------
wyclif
True story: my wife is Asian (from the Philippines). She's done with school,
but some of her friends are not. When they ask me for advice on this point, I
tell them to check "Hispanic" instead of "Asian." Most Filipino ancestry is a
combination of Chinese, Spanish, and Malay, but since the Philippines was
colonised by Spain in c.16, it usually works like a charm in differentiating
them from the mass of students with Korean, Chinese, and Japanese ancestry.

------
cpher
So, if a private school shouldn't/can't discriminate on the basis of race,
should they be able to discriminate on the basis of religious
affiliation/belief?

I ask this as a graduate of a Christian liberal arts college, which
discriminates on the basis of religious beliefs. It's not entirely on topic
but I think the "logic" still applies. Or does it?

------
itmag
Is it possible to be admitted to a top-tier US university as a non-US resident
(I'm Swedish)? How does that work with SATs and stuff then?

Also, is it possible to be admitted if one is outside the typical age range of
applicants (ie 18-19)?

I just don't know how these things work for you in the US, so I had to ask :)

------
sirclueless
This is what I would like to see: Two comparative histograms of SAT scores for
Asian and non-Asian applicants to Ivy League schools. One for all applicants,
and the other for those accepted.

Here is my suspicion (or what I would like to hear): Asian students are
significantly higher-scoring, in both histograms. Such a result would go a
long way towards vindicating the college admission process, and suggest that
universities don't explicitly judge those who mark "Asian" by a different
standard but rather choose to largely discount SAT scores (and by proxy
academic performance).

Similar studies were used to discredit claims that engineering and science
departments were practicing gender discrimination against women. Does anyone
have a reference to a study on race in undergraduate admissions that takes
this approach?

------
flipside
I'd love to be able to explain my identity this way:

Asian [x] - If you're more "white"

White [x] - If you're more "asian"

Both [x] - If you open minded or PC

Neither [x] - If you want me to pick a side

Hapa [x] - If you'll allow me all of the above

Identity depends on where you stand.

------
tle9
This is inherently true. Unless you're at a very white dominated school ie
Notre Dame where it helps to be a minority.

------
code_duck
If you're half Asian and half European, why is checking 'White' considered
hiding half your identity? That only makes sense in the background of US
racial views, where Barack Obama is known as Black due to 50% of his heritage.
So, if you're not 'pure white', you're not 'white', according to society. I
feel it is worrisome that such an old style racist line of thought is
ingrained into our culture in a way that few question.

------
pilom
"a member of HAPA, the Half-Asian People's Association" I was under the
impression that Hapa was a Hawaiian word for "a person of mixed race."
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapa> When did the Asians at Harvard decide to
steal that one?

------
rdl
I'm curious how carefully these things are checked. Like many white people
with ancestors from Appalachia, I'm sure I'm at least slightly Native
American. Is it fair to mark Native American (and white?) on these forms?

~~~
tokenadult
As is mentioned in the official federal definitions, mentioned in the online
FAQ linked to from a comment above,

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3309338>

the federal definition of "American Indian or Alaska Native" is "A person
having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America
(including Central America), and who maintains tribal affiliation or community
attachment." In other words, if you don't have community attachment to an
Indian tribe, or formal legally recognized tribal membership, you are not a
Native American or Alaska Native.

------
beastman82
That article is in desperate need of citations.

------
chegra84
By any chance, is this a honey pot post? Flag.

------
reader5000
If I were Asian, my "college strategy" would be to not apply, since I wouldn't
want to be an indentured servant for the next 15-20 years of my life paying
off usurious student loan debts to crotchety Western institutions that are
currently enjoying bubble tuition rates without offering remotely commensurate
value.

~~~
akavi
Which is exactly what wouldn't happen should you go to any of the "elite"
schools. Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and others go to great lengths to provide
adequate financial aid, all of which is provided in the form of grants, not
loans.

I'm very curious to know what could provide a greater return on investment
than spending four years at Harvard for free.

