| "Now you don't get leadership/excellence just from natural excitement, nor from just enjoying life without achieving anything intellectually."
Who said the opposite? Many of your statements reveal a stereotyping of the whole admissions process, as well as the concepts themselves. Colleges are not looking for empty,superficial leadership, but that with intellectual substance & creativity behind it.
"There are a lot of factors that are being considered for Asian kids. They do have a higher bar to compete against."
No they don't. This is the same mythology that gets repeated every year. It would help to go over to the Admissions forum and observe what happens when one more student screams 'discrimination' because of a, or several, college rejections.
Your anecdotes do not amount to evidence of discrimination, or a "higher bar."
Because it may be a personal/family goal in some/many Asian families to have & maintain grades & scores as a priority over everything else, does not mean that the colleges are asking for higher & higher scores, grades from Asian students, as opposed to non-Asian students. To the extent that any student, Asian or not, is an asset to a college because of a combined academic profile which includes but is not limited to stats, that student, of any ethnicity, will be admitted vs. students with less academic merit, of any ethnicity.
What you see is more of a clustering of college choices among Asians than among many other groups; therefore the rejection rate VERSUS the application rate may turn out to be higher. That is NOT evidence of 'discrimination.' It's evidence of family decision-making.
Posters have been advising for quite awhile now: go where Asians are in demand, because fewer are applying. Go where your (you, any student's) region is underrepresented; you will have an advantage. Go where applicants in your particular major are a little less knowledgeable/prepared than you; you will have an advantage as someone who is particularly ready for an academic program there that has just received an injection of funding. |