The following is the Wikipedia description about the "Jewish quota". Substitute every word "Jewish" by "Asian" and the same description works fairly well for Today's situation of Asian American students applying for College.
=============== Jewish quota - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jewish quota was a percentage that limited the number of Jews in various establishments. In particular, in 19th and 20th centuries some countries had Jewish quotas for higher education, a special case of Numerus clausus.
Jewish educational quotas could be state-wide law or adopted only in certain institutions, often unofficially. The limitation took the form of total prohibition of Jewish students, or of limiting the number of Jewish students so that their share in the students' population would not be larger than their share in the general population. In some establishments, the Jewish quota placed a limit on growth rather than set a fixed level of participation to be achieved.
According to historian David Oshinsky, on writing about Jonas Salk, "Most of the surrounding medical schools—Cornell, Columbia, Pennsylvania, and Yale—had rigid quotas in place. In 1935 Yale accepted 76 applicants from a pool of 501. About 200 of those applicants were Jewish and only five got in." He notes that the dean's instructions were remarkably precise: "Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all." As a result, Oshinsky added, "Jonas Salk and hundreds like him ..." enrolled in NYU instead.[1]
Jews who wanted an education used various ways to overcome this discrimination: bribing the authorities, changing their religion, or traveling to countries without such limitations. In Hungary, for example, 5,000 Jewish youngsters (including Edward Teller) left the country after the introduction of Numerus Clausus. One American who fell victim to the Jewish quota was late physicist and Nobel laureate Richard P. Feynman, who was turned away from Columbia College in the 1930s and went to MIT instead.
The college-admissions myth has always served colleges above all. While things have improved since the days of Jewish quotas, it's obvious that Asian students and women bear the brunt of discrimination today. "Development admits" can still be bought, and college officials are remarkably adept at condemning the annual admissions hysteria while using it to enhance the wealth and prestige of their institutions.
This very likely won't change until the weight of disappointment becomes overwhelming. Harvard rejected over 32,000 people this year, almost 94 percent of those who applied. What happens when the number grows to 100,000 or more? When do minuscule acceptance rates stop being something to boast about and start becoming signs of archaic, insulated, overly wealthy institutions that are badly out of step with their times?
Or someone might give Big Frank what he's looking for: actual information about college quality. The admissions myth is recursive and self-sustaining: Everybody wants to go where everybody else wants to go. It thrives in a vacuum of consumer information that might give everybody an irrefutable reason to go somewhere else. If that information arrives, those who rely on the old stories are in for a long fall, indeed.
"What happens when the number grows to 100,000 or more?"
Nothing. What's the difference between 32,000 and 100,000? Each individual denied admission is only worried about him/herself. If anything, having lots of company may make him feel better about the rejection, not worse. The lower the admit rate, the more likely students are to understand that there isn't room for all the terrific candidates. Being denied from a school with a 60% admit rate...now THAT really stings.
Toughyear: the issues you bring forth are very complex. But this statement "What happens when the number grows to 100,000 or more?" puzzles me.
It's said as if the solution was to admit more students (in order to raise the admit rate). But how is this possible? There are physical limits to each class. There are plans to expand the school but that reaches near a billion dollars to enact (see Yale's plan to expand for more detail). All the while, HYP's star won't shine any less and more and more kids will apply -- and the admit rate will still creep lower.
"When do minuscule acceptance rates stop being something to boast about and start becoming signs of archaic, insulated, overly wealthy institutions that are badly out of step with their times?"
To me, they are indicative of how much "name brand" shopping in higher education is sweeping across the world.
^ & ^^, sorry folks. The paragraphs are not mine, they are in the linked article.
As to what happens when app exceeds 100,000? The general admission rate will fall to under 3% and the Asian American admission rate to under 1.5% (IMO). I will advise my kid not to bother applying to these insane schools, but rather focus on long term goals and colleges that make sense for the goals. [as an aside, it is unfortunate that many with connection to this region are so selfish individually that they don't see it as an issue that is much bigger than themselves. they are the first to come out and shout down. haha]
Moderator Note to T.S. Please post again on this thread, with a source for the article cited in your post here. Thank you.
According to this article, Asian Americans have to score 140 points higher than the average White person to be accepted into an Ivy League.
This means that the pool of Asian Americans at non Ivy Leagues are smarter and more qualified than the average Ivy Leaguer. Something to note for those recruiters who want top talent and intelligence.
>>>>>>>
Competitive disadvantage
April 17, 2011
High-achieving Asian-American students are being shut out of top schools around the country. Is this what diversity looks like now?
Grace Wong has felt the sting of intolerance quite literally, in the rocks thrown at her in Australia, where she pursued a PhD after leaving her native China. In the Boston area, where she’s lived since 1996, she recalls a fellow customer at the deli counter in a Chestnut Hill supermarket telling her to go back to her own country. When Wong’s younger son was born, she took a drastic measure to help protect him, at least on paper, from discrimination: She changed his last name to one that doesn’t sound Asian.
“It’s a difficult time to be Chinese,” says Wong, a scientist who develops medical therapies. “There’s a lot of jealousy out there, because the Chinese do very well. And some people see that as a threat.”
Wong had these worries in mind last month as she waited to hear whether her older son, a good student in his senior year at a top suburban high school, would be accepted to the 11 colleges he had applied to, which she had listed neatly on a color-coded spreadsheet.
The odds, strangely, were stacked against him. After all the attention given to the stereotype that Asian-American parents put enormous pressure on their children to succeed – provoked over the winter by Amy Chua’s controversial Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother – came the indisputable reality this spring that, even if Asian-American students work hard, the doors of top schools were still being slammed shut in many faces.
And parents aren’t happy about it. “The entry barriers are higher for us than for everybody else,” says Chi Chi Wu, one of the organizers of the Brookline Asian American Family Network. “There’s a form of redlining or holding Asian-American students to higher standards than any other group.”
Although Asian-Americans represent less than 5 percent of the US population (and slightly more than 5 percent in Massachusetts), they make up as much as 20 percent of students at many highly selective private research universities – the kind of schools that make it into top 50 national rankings. But, critics charge, Asian-American students would constitute an even larger share if many weren’t being filtered out during the admissions process. Since the University of California system moved to a race-blind system 14 years ago, the percentage of Asian-American students in some competitive schools there has reached 40, even 50 percent. On these campuses, the so-called “model minority” is becoming the majority.
High-achieving Asian-Americans may be running into obstacles precisely because they work so hard. Mitchell Chang, an Asian-American studies professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, suggests that the attention given Chua’s book will only make things worse. “Her characterization can further tax Asian-American college applicants by reducing the chances that they will be viewed as self-starters, risk takers, and independent thinkers – attributes that are often favored by admissions officers but rarely associated with Asian-American applicants,” Chang wrote in a January Op-Ed in The Sacramento Bee.
Even though the Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that universities can continue to consider race in admissions in the interest of diversity, admissions officers deny they’re screening out Asian-Americans. However, in researching their 2009 book No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and researcher Alexandria Walton Radford examined data on students applying to college in 1997 and found what looks like different standards for different racial groups. They calculated that Asian-Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores of 1550 to have the same chance of being accepted at a top private university as whites who scored 1410 and African-Americans who got 1100. Whites were three times, Hispanics six times, and blacks more than 15 times as likely to be accepted at a US university as Asian-Americans.
What about the argument that, in relation to the general population, Asian-Americans are already overrepresented at universities? “It’s both true that Asians are overrepresented and that they’re being discriminated against,” says Stephen Hsu, a professor of physics at the University of Oregon who speaks out against discrimination he says Asian-Americans face in university admissions. Both things can happen at the same time, he says.
Hsu and others allege that universities are more concerned about boosting black and Hispanic enrollment than admitting qualified Asian-Americans, and that old-fashioned xenophobia comes into play as well.
“My personal perspective is that if institutions are using race to keep Asian-American students out, it’s based on a fear [among non-minorities] that these ‘other’ students are taking over our institutions or taking ‘our spots’ at the best institutions,” says Sam Museus, a professor in the Asian-American studies program at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.
At Harvard, the overall acceptance rate for the incoming class of 2015 was 6.2 percent, a record low. William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid, says that among different racial groups, there are “not radical differences” in the proportions of students who got in.
Last edited by paying3tuitions; 04-26-2011 at 05:25 PM.
According to this article, Asian Americans have to score 140 points higher than the average White person to be accepted into an Ivy League.
I haven't read the original article, but there is no indication that confounding variables have been removed from the summary you provided.
Have legacy, development cases, and athletic recruits been removed from the analysis? I doubt it. These groups have lower scores and they have far more whites than Asians.
Your statement implies that if an unhooked Asian American and white person apply to the ivy league, the Asian American needs to score 140 points higher to have an equal chance. That's false. You could argue that it's discrimination by so-called "disparate impact," but not straight discrimination. (BTW, there may be discrimination, but these statistics aren't enough to draw conclusions.)
Statistics can't just be taken at face value. You have to ask how they did the analysis to assess the results. Otherwise it's just propaganda.
I'm not sure if this question is related because it is not focused on Harvard, but it does have to do with Asians admission. If 4% of student body at a school is Asian, then does that mean Asians have a better or worse chance of getting into that school compared to a school with 12% Asian?
As I am sure you could figure out if you tried, it depends a lot on the reason the school is 4% or 12% Asian, and on what percentage of the applicant pool is Asian, and also of course whether the school even cares one way or the other about the ethnicity of its applicants. And of course the answer may may be a lot different if by "Asian" you mean American citizens or foreign students, Han Chinese, Tamil, or Meo, or for that matter Han Chinese adopted by an American family and raised as a Jew in Scarsdale. So there's no one-size fits-all answer.
But I'll give you one anyway. Many Asian students -- not all of them, but enough to make a difference -- focus their attention on a limited number of colleges. (And then some of them whine a lot when the percentage of Asian students admitted is less than the percentage of applicants.) It often feels to them like what they have to offer is being devalued by colleges in favor of what other minority ethnic groups may have to offer. Meanwhile, lots of the colleges that do not get truckloads of Asian applicants would love to have more Asian students, and many of them probably treat Asian applicants much like underrepresented minority applicants in their admission process.
Of course, the first group of colleges -- including, but not limited to, Harvard -- are the ones most likely to have 12% (or higher) Asian students, and the second group -- including lots of smaller liberal arts colleges -- is most likely to have 4%. So most of the time I think an average Asian applicant would have a better chance of admission at the 4% college, all other things being equal.
I'd just like to add to this discussion, that the racial numbers for Harvard provided by Collegeboard do not include a "decline to state" category, and it is my understanding that there are a fair number of them admitted. I have read that those admits may automatically be assumed to be White for statistical purposes. For all we know, they could be mostly Asian. Also, the number of internationals/aliens (14%) is not accounted for by race. And we do not know the composition of the "mixed race" category (6%).
So theoretically, the real number of Asian students at Harvard could actually exceed 25%. Maybe someone here has the real numbers, but I doubt they are released, if Harvard even knows them.
Harvard's Class of 2015: 17.8% Asian American, however that figure does not include Asians that are international, so the percentage is higher, but I doubt it exceeds 25%.
"Those accepted to the Class of 2015 represent an increasingly diverse spectrum of students from around the country and the world: 17.8 percent of the accepted class is Asian-American, 11.8 percent is African-American, 12.1 percent is Latino, 1.9 percent is Native American, and 0.2 percent is Native Hawaiian. Harvard said in a press release that the number of Latino and African-American students in the Class of 2015 will most likely be these groups’ highest representation in any class yet."
^But again, those numbers (accounting for 43.8%) probably only reflect the self-identified race of the applicants who were admitted. Internationals, those declining to state, and mixed-race applicants are not accounted for.
“Her characterization can further tax Asian-American college applicants by reducing the chances that they will be viewed as self-starters, risk takers, and independent thinkers – attributes that are often favored by admissions officers but rarely associated with Asian-American applicants,” Chang wrote in a January Op-Ed in The Sacramento Bee.
Does the author of this quote think that top school admissions officers are substantially influenced by biases accrued from the latest new books like Tiger Mother? If these applicants are not viewed as self-starters, risk takers, and independent thinkers, I wouldn't first blame the feeble minds of the admissions office.
Just to address the question of what happens when it reaches 100,000 applicants:
1. I don't think it will ever reach this point. As the admission rate drops lower and lower, people will be increasingly discouraged.
2. If it did reach this point, the vast majority of people applying will probably be considered "academically unqualified". For simplicity, lets break down the applicant pool into 4 groups.
a) People who have a very high chance of getting into harvard (very good scores, very good grades, cured cancer/IMO Gold Medalist/best selling author/whatever, if not harvard some other YPMS),
b) people who have a decent chance of getting into harvard (good scores, good grades, other interesting and cool aspects, if they don't get into harvard they will probably get into a peer institution or something similar (top 15)),
c) people who are have a very small chance of getting in (decent grades/scores, maybe some interesting aspect, probably get into a decently competitive school (top 75)),
d) people who have asymptotically close to zero percent chance (people who have generally poor grades, poor scores, generally no other redeeming factor, etc).
Now, I am willing to wager probably (+/- 15%) 90% of type a people are already applying to Harvard (or have made the decision not to), probably 70% of type b people are already applying (or have made the decision not to), and maybe 40% of type c people are already applying (or have made the decision not to), and some small fraction of type d people ("i applied to harvard just for the hell of it" type people) are doing a similarly.
So the only read place you will be getting these additional 68,000 (100,000-32,000) students are type c or d people, which generally don't have too high of a shot at admissions. So even if the official admission rate drops down to 3%,2% or 1%, the stereotypical College Confidential applicant (meaning the majority people who are posting "what are my chances" everywhere on this site) would probably be considered a b applicant and their chances won't be radically changed from what ever the current acceptance rate is.
I do think the changing of the last name has some merit. I had mentioned this to my husband that between 2 Asian children adopted from China, the one with an "English" last name probably stands a better chance of getting admitted to HYPMS without a photo.
