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<p>Is it kind of like saying that USA will not be USA any more if it keeps allowing certain ethnic groups to come in?</p>
<p>So guys, in summary what do you think Asians should do? I have collected a few suggestions.</p>
<p>1) Stop being Asian
2) If you must be Asian, then stop acting like Asians
3) If you must act like an Asian, then go to a second tier school
4) Above all, stop complaining and accept that the AdComs are always right</p>
<p>What else did I miss?</p>
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<p>I don’t. I don’t have time to think about such things. I just want equal treatment under the law for everyone.</p>
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<p>Have you considered therapy?</p>
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<p>Is that really true? I have looked at the problems and they didn’t seem particularly hard. I agree that getting an A in math courses at Harvard or MIT is likely easy, but to me anyway qualifying for the USAMO was not that complex either. It was not asking kids to get a Fields Medal, not even to do a PhD in math. The AMC 10 exam is quite straightforward. The AIME is slightly harder, but still not hard. Hundreds of kids qualify for the USAMO anyway. Don’t know about MOSP.</p>
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<p>Do you think therapy would help with developing blind loyalty for the AdComs, like xiggi?</p>
<p>By the way, how old are you kid?</p>
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<p>You are obviously superior to everyone here! Getting A’s in math classes at MIT is likely easy? We didn’t know who we were dealing with here. </p>
<p>Yes, I recommend therapy.</p>
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<p>Getting A in any course where there is no subjectivity is always easy. Give me any MIT kid and I can help him/her get an A. It’s all about test taking. That’s super easy. Look, it’s not like the kids are being asked to get the Fields Medal here. They are asked to solve some problems that have already been solved.</p>
<p>I have noticed that Americans in general don’t know how to ace tests. It’s a pity.</p>
<p>By the way, how old are you kid?</p>
<p>IndianParent I am sorry you feel as you do. I really do think whatever discrimination you experienced was unfair but I have hope for the future. Maybe I haven’t been able to understand you because I see the world from a different perspective. I know I am not Asian, but I also know that younger people are more accepting and less likely to see how we are different and more likely to focus on what makes us the same.</p>
<p>I think the changes you are looking for will come in time. I am one of those people who want the world to be a better place-for everyone. Don’t worry; my generation will get it done.</p>
<p>Peace. Good night to all.</p>
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<p>To be honest, I don’t really care, as I do not have a horse in the race. Change will come when Asians force change to happen. People who benefit from status quo never want to change.</p>
<p>I am 18 and am going to be a college freshman next year. You’re right, I think American’s in general do not know how to ace a test. Someone like you could help. Have you thought about volunteering at your local public HS?</p>
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<p>Wouldn’t someone like me benefit from the status quo? I didn’t apply to HYPS and was waitlisted at MIT (but my cousin is going), so maybe not. But I can tell you that I was raised to believe that when good things come to us it is our duty to pay it forward. That does not mean just to my race. I might not of ever thought that because I have never been discriminated against based on the color of my skin.</p>
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<p>I don’t see any strong evidence either. But, could it be that Asians feel marginalized while Whites don’t even notice what’s in the margin and some may even recommend therapy?</p>
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<p>Young people are indeed different, as clearly shown in 2008. Great to be young.</p>
<p>^Yes. Therapy might be very helpful for people that are feeling hopeless.</p>
<p>note to IndiaParent :</p>
<p>of the last 18 postings, 17 are yours. Your nearly 400 postings (and counting) have all been in the past week, all in this thread, and constitute between a quarter and a third of the messages posted since you joined the discussion. Much of the rest is other users answering and re-answering your many repetitions and re-re-re-repetitions of the same three thoughts. This is not a personal spam board.</p>
<p>Of your factual assertions very few have been correct. An example is the discredited but still repeated claim that after proposition 209, the Asian numbers at Berkeley skyrocketed. In fact, the Asian and white numbers increased in the same proportion immediately after 209; the ratio of Asian and white admission rates stayed the same. It actually went down for the Berkeley applicants who averaged 700+ per section on the SAT – the Asians supposedly being locked out of Stanford and the Ivy League, fared worse than whites just after 209. I checked the out-of-state numbers, too, and for both CA and OOS admissions, Asians were actually doing better relative to whites in some of the years before 209 went into effect, than afterward.</p>
<p>You also failed to check the numbers for Michigan and Florida, where the Asian numbers (according to the Asian discrimination theory and according to several of your postings) were said to have skyrocketed after affirmative action was eliminated. I checked and calculated as with the Berkeley in-state and OOS data, and you could do the same. The annual enrollment data are available in Common Data Sets online. You might find it educational to discover that NOTHING HAPPENED to the white/Asian ratio for freshman admissions to those schools. Nor has any jump in Asian numbers occurred as a result of any other ballot proposition. There are long-term trends of slow natural increases in all states, consistent with a growing Asian percentage of the population, along with growing wealth and English fluency and organization of institutions in the larger immigrant communities. The institutions include things like afterschool academies, SAT preparation courses, math olympiad schools, and college admissions counselors all catering to specific minorities – mostly Chinese and Korean, some Indian, and a smattering of others. All those will, over time, drive up the Asian vs white numbers at the state universities, both in absolute terms and in the relative qualification levels.</p>
<p>If you would like to do something more useful than spouting unsubstantiated opinion, a good start would be to present some data, such as the number of Asian and white high school graduates or college applicants each year in those states. Someone who calls the USAMO qualification problems “quite straightforward” and has a math background, could certainly draw quantitative inferences from this data, such as whether the growing Asian population percentage in CA, MI, or other states completely accounts for any “growth” in Asian vs white representation in those state universities. Three examples from California:</p>
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<p>That article has data and graphs on all the states with ballot initiatives. You can duly check that the Asian/white ratio shows no abnormal jumps when race-blind admission is introduced, other than natural annual fluctuations and the slow growth trend one expects from natural demographic processes.</p>
<p>Regarding the difficulty of USAMO qualification, </p>
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<p>A look at the annual data tables provided by the AMC (see amc.maa.org) will show that there are very few high scores on the AIME each year after subtracting the non-US competitors. The published tables and scatterplots also show that the AIME score does not correlate all that well with AMC score, because it is extremely difficult in comparison. The “hundreds” of USAMO qualifiers consists of about 120 high school graduates per year. Even if the qualifying exams were easy, there’s a large difference between generally being able to do problems of the AIME and AMC type, and doing them well enough to rank in the top 100 of one’s class nationally.</p>
<p>You get the hint, I assume. Start introducing content instead of noise.</p>
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<p>I don’t think Asians should do anything differently. Do whatever you want, continue doing what you are doing now. It is obvious that Asians have already cracked the secret of elite college acceptance. They are being accepted into top schools at huge numbers, at percentages that are slowly increasing over time (as Siserune argues). </p>
<p>What Asians should “change:” recognizing that out of every 100 kids who apply to HYPS, only 5-10 get accepted. And that percentage is the same whether you are Asian or white. The percentage might be higher if you are African American or Hispanic, but based on all the numbers I’ve seen thrown around here and elsewhere, it is not high enough that suddenly several thousands more white and Asian students will get accepted if the elite schools decide to stop accepted URMs. (And the acceptance rate for URMs is probably a lot closer to 10% than 100%).</p>
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<p>For colleges in the Hoxby “Rank 1” group (which includes all the Ivies), Hoxby’s projected earnings over a 34 year career amount to about $3M in 1997 dollars. This is based on earnings patterns of males who entered one of those private colleges in 1982. By my arithmetic, that would average out to about $90K/year (over a 34 year career, in 1997 dollars, for males entering a “Rank 1” college in the early 1980s).</p>
<p>Does that sound surprisingly low to you, IndianParent? It does not to me. It does not seem to be wildly out of line with recent payscale.com salary data, US earnings averages, or my own personal observations. What are you missing? For one thing, Hoxby states that “career incomes for highly selective colleges are conservatively estimated”. You can read why in Appendix A of the paper I cited. </p>
<p>Perhaps more importantly for purposes of this thread, another thing you seem to be missing is this: not all students admitted to highly selective colleges want to be Michael Lewis. Some of them want to be school teachers, college professors, or members of Congress (and I think it’s fair to say, adcoms welcome that.) In 2006-2007, faculty salaries at private independent institutions averaged about $85K/year (based on US Department of Labor stats). Rank-and-file members of the US House & Senate in 2011 make $174K/year. Basic pay for members of the US government Senior Executive Service currently range from about $120K-$180K/year. Of course, it generally takes years of work at lower salaries to reach these levels. Meanwhile, it’s true, a plumbing or electrical contractor might be earning more with far less formal education.</p>
<p>Notwithstanding all these numbers, I don’t think it is irrational to believe that a high-demand major (STEM, finance) at a tippy top school (HYPSM) is a much more promising path to riches (for a smart, hard-working person) than a random major at a random school. Adcoms at the tippy top school will accomodate the ambitions of some but not all applicants who want to follow that path. In my opinion, the reasons they don’t admit even more students who fit that profile, right or wrong, have nothing to do with overt “racism” (although there may indeed be cases in which more-or-less subtle stereotyping does lead the profiling process astray.)</p>
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<p>Harvard’s acceptance rate for African Americans is 16%, if I’m not mistaken. Given that African Americans only account for a small percentage of the applicant pool, and that 16% is a very low acceptance rate anyway, I don’t think railing against affirmative action at Harvard, Yale and Princeton in particular makes much sense.</p>
<p>^ I agree w/Ghostt. Railing against “holistic” admissions is another matter. However, before we do that, it would be good to try to understand what motivates it, from as emotionally neutral a point-of-view as possible.</p>