<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>