Asians at W&M

ttgiang15
Mon, 01 May 2006 22:06:05 +0000

I suppose it would only be appropriate for me to weigh in to this situation. Let me preface this post by stating my background: I am a Vietnamese male, originally from Orange County, CA, and am an accepted transfer student to W&M via the University of California, Berkeley (yes, that one school with 41% ‘Asian’).

It’s really cute that some of you have tried to use statistics to explain the discriminative/nondiscriminative policies by the admissions office by comparing relative admissions data from two unique sites. It is not right to compare data from UC schools to schools of the Virginia system. In this way, any attempt at statistics will invariably fail. Why is this the case? For a start, not all Asians are equal. Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Asian-Americans are not the same as Vietnamese, Laotian, Filipino, or Cambodian Asian-Americans. This has less to do with one’s parents’ country of origin, for the sake of this discussion. Rather, consider the immigration patterns of the group: those who belong to the latter (including myself), are more likely to have immigrant parents, are more likely to come from low-income families, and are more likely to have come from underresourced communities. These conditions, therefore, make this less an issue of racial diversity, but socioeconomic diversity in college admissions. Another issue is the populations in which you are analyzing. While you use statewise ‘Asian’ populations, as we have seen, it’s more a matter of what type of ‘Asians’ you are referring to. Here, we don’t even have to consider which group (of non-immigrant or immigrant backgrounds) an ‘Asian’ student belongs to. But we do have to take into account migrational patterns within the United States. The issue hasn’t been raised here, but did you guys ever consider why Asian-Americans are so concentrated along the West Coast? The most simple answer, of course, is the location on the Pacific Rim. However, this is just extremely simplified at best. This (over)concentration in California is due, in major part, to financial constraints: spatial and social mobility are inextricably linked. Starting out from the West Coast, many underprivileged Asian-American families simply cannot afford the adjustments associated of a coast-to-coast change of environment. The question becomes, just which Asian-American families are represented along the East Coast, in Virginia?

Another problem is that admissions requirements between the two systems are different. I have personally seen the points system for the University of California, San Diego, and one is awarded bonus points in UCSD’s criteria for having come from an immigrant background, or for having come from a low-income family (these have separate point values: if one is both, then they are awarded both points). Therefore, even if the socioeconomic distribution of Asian-American populations are EXACTLY the same in both states, then the UC and Virginia state college systems also have a final say. There is much more to be said on the matter on differences in college admissions, such as role of the transfer system (each year, 1/3 of Berkeley’s incoming class is comprised of transfer students, with transfer students being understood as a mode of opportunity- a ‘second chance’ if you will- for students who did not have the privilege of parents who attended college, or for students who had to work for basic necessities at home during high school- this is a purely California understanding, and these conditions might not apply to Virginia which, perhaps, even leads us to question just “who” makes up the transfer student populations). In short, the colleges, themselves, help skew the data as a byproduct differences in ideology of public education.

While I sincerely enjoy and appreciate the efforts of everyone’s input as it relates to statistics, I hope you also consider infusing a little Sociology 100 once in a while into your understanding of life. Sometimes, things aren’t always as they appear.

TTG