<p><a href=“http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=515779#[/url]”>http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=515779#</a></p>
<p>(Read the whole thing. It’s long but the middle part has the real meat, aka damning evidence.)</p>
<p>“Asian-Americans occupy a unique position on Harvard’s campus, represented in pure numbers at as much as four times their national presence”</p>
<p>Why did that quote strike you?</p>
<p>This struck me:
“One Korean student, applying from a top prep school, got pegged at MIT as “yet another textureless math grind.” At Vanderbilt, a former admissions staffer offered that Asians “are very good students, but don’t provide the kind of intellectual environment” that colleges are looking for.”</p>
<p>“Golden’s experience, however, suggests otherwise. He writes that Harvard evaluators “ranked Asian American candidates on average below whites in ‘personal qualities,’””</p>
<p>One of the most interesting facts in that article is that one third of the Ivy league is Jewish–I had no idea the proportion was really that high–though my kids, one at an LAC and one at an Ivy, have been telling me that most of the white students they know are Jewish. ONe could then make the argument that, in proportion to their population, the most under-represented group is non-Jewish whites! (Mostly tongue-in-cheek, please don’t flame, folks).</p>
<p>What does this mean, though? Are non-Jewish white students just not trying hard enough? I don’t know, but It’s a really interesting fact that doesn’t get explored much.</p>
<p>BTW, my Jewish dad went to Columbia when other Ivies were apparently quota-ing. And his non-Jewish grandson got in, too (not counted as legacy). And most of his friends are Jewish or Asian FWIW.</p>
<p>I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a good idea to overthink the race connection too much. Who cares?</p>
<p>Garland: my understanding is that during the “quota years”, the big Ivy’s (HYP) rejected so many qualified jewish kids, that schools like Tufts and Wash U in St. Louis became the schools of choice. Those schools now have a jewish population between 25-30%. When D was applying to Harvard, she and her interviewer, an Asian-American Alum, had a lengthy discussion re: quotas. His perspective (not mine) was that the Asian-American’s are today’s Jews.</p>
<p>I think that “during the big quota years” the schools that got more than their share of qualified Jewish students were public schools like the CCNY schools, SUNY schools, UC schools, Rutgers, Temple, Michigan, Wisconsin. Cornell and Syracuse, too. And, of course, Brandeis. I think the popularity with Jews of Tufts and Wash U is of somewhat more recent vintage.</p>
<p>My father’s high school in Newark NJ, which was about 99% Jewish (best known alumnus: Phillip Roth, who was a classmate of my uncle), had one “in” at Penn and one at Wesleyan. When my father was there, in the mid-40s, they sent one kid to each every year, and the remainder of the kids went to Rutgers or one of the NY schools. But by my uncle’s class (about 1950), things were changing rapidly, as evidenced by the fact that my uncle went to Amherst and Roth to Bucknell. (Even a few years before, my father had actually gotten an interview at Yale – the first WASP he had ever spoken with.)</p>
<p>This stands out to me
I think that this is true, though very unfair. I DO think it’s harder for Asian kids to get into selective schools, especially if they ARE interested in math or science. Then they are treated as stereotypes. My Asian friends from HS and college did not fit into any particular box, and neither do my children’s Asian friends.</p>
<p>As far as the Jewish quotas at Columbia, Richard Feynman did not get in to Columbia, which was a terrible disappointment to him at the time. He ended up at MIT, which seemed to work out very well for him.</p>
<p>^Well, that was obviously a huge mistake, but my understanding was that overall, Columbia always had a much higher percentage of Jewish students than HYP, esp located as it is in NYC.</p>
<p>Don’t you think that Columbia just kicks itself about rejecting Feynman? :eek:</p>
<p>For a long time, it made a lot of difference (especially at places like Yale and Columbia) whether you were a German Jew or Sephardic Jew compared to Eastern European Jews. The small Sephardic community had been here since early colonial days. The big German Jewish migration happened in the early-mid 19th Century, and the German Jews tended to be affluent and highly assimilated. Prior to the watershed events of the WWII era, there was a lot of animosity between those communities and the later-arriving, less-cultured, more-religious, much-less-assimilated Eastern Europeans, and it was much harder for the “Ostjuden” to get into Ivy-type colleges. (With tons of exceptions, of course, including many of my relatives. But my uncles cared a LOT about the Harvard-Yale rivalry, in part because they knew Harvard had been more accepting of Eastern European Jews than Yale.)</p>
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<p>This has been true of Jews for decades. Where have you been?</p>
<p>I went to Cornell thirtysomething years ago. The single largest ethnic group on campus was Jews – accounting for about one-third of the total campus population. I was one of the few kids in my social circle who wasn’t Jewish. On the high holy days, I used to make at least twenty copies of my notes from the classes that my friends missed because they were attending services.</p>
<p>Cornell is still about one-third Jewish, but that’s a higher proportion of the total white population than it used to be because there are a lot more Asian kids on campus now.</p>
<p>Nobody seems to care in the least about the heavy presence of Jews on campuses anymore. Society should learn from this. Huge numbers of Jews have been enrolling for decades in our best colleges and universities and absolutely nothing bad has happened. Nothing bad is going to happen if huge numbers of Asians enroll, either.</p>
<p>I’m overgeneralizing a bit here, but I think most of us can agree that many (probably most) subgroups within the overall Asian population and most subgroups within the overall Jewish population place a high value on academic achievement. It makes sense that kids from ethnic groups that value academics would want to enroll in top colleges.</p>
<p>This sort of trend doesn’t just occur at the college level, either. Have you ever looked at the ethnic composition of any of the East Coast public magnet high schools?</p>
<p>Marian–where i have been–at a midwest big public U, and before that at a big public non-magnet. Sorry–guess i just don’t run in the right circles!</p>
<p>Anecdotally (as in my kids’ accounts) I knew their schools had fairly large Jewish populations, but hearing that actual number surprised me.</p>
<p>Ought to take a look at top musicians; our high school is a perfect example. The honors orchestra is comprised, almost exclusively, of Asians and Jews(I have one of the Jewish kids :)).</p>
<p>Emphasis on music and academics is a stronghold for both Asians and Jews, so it shouldn’t be surprising to see both groups excel in these areas.</p>
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<p>I think that number has to be viewed with a great deal of skepticism.</p>
<p>Most Ivy League and other highly-selective colleges do not even ask students about religious affiliation, so there is no mechanism for accumulating this data.</p>
<p>The source for these percentages can usually be traced back to a very informal “guess” by the Hillel organization, so informal as to rival the old, “I heard it on the internet” source for data. </p>
<p>Often, the numbers appear to be ancient history, lore passed along from generation to generation. When these schools were 100% white, a high point of one-third Jewish may indeed have been the case. It is at least a plausible number. But, for an Ivy League school to be one-third Jewish today, roughly one of every two white students would have to be Jewish. There is no data to support that and the number strikes me as unlikely, if not outright implausible.</p>
<p>Where have I been? I’m 16 years old</p>
<p>^LOL! Now that was funny,b4nnd20!</p>
<p>As a child I remember my parents discussing how philanthropic Jews were, especially to the Urban League and the NAACP. I assume they were equally generous to their alma maters. Are Asian-Americans doing the same?</p>
<p>My mom didn’t even pick up the phone when her alma mater called last week. I think her exact words were “Goddamnit, it’s not even December.”</p>