The common belief is that elite colleges like the ivies discriminate against Asians, but do less elite, but still good schools like Georgia Tech and other large flagship state schools discriminate against Asians?
Also I heard that if your name is distinctly Asian that you should just identify as Asian on the common app. Do you think that admissions officers would be able to identify me as Asian by my last name Chow if I didn’t fill out the race section of the common app?
Yes, I think they would identify you as Asian. However you still have the right not to fill it out if you don’t want to. It won’t matter either way. “Discriminate” in this case is subjective, though. The ivies, notably Harvard, accepts a much higher percentage of Asians to their student body than is representative of the general population. Georgia Tech’s freshman class last year was about 20% Asian. That’s pretty similar to Harvard’s percentages. California state schools are likely even higher. You would have to check the common data set school by school, but I have a feeling it depends on location and majors. Don’t worry about what you can’t change. Race seems to matter less than socio-economic status these days anyway (check out USNWR’s latest methodology). There is a school out there for you - for everyone - so just focus on finding a match based on skills, interests, and what you and the college have to offer each other.
How does socioeconomic status affect college admissions?
@Academicstress , from what I can tell, large, need blind schools like Harvard like to admit a good number of kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, so they can get access to a higher quality education… or something along those lines. Bottom line, it makes the school look good when they can say “look at all the disadvantaged students we admitted.”
Harvard and other good FA private school students still skew strongly upward in SES. Usually about half get no FA (parent income in the top 3% or so), while only about 10-20% get Pell Grant (parent income in the bottom half or so).