I’ve read some horror stories on this forum about how Asians need much higher scores for admission to some highly selective colleges. There are also some colleges that don’t consider race, and maybe some colleges that consider Asians a minority. Can we list the colleges in each category?
For the colleges that don’t consider race, I know the following (at least by their own marketing material):
University of California, all campuses
Caltech
University of Washington
Any other colleges?
If you want to know whether a college considers race/ethnicity in admissions, see the common data set, section C7, or the admissions tab for its entry on collegedata.com .
http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg02_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=706 “considered” at Caltech
http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg02_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=764 “not considered” at Washington
For state universities, https://ballotpedia.org/State_data_on_colleges_considering_race_in_admissions is a handy table indicating where you may find state universities that do or do not consider race/ethnicity in admissions. Note that only 18.9% actually do, according to the table.
For those colleges that do consider race/ethnicity in admissions, expect them to be opaque about how it is used, since anything specific that they say will be used against them by those who do not like whatever specific thing that they say.
At many small liberal arts colleges, especially the more rural ones, Asians could benefit from a bump.
There is a perception – maybe unfair – that Asian-Americans tend to all target the same schools: the Ivies, the UCs, Stanford, and a handful of others. At the same time, there are many elite liberal arts colleges and smaller undergraduate-focused universities – especially outside major urban areas – that have relatively low (single-digit) Asian-American enrollment, and would like to have more.
Consider Colgate University, for example. One of the highest-ranked liberal arts colleges by USN&WR. ACT 30-33, higher than any UC campus other than Berkeley. Asian enrollment: 4%.
There is a perception – maybe unfair – that Asian-Americans tend to major in engineering. OK, most liberal arts colleges, including Colgate, don’t have engineering. But consider another Patriot League school, Lehigh University, which has a great reputation for its undergraduate engineering and computer science programs. ACT 29-32, still higher than most UCs. Asian-American enrollment: 8%.
@doschicos , that sounds logical, but is it a fact? Son applied to a few “diversity day” at rural LACs, but got rejection from every one. I guess he can apply to a few and test the theory.
@ucbalumnus , CDS data is good, but you have to know the college name to look it up. Is there a search engine when you can enter “ethnicity not considered” and get back a list?
you mean not racist colleges? There are not many.
I think LACs are a potential gold mine for Asians.
Most do not offer things like Engineering and Business, but:
What LACs lack in available majors/courses and major sports programs they make up for (IMO) with advantages in class size and professorial attention/involvement.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/10/asian
That story was from 2006, but still seems applicable. For example:
2016 Asian-American enrollment at Colorado College: 4%
2016 Asian-American enrollment at Whitman College: 4%
@bogeyorpar - this isn’t the place to re-litigate this claim about Asian Americans needing higher standardized test scores to gain admission to selective schools. Everyone needs high scores and GPAs to get into these schools. What all of most selective schools are looking for are students who go beyond those “minimum” requirements: those who can provide proof of longstanding pursuit of interests for their own sake, as well as letters of recommendation and essays that confirm the student’s unusual focus and excellence in these areas of interest. For example, a student who plays varsity basketball and performs in every Shakespearean drama they can, and then writes a great essay about why these interests are so important to them. There are plenty of these exceptionally curious and accomplished students that apply to selective schools and they never give a thought to building resumes or maximizing chances of admission to these schools by studying which one’s SCEA rates of admission are higher. They apply to schools where they think they will thrive and they are extremely effective at communicating to admission officers why they know they will thrive at those particular schools. Moreover, selective schools are known to accept these types of students even when they have lower GPAs and standardized test scores than their more conventional counterparts. That said, there are many, many, excellent colleges/universities in the US that would love to have Asian-American students with your son’s profile. Just search widely and make certain there are matches and safeties as well as reaches on his list. Best of luck!
I wonder how many white students want to attend a college with only 4-8% white students.
Regarding test score ranges, UCs tend to de-emphasize test scores relative to grades. However, this means that a test-score-heavy applicant may find more success at other schools than UCs, while a grades-heavy applicant may find more success at UCs, when comparing schools of nominally similar selectivity.
Since national/ethnic ancestry seems to be the necessary standard of comparison for this discussion, isn’t the U.S. population about 6% Asian? Wouldn’t colleges with about (or, more conservatively, at least) this percentage of Asian-Americans therefore be statistically diverse from the perspectives of both their Asian and non-Asian students?
And what about an analogy to religion? Many students attend schools where their religious affiliation has a single digit representation.
Statistically diverse isn’t necessarily what any particular person is going for. A small LAC with 6% Asian kids will have fewer total Asians than my kid’s non-diverse, but large, Midwestern high school.
For me, I would be 100% comfortable sending her to a school that was 80+% East Asian, because there’s enormous value in seeing the diversity that exists within the population of people who look like you, and she has had very limited opportunity to see that in her life so far. If she were white, she’d have seen that everywhere, and I would encourage her to look for schools where she would be in the minority.
These are deliberately extreme examples, with Asian-American enrollment <10%. If that seems too low, and you wanted to find liberal arts colleges or small universities with, say, 10-15% Asian-American enrollment, then of course you could do that too (e.g. Occidental or RPI).
The point is simply that there is a relationship here between supply and demand here (as there is in so many things). If a given school gets a huge supply of Asian-American applicants, they can afford to be very selective about the ones that they pick. So the problem is that there are too many Asian applicants.
On the other hand, if a school gets only a small supply of Asian-American applicants, their admissions policies are likely to be more generous. But then the problem may be the you are at a school with low Asian enrollment. It’s a trade-off.
There was probably a time when the Ivies, UCs, Stanford, etc. has only 4-8% Asian enrollment. But Asians were willing to look past that point in order to get a great undergraduate education. Maybe similar opportunities still exist at other schools
http://www.wiche.edu/info/publications/2017JulyDataInsightsKnocking-WesternFINAL.pdf.
Very interesting read on the projections for HS graduates and significant increase in #/% if Hispanic and Asian grads in public schools.
Okay, that’s probably needlessly inflammatory. Let’s just say, there could be too many Asian applicants who are virtually indistinguishable from white applicants and don’t necessarily benefit from race-conscious policies. When the OP complains that Asians need “much higher scores for admission”, they are usually referring to African-American and Latinx applicants who are barely enrolled at numbers resembling their proportion in the population (thus the “U” in URM.)
@worriestoomuch , this is not a topic to re-litigate Asian American’s issues. I really want to see which school doesn’t look at race and hopefully add/remove a few schools from son’s list.
@merc81 , I think that’s where “affirmative action” come from and people trying to use the racial distribution to give advantage to certain group of people while penalizing another group of people. Why not just erase “race” from the equation and let students’ merit speak for themselves? Again, I’m not trying to change the mind of these colleges, just trying to see which ones already have a “race blind” policy. Looks like colleges in the West are leading the charge, with premiere institutions like UCs and UWs not considering race.
@bogeyorpar : I didn’t intend to suggest a position on the greater topic of ethnic consideration in college admissions (which I recognize as not being the primary nature of your question in any event). Of note, though, college admissions quotas (in contrast to awareness) with respect to ethnicity would violate current U.S. law as I understand it.
Inspired by @ucbalumnus , I did two searches on CollegeData.
First one, “Most selective” colleges with “more than 20%” Asians. 19 colleges show up:
California Institute of Technology
Carnegie Mellon University
Columbia University
Cornell University
Duke University
Emory University
Georgia Institute of Technology
Harvard College
Harvey Mudd College
Johns Hopkins University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Princeton University
Rice University
Soka University of America
Stanford University
University of Chicago
University of Pennsylvania
University of Southern California
Wellesley College
Second one, “Very selective” colleges with more than 20% Asians. 18 colleges show up – dominated by NY and CA colleges:
Art Center College of Design
Baruch College (City University of New York)
Case Western Reserve University
New York University
Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University
Queens College (City University of New York)
San Jose State University
Stony Brook University
University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Davis
University of California, Irvine
University of California, Los Angeles
University of California, Riverside
University of California, San Diego
University of California, Santa Barbara
University of California, Santa Cruz
University of Texas at Dallas
University of Washington
I would like to search for colleges where Asians are less than 6%, but don’t know how to do that.