Daily Princetonian: Investigation into alleged admissions bias expands

[fabrizio]

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Asian Americans are a relatively recent addition to the American population, and unlike the black population, those Asian Americans coming to the United States (for the most part, post 1900s) CHOSE to come here. They had the resources and motivation to move to a completely new country, and brought with them the values and culture of the countries they left behind. This included, of course, the idea of education as the way to advance in society. So the vast majority of East Asian immigrants here have an advantage in terms of education–lots of resources, plus a pro-education attitude. You can’t say that same selection process occurs for blacks (shipped here against their will during the times of slavery), Hispanics (takes few resources to move here, so there’s no selection whatsoever), South Asians (many as refugees), and so you notice a relative lack of focus on education.

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<p>Then this advantage compared to blacks is a skills deficit, to borrow from Dinesh D’Souza.</p>

<p>Unless my father and every Chinese professor I know are magic outliers, most Chinese immigrants to the United States aren’t graduates from the “Chinese Ivy Leagues” (i.e. Beijing University, Qinghua University, etc.) Most are graduates from schools that are equivalent to our best state universities. Yet, they’ve been fairly successful in their new country. Why? Because they really don’t have a skills deficit compared to native-born Americans.</p>

<p>One of the prevailing attitudes in the pro-racial preference movement is, “CSU East Bay isn’t good enough. He needs to attend Berkeley.” They are sorely misguided. They want to focus on increasing black enrollment at select schools when they should be focusing on increasing black enrollment across the board. If select school enrollment goes up, then great. If it doesn’t, then it doesn’t matter as long as the total number increases.</p>