MODERATOR’S NOTE:
Whether or not college admissions is “racist” is beyond the scope of the original question. Regardless, College Confidential is not a debate society. Stick to the question at hand please. 5 posts deleted.
Ok…my opinion…being 1/4 Asian won’t affect your application prospects unless you are applying to a college that really is seeking Asian applicants. Even then…since you don’t really self identify as an Asian…not sure how this would help you.
If you google the stats, or check collegedata.com, you can see the makeup of a college’s ethnic population and make some (right? wrong?) assumptions about where race might place you.
I agree with @thumper1 that I’m not sure what good it might do to check that box given your special circumstances. My daughter is only a junior - and is a Chinese adoptee - so it remains to be seen what that means for her since many of her target schools have Asian populations in the low single digits.
I can tell you that my own alma mater, which is an Ivy, but not HYP, gives affirmative action to Filipinos because as a group they are underrepresented in top colleges. Chinese are not given the same advantage.
Personally, I think it’s a good thing that my alma mater doesn’t lump all “Asians” in the same pot. Filipinos and Hmong are considered URMs. Indians and Chinese are not.
As a Catholic, I can also tell you that being an observant Catholic is a boost in admissions at Notre Dame. If your Filipino friend submitted a letter of recommendation from his parish priest, it would have helped. That’s not a matter of affirmative action.
I agree with the sentiment in post #23. Wisconsin, a public U, does not have huge Asian populations but does have significant SE Asian refugees from the Vietnam conflict. Those, not all, Asians, are considered underrepresented and given consideration. My 1/2 Indian son was one of the only Indians in his HS but there were many Hmong students whose families were relocated secondary to the Vietnam war. Numbers are not the only reason to declare a group is at a disadvantage.
Regarding specific Asian ethnicities, here is a table from 2000 comparing educational attainment, among other things:
http://www.asian-nation.org/demographics.shtml
Percentage with college degree varies considerably. Compared to white people (25.3%), Indian (64.4%), Chinese (46.3%), Korean (43.6%), Filipino (42.8%), Japanese (40.8%) people had significantly higher percentage with college degree. Cambodian/Hmong/Laotian (9.2%), Pacific islanders (13.2%), and Vietnamese (13.8%) people had significantly lower percentages, more similar to Latino (9.9%), native American (10.8%), and black (13.6%) people.
Patterns of immigration presumably account for much of the differences. Some ethnic groups came heavily through PhD student and skilled worker visas, selecting them for high educational attainment, while others came in more through less selective (on educational attainment) methods. Once here, parental educational attainment relates to the nature and nurture that the immigrants’ American born kids have with respect to their own educational attainment.
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most of the Asian ppl I see that apply to top colleges get in, so I’m confused.
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A very large number of Asian applicants have tippy top stats and only a small portion are getting into tippy top schools. A bunch are being rejected simply because schools desire diversity and don’t want every seat to be Asian (or white, or whatever).
My half-Asian nephew (perfect SAT, perfect ACT, NMSF, perfect GPA, #1 in his class) is applying to Stanford (and some other tippy top schools). He put down “white” because he and his siblings say they identify as white, but also because he believes that putting down Asian would hurt his app.
Sigh. Diversity also means geographic.
Overall, my feeling is go with the truth. There’s so much kids/families already misread. Don’t confuse yourself further. Put the energy into understanding what your match really is, not parsing assumptions. It’s not just stats.
@babylola – every single college admits 25% percent of its entering class whose stats are in the bottom 25%, every single year. No matter how competitive the admissions year, how high the average test scores – when they do the math in the end – 25% of the students have test scores in the bottom 25%.
And no, despite everything you might have heard or read… those are not all students with some sort of affirmative action “hook.” They are just applicants who have something to offer that appeals to the school.
Normalized for stats, asians have a lower rate of admission-- i.e., URMs with a 1400 SAT score will have a higher rate than ORMs with same stats.
There are too many factors to reduce it to a simple statement. At some colleges, rates are lower for some highly sought majors. Oe there can be a wild imbalance in the numbers of apps from a relatively tight geo area. Not discrimination.
I think that people often misinterpret the way that colleges look at SAT scores. Any college with a holistic admission practices looks at the scores 'in context" – “context” means, among other things, the type and quality of the high school the student is coming from. The ad coms will generally also have a school profile that will tell them the score range of students at that school. So a kid who has a score of 1400 coming from an urban public high school may very well be viewed as if he had a higher score than a kid with a 1550 coming from top private academic prep.
When you sort all those scores out along racial and ethnic lines, it might very well turn out that the average score for admitted whites and Asians is higher than the average score for admitted URM’s, but that is an artifact of a multi-faceted admission process. Yes, the students racial/ethnic background is also a diversity factor – but it is one factor among many – in which test scores are considered, but are very rarely the dominant factor.
The problem is that CC users are not a representative sample – this board is full of parents and students who think that anything below 1500 is a terrible score. And the colleges are simply looking at much more than that .
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned how misidentifying your race on an application can jeopardize your admission status. If you truly do not appear Asian, have an Asian last name, actively participate in the culture/community, etc., I would caution against identifying solely as Asian on your application. It sounds like would be a lie to identify only as Asian on paper while admitting that you do not identify as such in your life. I’m not sure how likely colleges are to challenge an applicant’s reported demographics, but if anyone were to check your application against your previous records, you could be accused of lying to gain an advantage over others since you have only identified as Caucasian on your previous records.
If there is an option to identify as both Asian and Caucasian, that would be acceptable, but I’m not sure if that will help you any.
I disagree that she can’t state her race as Asian on the application is she doesn’t have an Asian name, participate in the culture, or in any way feel Asian. My daughter likes surfer clothes, country music, Mexican food, American sports. She participated in cultural events as a younger child (language and dance class, camps, CNY, art), even went on a heritage tour, but she didn’t really enjoy those activities and got busy with sports and band and art. She’s American. But she IS Asian, Chinese by birth, looks Chinese she is racially Chinese. The first day at a new high school, a boy asked her how she could play lacrosse if she was Chinese. She just looked at him and asked “Are you stupid?” As much as she would like to be Irish, she’s Chinese. If they asked her culture, she’d check American. If they ask her race, she checks Asian.
She didn’t check the box to get an advantage, but wanted to be honest and she IS racially Chinese. The school reports the statistics and she helps their statistics. She had no advantage or disadvantage in her admissions, though, because her school has plenty of URMs, and plenty of foreign students who are minorities too.
Kate Fitz, where’d you get those notions? The check box is optional. Guidelines come from the Census/Dept of Labor, which also allows self-reporting. There are some fine points, for some of the check boxes, but no one expects all Asian-Americans to have an Asian last name or participate in a culture club. No one will examine OP to see if she “looks” 1/4 Chinese.
She has always identified as Caucasian, her own choice, her own matter of simplifying. She can now choose for the college app.
Perhaps the answer is “yes”, since there are lots of people who are not northeastern Native American playing lacrosse.
She plays lacrosse, so the answer is definitely ‘yes’ but this kid had the prejudice that she couldn’t play because she is small and Asian. How the question came about was that she was new to the school and the rumor was that a new lacrosse player was coming to the school, and then this tiny Asian girl shows up. Where was the lacrosse player? She puts up with the stupid prejudices, so even though her name isn’t Asian, her culture isn’t Asian, her clothing, music, food preferences aren’t Asian, shouldn’t she get to check the box and get any advantage?
I don’t think there is an advantage or disadvantage, as I said above, but if the OP thinks there is she should check the box. OP is Asian. If the Obama kids want to identify as being white, they can. No one is doing DNA tests.