<p>I’m coming back to the discussion a bit late, but in response to Periwinkle, #376: It seems to me that an increase in the number of exceptionally well qualified Asian-American applicants should lead to an increase in the percentages of Asian-Americans in the “top” schools, unless there is a corresponding increase in the number of exceptionally well-qualified applicants of other races. I believe that the number of exceptionally well qualified Asian-American applicants has increased in the past 10-15 years. Is this not the case?</p>
<p>The people from the PRC who came to the US as graduate students in the first big wave, and then stayed, are more-or-less of parent-of-college-applicant age now (with some exceptions, as noted by mathmom). They did not all become faculty members–a lot of them went into other careers.</p>
<p>Also, the fact that Harvard has 2,400 faculty members does not mean that Harvard could not accommodate all of their children (if Harvard admissions wanted to). Suppose that the faculty members have (on average) 2 children each. Then we have 4,800 children of Harvard faculty members. However, the faculty members are spread over a 30-year period (roughly), in terms of their own ages. So one would anticipate that only about 1/30 of the group of children would be graduating from high school in any given year. That cuts the number to 160 children of Harvard faculty applying to college in a given year. Now, some of them will not want to go to Harvard, and some of them may not have the objective qualifications to be admitted. On top of that, some of the senior faculty recruited by Harvard have already sent their children to college before moving to Harvard, and so they contribute 0 to the number of faculty-offspring applicants. So the actual number of Harvard faculty children who are likely to go to Harvard is probably less than 160 per year, and it is almost certainly less than 10% of the entering Harvard class. Also, I suspect that relatively few of the Harvard faculty are Asian-American. I haven’t collected the data, but I would guess that the fraction of Asian-Americans among the Harvard faculty is lower than the fraction in the undergraduate student body. </p>