@pizzagirl, are your referring to post #28? You can’t attribute it to me although I can relate to @yohohoho. For me, I’ve been conditioned to believe that I am lesser than and making such self deprecating remarks just means that I can take it. If such talk is upsetting to you, that is a good thing for people like me.
As far YoHo realizing that oldfort and mcat are Asian, I interpreted that to mean “see, we are all the same. We might bring different perspectives but really race is irrelevant”. Maybe I’m wrong about that but that is how I took it.
I never claimed that Asians don’t fit in; my kids fit in just fine. My claim is that because Asians look different, colleges probably don’t want too many because it may alter the image that they want to portray. I’m not sure why you are attacking me about white students and their possible negative reactions to blacks. That would absolutely be wrong! Like I said, give everyone equal opportunity regardless of race. I don’t know what is so controversial about that.
There is very little difference between “native” born and those who came here under certain age. You will not even hear an accent in their speech (one exception that I know is H. Kissinger, I have no idea how he managed to retain such a thick accent), if they came like at 14 or under. Many people will not hear an accent in those who came here at 16 (but CIA specialist will) .And kids adapt very quickly, just give them few months, they will speak, read, write, that is if they are NOT “helped” by constant translation, but nobody is helping Asians, thank goodness, all so called “help” is aimed at Spanish speaking, so the Asians adapt faster.
Forgive for being petty by bumping up this thread.
@Pizzagirl, I thought we were having a civil discussion about all of this and then you came after me with your dukes up accusing me of such and such. I guess my response was not exciting enough for you that you’re not even acknowledging it. Even an half hearted apology would have been appropriate.
Did you show evidence the parents are limiting the time or the children are forced to only spend time with other Asians?
If you can understand that Jews like to spend time with people who share their heritage, why can’t you understand that perhaps Asians like to do the same?
What’s the difference?
Or is it OK for one group of people but not OK for the other?
Maybe the asians immigrants adapt faster because every time they make a phone call in the US they don’t get “press 1 for English, press 2 for Mandarin”
I don’t have published evidence, if that’s what you’re looking for. But I live in an area where there are many Asian families, and my kids had lots of Asian classmates. Some of these classmates’ families limited the amount of time that their kids could spend with non-Asian children outside of school – for example, they might allow their child to invite a non-Asian friend to their home only once a month – but they did not impose the same restriction on the amount of time their child spent with Asian friends.
As far as I could tell, when families imposed these restrictions it was because they were afraid that the non-Asian children would be a bad influence on their own children because they might not take academics seriously. This may have been a realistic concern.
Of course. Many people enjoy being with others who share their heritage. That isn’t the situation I was talking about.
Is it a surprise that kids of immigrants from China and India who commonly have high levels of educational attainment tend to do well in school, whether you see nature or nurture?
Or perhaps that, in their home country where they immigrated from, the social mobility is more academic merit based. (The advantage of going to an elite college could be greater there – and there may be fewer “elite education haters” and more “elite education worshipers” in their society due to a thousand years of “social promotion system” in their history.) So they keep valuing the academic much more than other kinds of achievement - this could hurt their odds of admission to some top US colleges which value other achievement as well. (e.g., the orchestra analogy that was mentioned: An orchestra only needs a fixed number of violinists.)
However, bachelor’s degree attainment in India and China is lower than in the US overall, so the immigrants from those countries of origin tend to have significantly higher educational attainment than those countries as a whole. In contrast, immigrants from Mexico (30% completed high school, 4% completed bachelor’s degrees) tend to have significantly lower educational attainment than Mexicans generally (47% completed high school, 20% completed bachelor’s degrees).
I would guess this is because the poor Mexicans have more opportunity to immigrate to US, but only those, Chinese or Indians with more means manage to do the same.
Sometimes, I have this thought: it is not totally clear to me that the US labor market needs more of the latter than the former. (Maybe I have started to become one of those who do not like elitism after having been here for decades. /Sarcastic.)
There has been selection for achievement-oriented families to be the ones who migrate to the United States, which differs from the situation for some other groups of immigrants.
A culture which overvalues the achievement at the expense of all others may also have some downside, (e.g., put too much pressure to their young), we should not forget this.
Is the size of Greek about the same as S. Korea in terms of population? I heard that after WWII and Korean war, S. Korea was dirt poor (their GDP might be similar to one of poor African countries at that time.)
Why is S. Korea in a much better financial shape as a country than Greek just after several decades? They even need to spend more of their resources on military defense as compared to Greek while achieving this. I think they may have been working much harder when they finally have a chance to do so.
I’ll be very non-politically correct, and if it’s too much so I’m sorry and the mods can edit my post.
Every race has smart members and dumb members. We in the US see different skews of these races though. The slice that we see of Asians are mostly those who came to the US in the last few decades, educated, and from strong genetic stock. The dumb members are still in their home countries, so we don’t see them. The smart Jews escaped the Nazis, so while almost half the world’s Jews live in the US, the Nazis in a sense strengthened their gene pool by culling the least intelligent while the most intelligent escaped. The biggest slice we see of Blacks are descendents of those who were sold into slavery, the genetic worst of their original countries. Whites have come to the US from all sorts of different situations, so we probably have a globally representative sample of Whites.
If we compared recent African immigrants and recent Asian immigrants I bet we’d see that they’re roughly equally intelligent. But recent African immigrants make up a much smaller proportion of Blacks in the US than recent Asian immigrants make up of Asians in the US.
Sorry, I didn’t read the whole thread but Asians start prepping their kids for the SAT at 3 years old. In grad school I worked for a couple of these prep programs and saw it first hand. This is cultural. Other groups could do the same and get the same results but have different beliefs and values so probably wouldn’t do this.
@pizzagirl,
You should be scolding me, not @bogibogi.
My comment about @oldfort and @mcat2 being Asian is to point out the following:
If college applications were masked/redacted to name, gender, and race, then each applicant could be evaluated on the remaining portions of the information that they reveal to the admissions committees: grades, rigor, std tests, essays, LORs, ECs, etc. Colleges would still be able to create student bodies based on the other info that a student provided in their ECs and essays. Should any applicant choose to write about their ethnicity, it would be just fine and dandy. But frankly, I don’t really care about it, because I’m not much of an activist, and I believe in affirmative action, so I’m fine with some Asians and Caucasians clearing out the way to give Hispanics and African americans a chance at a college education. Heck, I’m even a limoscene liberal and happy to pay more than my share of taxes.
The point I was making was that if you redact name, gender, and race, the adcom does not have any preconceived stererotypes when they read a college application. Here on cc, with name, gender, and race hidden, we often cannot tell which posters are male or female, or white, Asian, African American, or Hispanic. And without any preconceived notions, we can hear the cc’s posters true voices and learn their personalities. It would be an interesting experiment if college applications worked the same way. Without any preconceived notions, the adcoms can hear the kids’ true voices and learn their personalities. It would be interesting to see the make up of the final class, both in race composition and gender composition.
However, students asking about colleges or chances often do announce their gender and race/ethnicity, apparently believing that those aspects are among their most important attributes in college admissions. It does appear to be the case that many students and other posters believe that they are bigger factors than they are at most colleges.
Announced race/ethnicity also tends to affect responses to such questions, even if the student asking for college suggestions does not state any desirability criteria based on race/ethnicity. For example, a student who states that s/he is black is much more likely to get suggestions of historically black schools than a student who states some other race/ethnicity or leaves race/ethnicity unstated, even when any of these students shows no preference for or against historically black schools or any other race/ethnicity attribute of colleges.