<p>“I’m writing this on the day of the Harvard-Yale game, and the Crimson and Yale Daily News have been full of articles, hard to ignore!”</p>
<p>I bet they don’t have the following byline from NJ.</p>
<p>“Effigies of John Harvard and Handsome Dan went up in flames tonight as the University community gathered on Cannon Green around the bonfire, celebrating the Tigers’ victory in football over Harvard and Yale.”</p>
<p>Simba:</p>
<p>LOL! The Boston Globe actually has a story that depicts both teams as dispirited after their respective losses.</p>
<p>MOWFN:</p>
<p>I think someone with $16000 to buy a PS3 would be the equivalent of a developmental admit, don’t you think?</p>
<p>Sorry I’m late to this thread, but let me get this straight: Mr. Li got admitted to Yale and Caltech but is complaining because he didn’t also get admitted to Princeton? Gimme a break. I’d say the college application process treated him very well. The one thing that is worse than a sore loser is a sore winner.</p>
<p>“I think someone with $16000 to buy a PS3 would be the equivalent of a developmental admit, don’t you think?”</p>
<p>Yep!</p>
<p>“Xiggi, I find your response to Jonri extremely arrogant and you’ve also failed to provide any relevant stats in opposition to her comments.”</p>
<p>Cbreeze, thank you for analysis. </p>
<p>Being arrogant and failing to provide statistics is exactly what I am known for on this board. Sarcasm set aside, were you interested in seeing the relevant statistics I have posted in the past, you might consider using the search features of the new board, as well as the now defunct older version of College Confidential. </p>
<p>Forgive me for having lost interest in posting the same numbers year after year in response to posters who get their data from highly questionable sites such asianam and National Enquirer-like sensationalist researchers who seek their fifteen minutes of fame. </p>
<p>Not liking my “arrogant” style is your prerogative, and it is mine to reject your ill-founded accusation of having failed to provide relevant statistics.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I doubt this suit is so straight forward. I don’t think Mr. Li is suing Princeton because he was wait listed. He must have a preponderance of evidence shows Princeton exhibited racial bias towards his application. It has been widely discussed here in CC that many posters here think that Princeton has been more reluctant to embrace minority students than other elite colleges. Therefore I am hopeful that Mr. Li’s suit will force Princeton to examine its admission data and prove one way or other whether the university is biased in its admission policy in regards to him and other Asians. It has been noted here by other posters that he is not suing Harvard which rejected him; perhaps he doesn’t have evidence that Harvard showed bias towards his application. This may show that he thinks his suit is legitimate and is not sour grapes.</p>
<p>I am very surprised and rather shocked at the racial comments many posters had made here in regards to topics concerning Asian students and their families. I wonder if the same topics concerning other minorities with the word “Asians” replaced by Jews, African-Americans and Latinos, how different the comments would be. If the admissions officers at the elite colleges are a representation of the mindset of the posters here ( I say that because many of here claim to be Ivy educated and even interviewers for Ivies) then I’d say Mr. Li has a winning case.</p>
<p>Cbreeze:</p>
<p>The Crimson article I linked suggests that the stereotypes are alive among “Asian-American” students and their families as well as among non-Asians. </p>
<p>Why should someone who was waitlisted sue a university? He was deemed worthy of admissions by Princeton. But Princeton did not have room for him. How is it more discriminatory than being rejected outright by other universities which he decided not to sue? This whole thing really does not make sense.</p>
<p>In the past, Princeton has been accused of discriminating against urban students which few athletic ECs–this worked against both Jews and Asians who attended urban schools such as Stuyvesant, Princeton is known to value athletics more than Yale or Harvard (and has recently trounced both their football teams). Whether it could be proved that such a policy of favoring athletic suburbanites was a deliberate ploy to keep out Jews and Asians is doubtful, however.</p>
<p>So why aren’t Asian parents getting their kids into the sports for which the Ivies do field teams? If the parents believe elite colleges favor football or baseball players over violinists, they should sign up their kids into Pop Warner or Little League. It doesn’t mean the kid STILL can’t do orchestra, etc. It just would make that child stand out a bit amongst his ethnic competition.</p>
<p>The argument that colleges use other information besides SAT scores and grades to choose a class; therefore, there isn’t discrimination against high achieving Asians, isn’t logical. The former doesn’t lead to the latter.</p>
<p>The way to find out if there is discrimination is to actually ascertain the facts which I hope will happen. </p>
<p>There is a little information that looks like there is discrimination. The average SAT score of accepted Asian students is higher than accepted students from other ethnic groups.</p>
<p>So people are arguing that Asians fall short in other areas that are brought out when schools look at applications “holistically”. That looks like bigotry in sheep’s clothing to me.</p>
<p>I liked Jonri’s post too.</p>
<p>When S1 was applying to colleges, a friend who interviewed for Yale said: “Too bad he plays the piano. He’d have a greater chance of being admitted if he played the oboe.”</p>
<p>I’d love to see a suit by a student who was rejected because he played the piano.
S1 did not apply to Yale, by the way.</p>
<p>Marite, that analogy doesn’t work. There is a difference between taking a piano player over a violinist and taking one kid from an ethnic class over another kid from a different ethnic class.</p>
<p>Dsark:</p>
<p>How are you going to prove discrimination when Asian American enrollment at Princeton has nearly doubled (from 7% to 13%) over the last 20 years?</p>
<p>Those numbers are irrelevant.</p>
<p>
I don’t know if they fall short. I only know what I see in my own town. It is Asian kids taking 0 period classes and skipping lunch to add another course every day. I know non-Asian kids who have felt the pressure to follow this trend, but their parents felt it was not healthy. The arts & choir offerings at the H.S. bring down a student’s weighted GPA, so Asian kids generally don’t participate. The Asian kids join cross country, track, crew, & tennis. Not football/lax/hockey/soccer/bball. I’ve rarely seen Asian kids try out for the theatrical productions in town. I know Asian parents who will get tutoring for their kids if a grade earned is lower than 95. All these things are free choices & nobody is forcing Asians to make them. But in my limited experience, there is a remarkable amount of similarity in the Asian kids’ profiles. Asian friends of my d complain about their “crazy Asian” parents. </p>
<p>I don’t think it is bigotry to notice these differences. I believe that colleges do, and have decided to use criteria other than GPA or SATs to award spots in their class. Calling an Asian kid a “grind” or other pejorative term, or implying he is one simply because he is Asian is wrong. But if a college wants a class of kids who bring many different gifts to the school, admissions decisions will never be strictly correlated with quantitative measures.</p>
<p>I remember a while back there was a thread on the parent’s forum </p>
<p>Whoever has the most AP wins</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=97255[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=97255</a></p>
<p>On post # 49 Ben Jones (MIT admissions) wrote the following and I think that many of his peers involved in elite college admissions share the same sentiment:</p>
<p>**When faced with the choice, we will always choose "the right match" over numbers. We’re not lying when we say that. You’ve heard me beat that sentiment to death in other threads, so I won’t do so here.</p>
<p>(*Match = mission, collaborative spirit, hands-on, balance, character, and passion, among others.)</p>
<p>But the reality is that when you have 10,500+ applications for ~1000 spots and 70% of the pool has great numbers, your pool is going to have plenty of kids who have the passion and the match and the scores/grades/AP’s. So we admit those kids - what other choice do we have?**</p>
<p>**So when a parent says to me, “Why does HYPSM put so much emphasis on AP’s?” I reply “Why do you put so much emphasis on HYPSM?” When a parent says “My kid’s value as a person/student shouldn’t be measured by how many AP’s he/she has taken” I say “…and your kid’s value as a person/student shouldn’t be measured by whether or not he/she goes to HYPSM.” I could go on and on.</p>
<p>There are literally hundreds of amazing colleges and universities out there (some of which actually admit kids with no AP’s!). Many of them would actually be better matches for your child. Many of them would provide your child with a better education. Most importantly, many of them would ultimately give your child a greater sense of happiness and fulfillment. The right match will do that.</p>
<p>And the match goes both ways. We try to determine if your kid is a good match for MIT. Your kid should be trying to determine which school is the best match for him/her. As a parent, what are you doing to help him/her figure that out?</p>
<p>Here’s a hint: if you’re spending time obsessing that a lack of AP’s is going to keep your kid out of Stanford, you’re missing the point.</p>
<p>Make sure your kids are choosing their schools for the right reasons. Name, status, “brand” - these are not the right reasons. Let your kids be kids. Let them follow their hearts. Encourage them to have a present, not just a future. Don’t let them define themselves by which colleges accept them - and don’t let them define themselves by doing things only to get into certain colleges.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>dstark:</p>
<p>If you don’t like the analogy, then perhaps someone from Long Island will sue over being rejected in favor of someone from Wyoming? All signs indicate that it’s tougher for applicants from LI to get admitted into the Ivies than someone from a rural area.</p>
<p>" (*Match = mission, collaborative spirit, hands-on, balance, character, and passion, among others.)"</p>
<p>so how does a having color or race = *Match?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well, a lot of Asians do orchestra, isn’t that graded the same as arts and choir and affect their GPA’s as well? The fact that Asians do cross, track, crew and tennis mean that they are willing to do sports. Why single out the types of sports that they don’t do? I rarely see jews do football, basketball and soccer , why didn’t you mention that? In your other thread, you mention that Asian girls cried whenever a test is handed back; how many actually cried? Do ALL the Asians cry? My D has a close jewish friend who lied on her college applications, should I say that girl is dishonest or should I say jews are cheaters.</p>
<p>If you see an incident and notice race first and the person second, then there’s a problem. I think Mr.Li’s suit is trying to point out this fact.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Dstark, would you please share with us what numbers are not irrelevant to you? And, while at it, could you tell us why higher SAT scores demonstrate … discrimination? Doesn’t the SAT offer only a small insight into the overall “quality” of a student? </p>
<p>Wouldn’t this be akin to believe that the sole running speed or acceleration of a soccer player makes him a great player? Oh wait, don’t tell me YOU believe that the faster players are indeed the very best players, and the slow(er) ones can only play Division III!</p>
<p>Simba:</p>
<p>That’s MIT. Other schools have additional criteria, such as geographic diversity, filling up certain types of majors, filling up the sports teams, the orchestras, etc… Race/ethnicity is one such criterion, I would assume. It is possible to discuss slavery in a roomful of Caucasians but it is more enriching to have some descendents of slaves as well. </p>
<p>I don’t know why people are so focused on race and ethnicity as the basis of discrimination when athletes and legacies are probably more favored–even recruited-- in the admissions process.</p>