UC Berkeley vs Stanford Asian Americans

muckdogs07
Tue, 04 Dec 2012 11:30:12 +0000

Agree that it is much tougher for Asians at top colleges, but am not sure this is because of discrimination as opposed to institutional priorities. The bottom line is that most top schools do not use academic achievement as a proxy for merit in most cases.

Instead, I believe that a class of admittees can be divided into roughly three categories – one for pure academic merit, one for status (URM, athlete, first generation), and one more general category encompassing legacy/development/institutional priorities like professors child etc.

I suspect the reason for Asians relatively low percentage of admittances to top schools compared to their acadmeic achievement is that they do not fall into the latter two categories as much as other groups.