Are Canadian Universities 'Too Asian'? | Hacker News Reader

Are Canadian Universities 'Too Asian'?

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Being a Waterloo alum working in Vancouver I'm just used to this ratio and I guess I've just adapted to the fact that its being 'normal' for 30-40% of my colleagues to be asian. But whenever I wonder if I should worry about the fate of my entitled WASPish brothers being locked out of certain programs, I just remember a great line from a recent 30 Rock:

"The first generation works their fingers to the bone making things, the next generation goes to college, innovates things, the third generation...snowboards and takes improv classes".

Soon enough, there will be asian students who take improv classes who's parent's will bitch about their school spots being taken by super-students from Elbonia

That is an excellent point. I can't see a lot of my Asian friends driving their kids nearly as hard as their parents have driven them.

I'm a UofT student, and it's the same here. There's nothing particularly bothersome about having a lot of students from Korea and China. There's not even really much to get used to. Yeah, there are asians. So what?

The parents in the article claim that the asian students beat them out, but honestly, it was really easy to get into this university. I had terrible grades in my first two years of high school, and for the most part I was rejected by (good) US colleges (probably also because I didn't have my green card). I was even forced to apply later than students in Canada, because I did not go to an Ontario high school and had to fill in a different form with a later submission date. All these things would seem to be disadvantages, and I didn't figure on getting accepted at all. And yet I got into UofT (and Waterloo). It's remarkably easy to get into a university like this -- possibly because you're only allowed to apply to three Ontario universities -- and I don't buy the parents' arguments at all. More likely their kids got terrible grades, and that's nobody else's fault.

Honestly I can't believe we're even having this discussion. The last time I heard about fears of Chinese immigration was in history class.

  The last time I heard about fears of Chinese immigration was in history class.

Expect a lot more of it if the economy stays in the toilet.

I'm far more worried about Chinese emigration. It used to be that Chinese students came to Canadian universities and then start companies like ATI. Now they come to Canadian universities and go back to China or Taiwan and start companies.

This is more of an interesting concern, especially considering how much money Canada spends getting students in. I don't know the numbers for emigration, though. Have any figures?

It's possible that they still stay here, but don't start companies like ATI anymore. Being anonymous employee #5761 at ATI is cool too.

I spent 6 years at SFU and am now in my 3rd at UBC. The biggest problem I see is that people form micro-societies everywhere. Mostly people seem to stick to their own ethnicity too. I figure it's a cultural thing. No one wants to be somewhere they don't fit in and don't belong. I had a really hard time at SFU with making friends and having a life. UBC is a big enough school that I've had a much easier time but I'm still largely a floater. I'm a métis, i fit everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

I think I share a similar sentiment. I was born in mainland China but moved to the US at an early age, and I'm a fluent Chinese speaker. But I found that I fit well with neither the Chinese student associations (mostly recent immigrants) nor the Chinese-American student associations (mostly ABCs, American-born Chinese).

Ultimately I rejected the groups that were based on ethnicity and instead participated in ones centered around an activity. Whether it was programming, board games, or quiz bowl, there was always a healthy multicultural mix of people. A shared heritage provides some basic level of camaraderie, which tends to be very consistent and reliable, but common interests certainly are better at holding one's attention.

It doesn't have to be a strong cultural thing; even tiny individual preferences will tend to get amplified:

http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/Segregation

(Schelling also covers a slightly different neighborhood model, closer version to an aggregate group like a school, in his Micromotives and Macrobehaviors)

I took Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. My class had lots of Asians (and other minorities), and to a large degree they beat the pants off most of us white people for grades.

But that was the point of going there, I thought. I had scholarship offers from universities where they were going to make it easy on me. The high immigrant population at Waterloo shifted the bell curve so that all the courses had to be harder. Why would I spend money and four years of my life on something that wasn't as challenging as possible?

So thanks, hard-working immigrants, for raising the bar and therefore the quality of my education :) I hope the best Canadian universities continue to be smart enough to not try to influence it the other way.

By the way, I lived in London Ontario for a while, and the University of Western Ontario seems to be exactly as characterized in the article; mind boggling. But hey, I'm all for diversity. If that's what the majority of white people want to pay for, then sell it to them.

Universities shouldn't be worried about racial quotas or anything like that -- but they should be worried about homogeneity (at least, private universities). There's a very good point to be made that a university should be a place where people of different backgrounds and cultures can come together in a collective environment. If you have 60% 'Asian students who want to major in math or science and play the violin' that's an issue, just as 60% white business major lacrosse-players is an issue.

I do have to say, one area where I'm concerned is graduate international admission. In my experience the TOEFL is clearly not cutting it with some people and knowing English is not optional as a graduate student -- you NEED to be able to easily communicate with your fellow grads and, perhaps most importantly, the undergrads you TA. Similarly, strong accent should definitely be a factor in choosing who can lecture classes. I don't care how good a researcher someone is if no one can understand them. This isn't even a complaint about Asian students and professors, either. The person I'm thinking of is Brazilian.

I kind of agree; it annoys me to meet people who emigrated and after years still speak with a thick accent and make strong grammar mistakes. I'm brazillian, and I observe this phenomenon both with foreign people in brazil (who apparently refuse to learn some vowels and gendered nouns) and brazillians who emigrate to english-speaking countries and still have crappy english.

I wonder why this is, though. First time I went to london (I was young) I was shocked that I, just out of movies and internet and some classes, spoke a better english than most working people I met in the streets who seemed to have emigrated there years ago.

Sone people are just better at some things than others. I know some "musicians" who can't play a steady rhythm even after years. It's also connected with exposure as a child. (Works both for music and language.) It's less common for someone to achieve the high fluency level of a native speaker starting as an adult.

It doesn't surprise me that learning from movies and the internet would make you more proficient than someone who learnt by living in the UK. When people are forced to speak a language that they do not know well they often end up reinforcing bad habits. Once someone has developed bad pronunciation or inadvertently trained themselves to ignore certain grammatical features it takes a lot of effort to correct the habits. Of course a committed learner can offset this to some degree, but most immigrants aren't willing to put in the effort and are only partially aware of the mistakes they are making. After three years they then speak in much the same way as they did after six months, but with a larger vocabulary.

Universities don't care.

It is naive to believe that a research university's purpose is to educate its undergrads. If you speak to any professor, they will tell you that the purpose of a university is to create ground breaking innovation on the bleeding edge of their fields. The undergrads are there just because they have to deal with it. Given the option of teaching and research, most professors wouldn't think twice.

Would this look out of place in pre-war Germany if you substitute "Jewish" for "Asian"?

How about looking at things as if the individual matters?

More smart, hardworking people only makes a country stronger and life better for the average person.

Need proof? Experiment with the exact opposite. Move to a place where everyone is dumb as a post. You may be the smartest fish in a mucky little pond, but you'll never get your order right at the drive-thru again. Break a leg and wake up with a cast on your arm.

Pre-war America, starting with Harvard, invented college admissions departments as a way to keep Jews out. Before so-called holistic criteria to find "balanced" students, when they just looked at academics, Jewish students were outcompeting the Protestants who "should" have had the majority at Harvard.

The groups in favor change but the system, the self-serving rhetoric justifying it, and the empire of lies which protect it continue virtually unchanged to the present day.

Franklin Roosevelt played a key role in setting this up at Harvard[1]. I was so gobsmacked, I looked up the reference, which was a memoir by Morgenthau, I think his Secretary of State, and the only Jewish member of his cabinet. Roosevelt was telling this story to justify his refusal to increase the quota of Jews allowed to immigrate to the US, in the face of violent anti-semitism in Germany. His argument was that you can't favor one group over another, because that would be invidious. Amazing.

[1]http://books.google.com/books?id=8HKQEJlAl9gC&lpg=PP1...

Most Jews were no immigrants. They had been living in Germany for centuries. Ironically, during most of that time, Jews were forced to be different, banning them from most occupations and from owning land. Modern North-American culture is based on integration and assimilation.

Basically, anybody can be American, if you think and do like they do. A major step forwards from blut und boden. If only we could also accept those who choose to remain different.

Many Americans still treat you like a foreigner if you look different. I know from being born here and living here for 4 decades.

The flip side of this is that a large number of Jewish people in Germany maintained their clear cultural separation for around 500 years even though the 'looking different' aspect seems to have diminished over time. In retrospect you'd have to say that outperforming the locals without becoming one of them isn't appreciated.

You mean: "... if you don't look white or black..." Just ask anyone to draw a picture of an "All-American". Most folks will draw someone white or black.

This kind of comment would be more credible if the same person would admit the equivalent: More dumb, tax-eating people makes a country weaker and life worse for the average person.

It's rare, let me tell you, for the same person to hold those two ideas together.

Huh? Why wouldn't someone believe that?

Being an unproductive member of society living on welfare sucks money from the state, which could otherwise do things like offer more support (healthcare), improve infrastructure, fund medical research, etc.

And if you read the entire comment, you'd see "the same person" (me) is saying more dumb people make life worse. Or am I not reading my own comment correctly?

This report reminds me of the WSJ's article on "White Flight" from a few heavily Asian high schools in the Silicon Valley: http://wsjclassroom.com/teen/teencenter/05nov_whiteflight.ht...

And somewhat of NYT's report on my alma matter (Berkeley): http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/education/edlife/07asian.h...

Personally, as a white person who attended a heavily Asian high school and college, I never understood this fear of a school being "too Asian". It might just be the hacker in me, but I felt that the added competition such demographics supposedly brings only betters everyone.

It seems most interesting to me how the blatant racial statistics and stereotypes in this article receive nary a comment.

Yet if the subject was, for example, how a study showed "blacks" underperform in American high school, people would be lining up to point out how the study is flawed, etc (since any seeming statistical patterns based on race are all imagined, or manipulations of data).

Am I the only one that sees a double standard here? Or is it as simple as: you can be racist when complimenting, but not when criticizing?

Do you have any concrete arguments as to why the study/statistics in the above article is flawed?

Not at all.

That Asian students work harder is a fact born out by hard data.

But, replace "Asian" with "black", and "harder" with "much less hard" in the above sentence, and people would be lining up to state in a variety of ways that any study making such an assertion is inherently flawed, as no measurable differences in achievement amongst races or cultures has been, or can be, objectively measured, since no such difference exists, period.

Just an interesting observation.

> One panellist, Rachel Cederberg—an Asian-American then working as an admissions official at Colorado College—described fellow admissions officers complaining of “yet another Asian student who wants to major in math and science and who plays the violin.”

The discrepancy of performance required between asian and white kind of makes sense taken in context of that quote. If your application looks exactly the same as a couple hundred other students, you're going to be compared against them first. A University can't admit only the math/science violinists, they need at least some variety, so you'll be measured against the people similar to you rather than all the applicants.

p.s. what is it with violin and piano, anyway? Is it because they are classical (and thus appear refined) yet can solo?

Violin and piano are indeed the most popular solo instruments in classical music. I won't stretch it too much if by saying that some of the best classical pieces are piano and violin concertos. At least 7 years of piano education were almost unavoidable growing up in former Soviet Union as well. There were free music lessons for everyone. Most people never touched the instrument after they were done. However some ended up switching to guitar or being able to play piano/keyboard for friends' entertainment. So overall I am glad I grew up in a country where music education was so universal.

"According to a 2009 UBC report on direct undergraduate entrants, 43 per cent of its students self-identify as ethnically Chinese, Korean or Japanese, as compared to 38 per cent who self-identify as white. Although Vancouver is a richly diverse city, according to data from the 2006 census, just 21.5 per cent of its residents identify as a Chinese, Korean or Japanese visible minority."

I don't get why the article compares student body race ratios with the general population race ratios in the same city. I wouldn't expect them to be the same, especially given that admissions is meritocratic, and that a school admits kids from different places.

They are also neglecting to point out that that 21.5% number includes people that are 'too old,' 'too young.' or just plain not interested in university.

Also, whats the difference between identifying as "ethnically X" verses "as a X visible minority?" Are they using some weird sort of weasel words?

I'm going to venture that the article is simply using the language from the reprots cited. UBC probably asks about ethnicity. Visible minority is a legal term in Canada (hence would be on the census): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_minority

The vast majority of the student population in Vancouver is local - out of province admissions are relatively few. Besides, the trend is for folks from Western Canada to drift eastward, not the reverse.

Also, keep in mind the racial distribution across the province of BC - if anything, accounting for the fact that UBC admits students from all over the province, one would expect the population to get more white, not more Asian.

"many white students simply believe that competing with Asians—both Asian Canadians and international students—requires a sacrifice of time and freedom they’re not willing to make. They complain that they can’t compete for spots in the best schools and can’t party as much as they’d like"

Time to file for an injunction to suspend Evolution's "survival of the fittest"

Partying hard at college seems a relatively good way to propagate your DNA to the next generation. I would be wary of ascribing any worthiness to the ones that do so compared with say childless nuclear physicists.

The real problem seems to be that people are of too similar a mindset, regardless of backround.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/the-orga...

no, these people just feel so entitled that they want to be able to party party party AND feel (not actually be) well-educated. anyone who works harder than them and learns more is threatening to this feeling.

I wholeheartedly agree, but admittedly, partying may in fact be the main purpose for which some of these people are there, not the education. Ask the business school students whether they got more from their classes or the connections they made.

I have a few friends who are in business school and the sole reason they went back (undergrad business in Stern) was to network a little bit and make connections. In terms of class and learning, they knew going in that there was not much to offer.

I'm going to business school (enrolled yesterday), and did so because I noticed that even though I'm much more qualified than some colleagues, they're getting ahead because of their connections.

And I believe it's a human fact of nature and understandable. (also, qualified doesn't mean I actually am a better fit or better worker, just that I studied more).

My reasons for going for Business school are that if I show that I'm hardworking, qualified and an acquaintance, I can shoot for the jobs above my current "glass ceiling".

If it fails or I'm so inclined, I'll go the startup/enterpreneur route :) (I'll probably try both shooting for the CTO position and enterpreneurship on the side)

Why would you want to go to university with a bunch of completely uncreative people who only sit around and study? Studying (for actual classes) is only part of what university is about. Most Asians are so bland that they could easily be replaced by some sort of advanced work/study-robots and we wouldn't know the difference.

Of course, since universities have been turned into factories, robots are perfectly adapted to that environment.

This is one of the most incredibly racist things I've ever read. I beg you to reconsider - look at the incredibly rich cultural traditions of China (India could also fit into this mold), and then talk to me about creativity.

This is obviously a subjective matter, but I would say that the sum of the culture of the West is far richer than that of any other culture, even though ancient China and India are impressive in many ways.

But it really doesn't matter what China was like 2000 years ago. What matters is what Asians are like _today_.

Okay - look at the Beijing 2008 Olympics. The bird's nest, the water cube, the opening and closing ceremonies.

Now let's compare it to the London Olympics in 2012. Then you can tell me which culture is more creative!

So is your contention that most asians are uncreative and most westerners are creative folks?

It is my observation that Asians, on average, are more uncreative/conformist/careerist/bland than Westerners. But hey, that's OK -- I just wouldn't want to got to a university with too many Asians.

I see. An interesting generalization for sure :)

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