Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

When I was an admissions office for a short time, my advice to asian applicants looking to be noticed was to go to clown school, perform as a semi-professional magician, or even excel at sports.

Violin, cello, piano, essays about translating for your immigrant parents, computers, math, science...all that stuff blends together after awhile and makes it hard for an admissions office to remember you when sitting around the table voting on applicants.

I was pretty naive, and after thinking it over for a few minutes I decided to ask her for advice. I said to her: "Well, I'm really not sure what to tell you, see, my mother's Jewish, and my father's Ukrainian. Can you write them both? Or am I supposed to choose somehow? What do you think?" I'd actually thought it through a bit more and was ready to continue telling her how my parents were divorced and I was living with my mother so I should probably choose that side... but I decided to wait for her response first.

She looked at me a bit funny (I think now that she was trying to see if I was being ironic. I wasn't). She held a pause. And then she said firmly: "Let's just write you up as a Ukrainian, shall we?"

I feel supremely sorry for any 16-year-old trying to get into a top ranked school right now. As a fairly stable 26-year-old it made me depressed like nothing before. It's a broken process that's been spoiled rotten by the bottom feeders who will tell a kid "you won't get in unless you pay me five grand to help you." (i couldn't afford it...)

If you want to see some people really freak out over race and admissions, talk to some Indian B-school hopefuls (note: I am not Indian). They are absolutely bucketed and compete against one another.

They don't reject high-performance black athletes for lower performing, asian athletes. I've never once heard anyone complain that their university's football team had a disproportionate number of non-asian people.

Serious double standard there.

The illusion of merit that graduation from these schools imparts leads to a false sense of mastery amongst those who've been able to scale the pyramid of achievement, a self-deception that has had pretty profound consequences for the country since, oh I don't know, say 2008 or so.

[1]: http://chronicle.com/article/Pell-Grant-Recipients-Are/12689...

[2]: http://books.google.com/books?id=4JyQus8r9JYC&pg=PA150&#...

Why is asking for ethnicity even legal?

Jared Diamond concurs: http://www.learntoquestion.com/resources/database/archives/0...

If you believe their arguments, there is no scientific basis for categorizing someone on the basis of race. Appearance is particularly hazardous.

Therefore, why can't Asians mark black on the application? Who is to say they are not black if they self-identify as black? According to PBS, Jared Diamond, and many sociology departments, it is impossible to administer a genetic test that distinguishes African Americans from Asians, so self-identification is the only measure that matters.

So: why would Asians simply self-identify as white? Why not self-identify as black?

If race just a sociocultural construct, well, many Asian Americans certainly are into rap music and cultural markers that are associated with socially constructed category of African American. So why aren't they black?

The interesting thing is that the cutthroat high school his son is enrolled at - the AP weed-out courses, the hardest ones are the humanities. Courses like Modern European History.

> For these students, extracurricular activities play a different role than for their peers. They don’t use activities to signal their qualities, they use them instead to transform themselves into more interesting people. In other words, what’s important about an activity is not its impressiveness, but its impact on your personality.

http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/02/18/want-to-get-into-harva...

I mean, I'm sure the school would reject you if they knew you were lying about it, but there really isn't any way for them to tell, is there?

This is roughly how admissions works at Yale:

1. An officer reviews your application for 20-25 minutes. 1a. Some kids are clear rejects. 1500/2400 SAT and a 2.7 GPA, with no activities usually does the trick. The director (or an experienced officer) reviews these. 1b. Some kids are clear admits. These are incredibly rare - something like 20 kids out of 26000 I think? The director also reviews these but they're pretty much auto admits - think multiple gold medalists at IMO, IOI, and IPhO, stuff like that.

2. The officer writes a summary sheet that contains what the officer feels about you, good points, etc, if they like you. If they don't, you get put in the "no" pile. 2b. I believe most of these "no" applicants are reviewed by another officer, but not as deeply. The goal is to find false negatives - most people in the "no" pile stay there.

3. The application goes to a committee of 3-4 officers. They all read your profile and debate about whether or not to let you in. Your admissions officer is supposed to argue in your favor, and the others can argue for you or against you. Usually, most candidates at this point are solid, so the officers argue about possible negatives.

Something like 70% of applicants are qualified to attend Yale, so it usually breaks down to what you'll contribute to the campus community, what kind of a person you are, etc. A lot of admissions officers were former Yalies, so I imagine they even ask "would I hang out with this person?".

4. If you're accepted, you're golden. If you don't make it past committee, you usually don't get in. Some people get waitlisted. They also review several of the "no's" to avoid false negatives, and some people might be brought to committee again. If you're borderline between "admit" and "reject," you will usually be rejected or waitlisted. There's just too many really good applicants.

There is no EXPLICIT comparison of Asians to Asians. Nobody looks at your application and says "Oh, another Asian, let me turn on my asian scale!" What happens, subconsciously, is that the stereotypical asian profile is "high scoring, high gpa, piano/violin, tennis, math/science."

So a lot of qualified asians get rejected because their admission officer can't find enough good arguments for them. Regardless of how qualified you are individually, Yale is trying to build a diverse class, so if you do the same thing as 1000 other candidates, it's very hard to vouch for you. "What do you bring to the campus that this other kid doesn't? , and that's the end of it.

I don't think checking "Asian" or "not Asian" makes a huge difference, because in the end, it's your activities, recommendations, and essays that differentiate you. Once your scores are high enough, nobody is going to say "well Bob and Melinda are both cool, but Bob has a 2310 while Melinda has a 2270, so we should clearly go with Bob." That's just absurd - they always go with the person who will contribute more to Yale.

I hope that dispels some of the myths you see and hear. Correlation does not imply causation. People don't get rejected because they ARE Asian - it's usually the lack of differentiation. Again, I don't represent Yale or anything like that, and this is just what I've heard, but I believe it's fairly accurate, and for most Asians, they'll figure it out by your name, so a box isn't making a huge difference.

Edit: Legacy students (parent(s) went to Yale), recruited athletes, and under-represented minorities have higher admission rates than the overall pool. I don't know why or by how much or anything like that. This exists at almost every elite school.

I didn't know there was a quota on how many Asian students a college could accept.

And besides, doesn't a college want the best students in their college, regardless of ethnicity?

In any case, there's a suit 'Fisher v University of Texas at Austin' which experts think will be heading to the Supreme Court sometime in 2012, and may have a good chance of bringing education a little closer to the meritocracy it should be: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/sunday-review/college-dive...

Quoting from the anecdote:

All of my known forebears came from Europe, mostly from Southern Germany with a few from England, Ireland, and Scotland. A glance in the mirror, however, indicated that there was Middle Eastern blood in my veins. I have a semitic nose and skin that tans so easily that I am often darker than many people who pass for black. Did I inherit this from a Hebrew, an Arab, a Gypsy or perhaps one of the Turks who periodically pillaged Central Europe? Maybe it was from a Blackfoot Indian that an imaginative aunt thinks was in our family tree. I will probably never know.

As an arrogant young computer scientist, I believed that if there is any decision that you can't figure out how to program, the question is wrong. I couldn't figure out how to program racial classification, so I concluded that there isn't such a thing. I subsequently reviewed some scientific literature that confirmed this belief. "Race" is, at best, a fuzzy concept about typical physical properties of certain populations. At worst, of course, it is used to justify more contemptible behavior than any concept other than religion.

In answer to the race question on the security form, I decided to put "mongrel." This seemed like an appropriate answer to a meaningless question.

If it happens to be the case that race Y dominates admissions (or race Z can't seem to get a leg up), whether that domination be through genetic or cultural factors (or both), it is arguably racist to handicap admissions by appeal to soft factors. But consider:

Let's imagine (e.g.) global warming has destroyed US agriculture so all the gringos in the US have to migrate south to Mexico. The University of Mexico is (say) the premier university of Mexico, the Harvard all the best Mexican students want to attend. Historically, whites outperform latinos on admissions numbers (SAT and GPA). Would it make sense then for the University of Mexico to cease accepting latino-Mexicans (or substantially decrease their admissions rates) in favor of the new white-Mexicans with higher numbers? Would that be the fairest thing to do? Or would the U of M admissions board say things like "yeah whites have good numbers but they all kind of look the same to us. All from the same middle class families, all played tennis and hockey in high school, all want to be business/psych majors and join greek fraternities. We look at other things than just numbers."

I'm not entirely sure it's unfair to handicap asians, or assist blacks, if we've essentially industrialized the production of status-signalling - fixing the recommended amount of prestige and job offers a person should receive for the rest of his life at age 18 - and have to determine some means of doling it out.

Maybe the problem is that going to an elite school matters too much for arbitrary social reasons. We've all heard and read about how hiring at places, such as elite financial institutions, will simply discard any application from a person who didn't go to an elite university. No one wants to lose out on opportunity.

Why can't elite universities increase enrollment to increase the number of opportunities? They have the endowments for it. I'm not aware of any Ivy struggling to pay its bills.

If society thinks that people who attend these schools are a better value, then wouldn't it be of benefit to try to expand capacity?

It seems like an artificially created scarcity. Do top schools feel their brand is diminished if they start accepting 2k students vs 1.5k?

http://www.acenet.edu/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Programs_and_S...

The federal regulations on the subject

http://www.ed.gov/legislation/FedRegister/other/2007-4/10190...

require all colleges to ask, but no students to tell, which of the federally defined race or ethnicity categories

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/fedreg_1997standards

they belong to. A growing number of students decline to answer the questions, which are clearly marked as optional on all college application forms. Harvard

http://members.ucan-network.org/harvard

reports 12 percent of its enrolled undergraduates as "race/ethnicity unknown," and several other selective colleges have higher percentages of students reported as unknown race or ethnicity. Several state university systems, by state law, may not consider student race or ethnicity at all as part of the admission process.

The definitive online FAQ on the issue of race and ethnicity self-identification in college admission in the United States

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/12282...

links out to other relevant laws and official definitions and news stories, and gives links to reported enrollment figures for a wide variety of colleges.

After edit: A comment at the same comment level as this comment appears to be referring to a college's claimed rationale when it says:

I don't understand why they require ethnic proportions to stay close to population averages.

They don't. Indeed, it is strictly illegal to have admission quotas by race, since the Bakke decision decades ago. If you look at the actual enrollment figures, linked to from this comment, you will see that that is not what happens in practice either.

Another comment mentioned an applicant's view that he should not "lie about his race." This view motivates my children NOT marking anything on the forms, because the form questions are optional for applicants, and because my children think it is a lie to describe themselves as belonging to any narrower category than humankind. (From an old-fashioned American point of view, my children could be described as "biracial," but we prefer the term "human" and accept the term "postracial.")

I'm a baby boomer, which is another way of saying that I'm a good bit older than most people who post on Hacker News. I distinctly remember the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated--the most memorable day of early childhood for many people in my generation--and I remember the "long hot summer" and other events of the 1960s civil rights movement.

One early memory I have is of a second grade classmate (I still remember his name, which alas is just common enough that it is hard to Google him up) who moved back to Minnesota with his northern "white" parents after spending his early years in Alabama. He told me frightening stories about Ku Klux Klan violence to black people (the polite term in those days was "Negroes"), including killing babies, and I was very upset to hear about that kind of terrorism happening in the United States. He made me aware of a society in which people didn't all treat one another with decency and human compassion, unlike the only kind of society I was initially aware of from growing up where I did. So I followed subsequent news about the civil rights movement, including the activities of Martin Luther King, Jr. up to his assassination, with great interest.

It happens that I had a fifth-grade teacher, a typically pale, tall, and blonde Norwegian-American, who was a civil rights activist and who spent her summers in the south as a freedom rider. She used to tell our class about how she had to modify her car (by removing the dome light and adding a locking gas cap) so that Klan snipers couldn't shoot her as she opened her car door at night or put foreign substances into her gas tank. She has been a civil rights activist all her life, and when I Googled her a few years ago and regained acquaintance with her, I was not at all surprised to find that she is a member of the civil rights commission of the town where I grew up.

One day in fifth grade we had a guest speaker in our class, a young man who was then studying at St. Olaf College through the A Better Chance (ABC) affirmative action program. (To me, the term "affirmative action" still means active recruitment of underrepresented minority students, as it did in those days, and I have always thought that such programs are a very good idea, as some people have family connections to selective colleges, but many other people don't.) During that school year (1968-1969), there was a current controversy in the United States about whether the term "Negro" or "Afro-American" or "black" was most polite. So a girl in my class asked our visitor, "What do you want to be called, 'black' or 'Afro-American'?" His answer was, "I'd rather be called Henry." Henry's answer to my classmate's innocent question really got me thinking. Why can't individual human beings have the right to be treated as one more member of the general human race?

I ask this as a graduate of a Christian liberal arts college, which discriminates on the basis of religious beliefs. It's not entirely on topic but I think the "logic" still applies. Or does it?

Also, is it possible to be admitted if one is outside the typical age range of applicants (ie 18-19)?

I just don't know how these things work for you in the US, so I had to ask :)

Here is my suspicion (or what I would like to hear): Asian students are significantly higher-scoring, in both histograms. Such a result would go a long way towards vindicating the college admission process, and suggest that universities don't explicitly judge those who mark "Asian" by a different standard but rather choose to largely discount SAT scores (and by proxy academic performance).

Similar studies were used to discredit claims that engineering and science departments were practicing gender discrimination against women. Does anyone have a reference to a study on race in undergraduate admissions that takes this approach?

Asian [x] - If you're more "white"

White [x] - If you're more "asian"

Both [x] - If you open minded or PC

Neither [x] - If you want me to pick a side

Hapa [x] - If you'll allow me all of the above

Identity depends on where you stand.