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Comment by liber8 | Hacker News Reader

Can you explain about these "unofficial quotas against Asians"? I'm genuinely curious if this actually exists. Note that less than 5% of Americans are Asian, but:

40% of UC students are asian (and it's higher at Cal, UCLA and UCSD (i.e. the better schools)).[1]

23% of Stanford students are asian (probably higher since that excludes "international" and "decline to state").[2]

26% of MIT students are.[3]

In other words, at (a small sampling of) the top schools, Asians are over-represented by anywhere from 400% to 1000%. It just doesn't seem like any sort of quota system exists, looking at the data.

[1]http://diversity.universityofcalifornia.edu/documents/divers...

[2]http://www.stanford.edu/dept/humsci/external/under/demograph...

[3]http://tech.mit.edu/V127/N31/admissions.html

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Asians may be over-represented relative to their proportion in the population at large, but the question you should be asking is "are Asian applicants over- or under-represented among applicants with certain grades and test scores?"

This is a widely studied and easily Google-able topic. Private schools discriminate against Asian Americans is through the combination of Affirmative Action (favors non-Asian students), athletics (favors non-Asian students - completely bizarre to non-Americans) and legacy admissions (favors non-Asian students).

I attended a famous public high school where Asian girls (officially) had to meet a much higher grades+scores standard than others. Many lawsuits, so I'm not sure whether this is still in place.

Of course it's open to debate, but I'm convinced there are unofficial quotas, though naturally no university will admit it. An interesting quote from a NY Times op-ed: "The Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade wrote in his 2009 book, No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life, that 'to receive equal consideration by elite colleges, Asian Americans must outperform Whites by 140 points, Hispanics by 280 points, Blacks by 450 points in SAT (Total 1600).'

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/12/19/fears-of-an-...

Two of those are California universities, where Asians form 13.6% of the population[1]. Since the average GPA for Asians in 2009 was 1623 and the next highest average (for white students) was 1581 [2] and the average GPA for Asians in 2009 was 3.09 vs. 2.88 for whites [3], I'm sure the percentage of Asians in California who earned the median SAT scores or GPA's at those schools was much higher than 14%, and was probably higher than the percentage of Asians in those schools. Also, I might note that UC Berkeley (Cal) and UCLA are located in metropolitan areas with Asian populations that are larger than the California average.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_California [2] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-08-25-SAT... [3] http://nationsreportcard.gov/hsts_2009/race_gpa.asp?tab_id=t...

The argument that Asians are over-represented and it proves the absence of any quotes reminded me of identical arguments I heard in the former USSR. They claimed over-representation of Jews in science, engineering, entertainment was a proof there was no anti-semitism!

Yes, indeed, those schools don't seem to have a quota.

However, this study appears to show a quota in place (starting around 2003) at the Ivy League schools.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-...

Under ethnicity-agnostic admissions standards, those percentages may be even higher.

Note that Stanford's and MIT's percentatges are notable lower than UC's. Why?

This is just speculation.

California has this:

    > California’s Master Plan for higher education, adopted in
    > 1960, guarantees a place in college for every state
    > resident who can benefit. The historic blueprint produced
    > systems and programs that have served as models for other
    > states and for countries across the globe.

Stanford is a private university, and MIT isn't in California. The UCs sound like they're public universities. Perhaps the Asian students in California who are blocked out of other universities end up going to UCs instead.

This one might be incorrect, but California being on the west coast might mean that there are more Asians per person in California than in many other parts of the US, too.

I assume the poster is referring to the effect of affirmative action for under-represented minorities which can be viewed as effectively taking away spots from over-represented minorities. Of course it also takes spots away from the majority group.

Or alternatively perhaps the poster refers to latent preference for 'blue blood'-connected individuals and networks?

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