Brian Taylor is director of Ivy Coach, a Manhattan company that advises families on how to get their students into elite colleges. A number of his clients are Asian American, and Taylor is frank about his strategy for them.Do I understand correctly that Asians should go into the racial closet when applying to universities?
“While it is controversial, this is what we do,’’ he says. “We will make them appear less Asian when they apply"...
Chen founded Asian Advantage College Consulting 20 years ago in response to what he considers bias against top Asian students in elite college admissions. His firm, which is based in Alameda, Calif., also has clients on the East Coast, he says, including Boston.
“The admissions officers are seeing a bunch of people who all look alike: high test scores, high grades, many play musical instruments and tend not to engage in more physical sports like football,” Chen says.
If students come to him early in high school, Chen will direct them to “switch to another musical instrument” or “play a sport a little bit out of their element.”
And for the college essay, don’t write about your immigrant family, he tells them: “Don’t talk about your family coming from Vietnam with $2 in a rickety boat and swimming away from sharks.”
Perhaps so:
Harvard consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than others on traits like “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected,” according to an analysis of more than 160,000 student records filed Friday by a group representing Asian-American students in a lawsuit against the university.Asian-Americans scored higher than applicants of any other racial or ethnic group on admissions measures like test scores, grades and extracurricular activities, according to the analysis commissioned by a group that opposes all race-based admissions criteria. But the students’ personal ratings significantly dragged down their chances of being admitted, the analysis found.
Perhaps university admissions officers are trying to channel Einstein:
Travel diaries he wrote during a months-long voyage in the 1920s reveal that in his private moments, the Nobel-winning physicist portrayed people of other races, such as Chinese and Indians, in a stereotypical, dehumanizing way. Einstein’s unfiltered musings about the people he saw and interacted with during his journey show that even the civil rights icon and “paragon” of humanitarianism harbored racist thoughts about those who did not look like him, said Ze’ev Rosenkranz, senior editor and assistant director of the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology...About a decade after his travels, in December 1932, Einstein and his wife left Germany for a three-month trip to the United States. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party took over the German government the following month. Einstein didn’t return home and stayed in the United States, where he became more aware of the plight of African Americans. He entrenched himself in the civil rights movement, signed anti-lynching petitions and volunteered to testify as a character witness in the trial of writer and philosopher W.E.B. Du Bois.“It would be easy to say, yes, he became more enlightened,” Rosenkranz said. But whether Einstein’s racist views, particularly about the Chinese, had changed, Rosenkranz is not sure.
6 comments:
I don't know. Affirmative action for males has been around for over ten years, and the left doesn't seem to to have a problem with it.
According to Ivy Wise affirmative action for males is common. (Yale appears to have the most extreme pro male bias.) The argument is:
"... a balanced campus is a diverse campus, and intellectual discussions should include equal input from both male and female points of view. Furthermore, a balanced campus is generally seen as more appealing and can increase a school’s selectivity."
I have mixed feelings about this, but it is probably true that most young women, even those who consider themselves feminists, don't want to attend a school that is overwhelmingly female.
I teach in a school with a very pronounced Asian demographic. Most of these students are Korean and Vietnamese. Neighboring districts have a large number of Chinese students. What we share is a concern that these students, the children of doctors, lawyers and engineers, are often overlooked for scholarships and grants, not to mention admissions, because they are Asian. This reflects both an arrogance and an ignorance of elite schools regarding the various Asian cultures. First of all, many of our Korean students excel because they have already had many of the standard high school math and science courses back home. Their parents send them to live with relatives in the States for several reasons, not the least of which is to dodge the mandatory military service and the fear of war on the peninsula. Our Vietnamese students, on the other hand, don't generally expect to leave home because many of them will work from the time the can walk to when they marry in family businesses. These students are especially hurt by choices to ignore test scores or downgrading based on ethnicity. I also don't believe in allowing "legacy" students to enter an elite school just because their parents or siblings went there. It's time for us to return to a system based on merit alone.
I don't know that we can "return" to a system based on merit alone, as I'm not convinced that has existed in the past century or more. "Asians are the new Jews" in college admissions.
But I'd like to get to a system based on merit alone.
In California it is illegal for the state colleges and universities to offer affirmative action based on race or gender. Berkeley does not give preferences for legacy students, so I guess that it's as close as you can get to a merit alone system.
I do wonder if test scores and grades are the best measure of merit. Look at Jack Ma. His grades and test scores were terrible. But when it comes to teamwork, leadership, imagination, and the ability to read the markets, he is clearly off the charts. A business school that wants a reputation for turning out competent middle managers, should probably stick with selection by grades and test scores. But a business school that wants to turn out game changers who dominate their industry needs to look for something more.
How do you identify these savants? Just let in a bunch of average scores and hope for the best?
Of course you're right. There are no easy answers. Perhaps colleges could look more closely at extra curricular activities such as team sports or starting a small business.
I'm also concerned about the growing male/female gap. I know that male applicants do not look as good on paper, but I just don't believe that boys are less competent than girls. Gaps like these are not healthy for our society. A number of colleges and universities are engaging in outreach to help males do better.
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