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

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

#121

Post by tzs »

socratic wrote: post #39
BlackJack wrote: post #25

Full disclaimer: I'm a sophomore at Yale, my adviser last year was an admissions officer, and a friend of mine works in the admissions office. I'm also friends with the girl photographed, but that's irrelevant :) 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…

My understanding is that 0% of MIT admissions is non-academic admits (legacy, recruited athletes, development, under-represented minorities). Is that incorrect?

Note that you can adjust demographic characteristics of your student body without considering that characteristic in the admission process. You can instead work very hard to get more qualified people with the desired characteristic to apply, and to get those who are accepted to pick your school instead of some other school.

Caltech did this at one time with women (I don't know how they do it now). They would seek out high school women who showed promise in math and science, and encourage them to consider Caltech. Women who were accepted would be given trips for themselves and their parents to come visit the campus where the benefits of Caltech could be pitched.

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

#122

Post by wyclif »

True story: my wife is Asian (from the Philippines). She's done with school, but some of her friends are not. When they ask me for advice on this point, I tell them to check "Hispanic" instead of "Asian." Most Filipino ancestry is a combination of Chinese, Spanish, and Malay, but since the Philippines was colonised by Spain in c.16, it usually works like a charm in differentiating them from the mass of students with Korean, Chinese, and Japanese ancestry.

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

#123

Post by forensic »

andrewflnr wrote: post #54
cyrus_ wrote: post #41

Serious question: Is there any reason not to just lie about your ethnicity? Why not put "black" or "native american" on your app to really up your chances? 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?

They'll know when you show up for class. At best, that seems like a bad start for the year, if anyone from admissions happens to match your name and face.

This isn't true. Lots of people don't look their race for one thing

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

#124

Post by code_duck »

If you're half Asian and half European, why is checking 'White' considered hiding half your identity? That only makes sense in the background of US racial views, where Barack Obama is known as Black due to 50% of his heritage. So, if you're not 'pure white', you're not 'white', according to society. I feel it is worrisome that such an old style racist line of thought is ingrained into our culture in a way that few question.

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

#125

Post by tzs »

jpdoctor wrote: post #36
anatoly wrote: post #32

I was 13, I think, when I went to compete in the all-Ukrainian math olympiad, back a bunch of years ago when it was called a "republican" olympiad because Ukraine was a republic in the USSR and not a separate country. It was a long event: delegations from all the regions came and were housed in a sort of summer camp for two weeks. As we were getting registered, one of the organizers who was getting everyone's details…

It reminds me: I believe in Feyman's day, Jews were fighting a similar problem to Asians now. I'm pretty sure that SAM (a Jewish frat?) was gone by the 80s at MIT, as a calibration point. Edit: I was a little confused, he was turned away from Columbia for being Jewish. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota

Isaac Asimov also ran into Columbia's Jewish quota.

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

#126

Post by estevez »

Stories like this irk me, because they overlook the larger injustice of continuing to think about elite schools as meritocratic institutions, when they are plainly not. At Harvard, for example, the bottom half of the income distribution makes up 6.5% of students.[1] When we consider the most selective schools in aggregate, we see that nearly three-quarters of incoming freshmen at those schools are drawn from the top quartile of incomes.[2]

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&#...

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

#127

Post by nobody31 »

mikeknoop wrote: post #112
patio11 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yale has an explicit, declared policy to discriminate by race in admissions and hiring decisions. Sorry, it felt at least a little relevant towards the question of whether Yale racially discriminates. You can review, but not make copies, of this written policy. It is kept at - I kid you not - the Office of Equal Opportunity Programs.

Don't most admissions discriminate? For example, http://yale.lawschoolnumbers.com/stats/1011/ Play around with the year/school. Clicking on data points shows self-reported profile information. It's pretty clear there is a shifted standard in many cases.

That's why I always put African on the ethnic origin forms - I understand my ancestors came from Olduvai Gorge

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

#128

Post by Sukotto »

When asked for your race, answer "mongrel" http://yarchive.net/risks/mongrel.html

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.

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

#129

Post by jwingy »

estevez wrote: post #126

Stories like this irk me, because they overlook the larger injustice of continuing to think about elite schools as meritocratic institutions, when they are plainly not. At Harvard, for example, the bottom half of the income distribution makes up 6.5% of students.[1] When we consider the most selective schools in aggregate, we see that nearly three-quarters of incoming freshmen at those schools are drawn from the top…

According to this study (http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and-...), there's a clear correlation between students from high income backgrounds having higher scores versus students from lower income backgrounds having lower scores as well.

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

#130

Post by camz »

patio11 wrote: post #111
BlackJack wrote: post #25

Full disclaimer: I'm a sophomore at Yale, my adviser last year was an admissions officer, and a friend of mine works in the admissions office. I'm also friends with the girl photographed, but that's irrelevant :) 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…

Yale has an explicit, declared policy to discriminate by race in admissions and hiring decisions. Sorry, it felt at least a little relevant towards the question of whether Yale racially discriminates. You can review, but not make copies, of this written policy. It is kept at - I kid you not - the Office of Equal Opportunity Programs.

i definitely agree with patrick.

every school clearly remarks similar policies and reviewing the statistics is pretty self-evident. i don't see why everyone is making an issue to explain away the current standards when they're pretty clear.

i'm asian and it doesn't really bother me, since i've experienced similar situations in the "real world" during my career.

i've dealt with the principals and superintendents in nyc and they've made it abundantly clear that they want asians in their schools because "they raise the stats and increase funding." race clearly has an influence on the admission process at multiple levels of education.

the glass ceiling is pretty obvious when i had a "literal" 100% turnover rate within 12 months of every asian in my department at prestigious firm. this includes myself, i left within 12 months.

you simply make it so that your accomplishments are so undeniable that race no longer becomes an issue. however, i do personally feel that race shouldn't be a question that is asked at all or at least no one should answer them. i'd even go so far as to eliminate or redact applicant names to the admissions board as a question of independence.

go one year where no one is aware of an individual's race or name and i think that would be an interesting data set!

i hope that we'll move towards a true meritocracy instead of constantly worrying about race and other irrelevant facts.

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