Chinese-American senior Jeremy Tong was clear in his view. “Race can also help you a lot as a student, but it also hurts a lot of people,” he said.
Sophomore Neerja Thakkar shared her opinion. “It used to be that being Asian would help you since colleges wanted diversity,” she said, “but now there’s so many Asians getting into top colleges that it can actually hurt you.”
In college applications, the box which students may check for race is determined by forces beyond the high school experience.
For Asian-Americans, the impact of race on an application is under dispute, especially when it comes to top tier schools. According to a segment in The New York Times’s online opinion forum “Room for Debate,” even though the population of college-age Asian-Americans has approximately doubled in the past twenty years, the average number of Asian-Americans enrolled in Ivy League schools has stayed at 17 percent. On the other hand, the California Institute of Technology, whose admissions office follows a race-blind policy, has Asian-American enrollment statistics that parallel population growth.
Director of College Counseling Mary Hill thinks that “there is the reality that universities and colleges of all shapes and sizes are always trying to consciously shape the class that they are enrolling.”
Hill does not believe that any college sets quotas or a goal to discriminate. “No college is sitting over there with a number count,” she said. How much a school “shapes” their group of accepted students may depend on the makeup of the applicant group, and the admitted group may not have the same numbers as the one that attends in the fall.
According to the Harvard University admissions web site, 21% of Class of 2016 admittances were Asian. “Harvard College welcomes talented students from all backgrounds, including Asian-Americans,” Senior Communications Officer at Harvard University Jeff Neal said in The New York Times.
Tong doubts these statements. “I guess that’s just an euphemism for whatever they do and in reality I’m sure that they’re not race-blind,” he said.
In response to the concern among students, Hill hopes that fears of discrimination will not prevent students from applying to certain schools. “I think when there are articles and discussions about statistics, it’s a piece of information to consider along with other bits of information,” Hill said.
Affirmative action, a policy used by some schools to reach out to underrepresented groups, is controversial due to how it may lead to reverse discrimination against majority groups.
A current case undergoing review in the United States Supreme Court, Fisher v. University of Texas concerns two female white students who believe that they were denied admission to the University of Texas based on their race. If the court rules against the school, affirmative action may end in public universities.
In his book, No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade wrote 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 [the] SAT (Total 1600).”
“That’s probably true,” Tong said in response to this. “From my experience, test scores didn’t really help me at all… they matter less when you’re trying to compete with other students for spots.” Test scores are not the entire application, but Tong believes that his extracurricular activities were not lacking, either.
Thakkar, who still has over a year before applying to colleges, has an Asian-American friend who blamed his race for the admission responses he received from colleges. “He noticed that his classmates who had similar applications to him got into better colleges than him just because they weren’t Asian,” Thakkar said.
Hill wants to dissuade students from finding a single reason for the college admission results they received. “I think it’s really important to realize that a college is never admitting a student simply because of their race or ethnic background. Is it a factor among many other factors? Yes, it is,” she said. “Even if you can sit on the right side of that admission officer who made that final call, it’s usually never a function of just one factor, but it’s natural and very human to try and make sense of it.”
Thakkar plans to face the college application process by succeeding in the parts she can control and putting fears of discrimination aside. “It’s not like you can really do anything about it, so I’m just going to try to keep my grades up… and just apply for colleges and see what happens,” she said.
Overall, Hill encourages this discussion of race’s impact on college admissions to continue. “I think it’s an important aspect of the process to keep calling attention to,” she said. “I think you have to examine and expose aspects of the admission process that can raise some difficult questions.”
