There’s mounting anger among Asian communities in the U.S. that many qualified Asian students get rejected by
top American universities in their attempt to ‘sculpt’ the class with race and gender
percentage in mind.
In May, when coding whiz Pooja Chandrashekhar,
the daughter of two Virginia-based engineers, aced the
admissions test and got into 14 U.S. schools—including
all eight Ivies—and was deciding between Harvard and
Stanford, her brilliance made headlines in India, but was
treated with moderation in the American media.
Chandrashekar is now bound for Harvard to study
courses geared towards medicine and bioengineering.
She has a 4.57 grade-point average, scored 2390 out of
2400 on the SAT, aced all 13 of her Advance Placement
exams and developed a mobile app that tests speech
patterns to predict if a person has Parkinson’s disease. She
is also the CEO and founder of a nonprofit ProjectCSGIRLS,
which spurs girls to participate in STEM programs—all
this before her 18th birthday.
Chandrashekar is part of a triumphal Indian
American narrative. But are brilliant Asian overachievers
beginning to face a barrier in the upper echelons of
the American educational system? Asian American success
is generally seen as a testament to the American
Dream. Still, is there an undercurrent of panic about
Asian Americans collectively dominating in elite high
schools and universities?
“Nowadays nobody on an admissions committee
would dare use the term racial ‘quotas,’ but racial stereotyping
is alive and well,” Sara Harberson, a former Ivy
League admissions dean writes in the Los Angeles Times.
“And although colleges would never admit students based
on ‘quotas,’ they fearlessly will ‘sculpt’ the class with race
and gender percentages in mind.”
Haberson is privy to the delicate, arcane workings of
elite-college admissions as she was the former associate
dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania and
former dean of admissions at Franklin & Marshall College.
“Has holistic admissions become a guise for allowing
cultural and even racial biases to dictate the admissions
process? To some degree, yes,” states Haberson.
If the American college application system was built
solely around test scores and grades, what you would
get is a classroom of overwhelmingly similar high test
scorers. But many elite colleges use “holistic admission”
standards, which allow a college to factor in a student’s
background, extracurricular involvement, skills diversity,
letters of recommendation, and many other criteria.
Unfortunately, race can fall into one of the “many
other criteria” and in some cases, the consideration of
race will work against Asian students.
“There’s an expectation that Asian Americans will
be the highest test scorers and at the top of their class;
anything less can become an easy reason for a denial.
Yet even when Asian American students meet this high
threshold, they may be destined for the wait list or outright
denial because they don’t stand out among the other
high-achieving Asian students. The most exceptional academic
applicants may be seen as the least unique, and so
admissions officers are rarely moved to fight for them,”
says Harberson.
She points out that holistic admissions can allow for
“a gray zone of bias at elite institutions” working against
Asian Americans.
Asians score highest in GMAT
There has been a burst of sharp analysis in the
press that lays bare some plain facts: Indian and Chinese
students, of American or indigenous origin, fare
better in entrance exams, especially for business
schools. The gap between Indian, Chinese, and U.S.
students on the math portion of the GMAT has widened.
Last year the mean raw score for students in the
Asian-Pacific region on that section was 45, above the
global mean of 38 and the U.S. mean of 33, according to
GMAC data.
“That’s causing a big problem for America’s prospective
MBAs,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “Asia-Pacific
students have shown a mastery of the quantitative portion
of the four-part GMAT. That has skewed mean test
scores upward, and vexed U.S. students, whose results
are looking increasingly poor in comparison. In response,
admissions officers at U.S. schools are seeking new ways
of measurement, to make US students look better.”
No proverbial golden ticket
Asian students who hit all the listed benchmarks are
also turned away from elite U.S. colleges because they
don’t have a “tag” associated with their application—what Harberson calls “the proverbial golden ticket.”
“Asian Americans are rarely children of alumni at the Ivies. There aren’t as many recruited athletes coming
from the Asian American applicant pool. Nor are they
typically earmarked as “actual” or “potential” donors.
They simply don’t have long-standing connections to these institutions,” says Haberson.
In contrast, students with tags may be “recruited
athletes, children of alumni, children of donors or potential donors, or students who are connected to the
well connected.”
Asian Americans file complaint
Harberson’s strong comments come in the middle
of a heated controversy about the use of race in elite
college admissions. A coalition of over 64 Chinese, Indian, Korean, and Pakistani organizations have filed a
complaint against Harvard University with the U.S.
Education Department for “systemic and continuous
discrimination” against Asian Americans who are held
to a higher standard compared to other students apply-ing for admission at elite universities.
In effect, it’s a kind of restrictive quota system,
but Harvard denies the charge, saying its “holistic” admissions process looks at applicants’ “extracurricular
activities and leadership qualities.”
Still, there appears to be subtle injustice at work against Asian American students. To get into elitist and exclusive Harvard, they need SAT scores that are about 140 points higher than those of their white peers.
The lawsuit filed in May on behalf of Asian applicants
offers strong evidence that Harvard University engages
in racial “balancing.”
Clearly, elite institutions like Harvard use “holistic” criteria as a way to apply different standards to different applicant groups—e.g., play down objective test scores for Asians, play up subjective recommendation letters for blacks and Hispanics.
The 50-page complaint accuses Harvard and other elite institutions of holding Asians to far higher standards than other applicants, a practice used to limit the number of Jewish students at Ivy League schools in the first half of the 20th century.
The complaint urges the government to ask
Harvard to “cease and desist from using stereotypes,
racial biases, and other discriminatory means in
evaluating Asian-American applicants during its
admission process.”
Uttara Choudhury is a contributing writer at Forbes India, an editor (North America) at Firstpost.com, and a consulting editor at BrainGain Magazine.