Beida, i am not sure what is your agenda here using these irrelevant cases
to prove there is no discrimination against Asians in college admissions.
Statistical Evidence of Discrimination Against Asians
Three main sources of data contend that selective colleges discriminate
against Asians
First, some top colleges have in the past (though not recently) released
detailed admissions data. Second, in 1996 California banned state
universities from considering race and ethnicity in admissions decisions.
The result is a natural experiment where you can see what happens to the
number of Asians accepted before and after this decision. Finally,
researchers have tried to quantify whether the number of high performing
Asians has been increasing and whether that has corresponded to more
placements in selective schools.
The most cited, well-researched evidence that it’s harder for Asians to get
into top colleges is presented by Princeton professor Thomas Espenshade and
his collaborator Alexandria Radford in their 2009 book No Longer Separate,
Not Yet Equal. In this book, the researchers analyzed the complete
application histories of eight “elite” universities in 1997 (the last year
these schools released this information). While the data is over 15 years
old, it’s the most complete dataset publicly available.
Espenshade and Radford use the 1997 data to show the overall acceptance
rates by race and class at public and private universities with highly
selective admissions criteria. We will focus on the private institutions
data since most elite schools fit in that category. As the numbers show,
Asians have the lowest acceptance rates at the selective private
universities in this sample. The authors then lay out how admissions rates
vary by race and SAT score:
Asians have the lowest acceptance rate for each test score bucket.
While these descriptive statistics are useful, there could be additional
factors at play. The authors next build up a regression model that controls
for the applicants’ state of residence and academic performance. Model 5
shows the impact of race on likelihood of admissions after controlling for
these factors at these private schools. As the model shows, Asian applicants
have 67% lower odds of admission than white applicants with comparable test
scores.
Finally, the authors convert these findings into more intuitive results.
With white students as a baseline, they look at how much of a bump or
penalty students receive in terms of SAT scores on the basis of their race
They find that being Asian is the equivalent of a 140 point score penalty on
your SAT when applying to top private universities. For example, a white
student that scored 1360 on the SATs would be on equal footing with an Asian
student that scored 1500.
Ultimately, the authors come short of making any conclusions about whether
Asians are discriminated against. Their data indicates that Asians needed
higher standard test scores than whites to get accepted to top schools in
1997, but this doesn’t consider other parts of a “holistic” admissions
process such as athletic prowess, legacy status (being the child of an alum)
, or quality of admissions essays and recommendation letters.
The next piece of evidence frequently cited in the debate is the the
admissions data of public universities in California (Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD,
Davis, etc). In 1996 it became illegal for these schools to consider race in
their admissions criteria. This created a natural experiment showing what
happens to the number of Asian students at a school when admissions officers
are not allowed to consider that they are Asian.
Finally, the fact that the growth in the Asian population has not been
reflected in their numbers at top schools is cited as well. Not only have
the the number of college-aged Asians increased in the last two decades, the
number of academically high performing Asians has as well. This viewpoint
is summarized quantitatively by Ron Unz, founder of The American
Conservative - a publication that is quite vocal about this issue: The data
Unz has compiled shows that while the number of college aged Asians has
increased dramatically, their presence at top schools has shrunk or remained
flat. By contrast, Cal Tech, which has a strictly race neutral admissions
policy, has kept pace with the growth in the the Asian population. (This is
also true of the University of California school we previously examined).
Unz also contends you should see a lot more Asians at these Ivy League
schools during this time, because they were kicking ass and taking names
academically:
"Asians were less than 10 percent of U.S. Math Olympiad winners during the
1980s, but rose to a striking 58 percent of the total during the last
thirteen years 2000–2012. For the Computing Olympiad, Asian winners
averaged about 20 percent of the total during most of the 1990s and 2000s,
but grew to 50 percent during 2009–2010 and a remarkable 75 percent during
2011–2012.
….
"The statistical trend for the Science Talent Search finalists, numbering
many thousands of top science students, has been the clearest: Asians
constituted 22 percent of the total in the 1980s, 29 percent in the 1990s,
36 percent in the 2000s, and 64 percent in the 2010s.
…
“Although Asians represented only about 11 percent of California high
school students, they constituted almost 60 percent of the [National Merit
Scholars]… In Texas, Asians are just 3.8 percent of the population but were
over a quarter of the NMS semifinalists in 2010, while the 2.4 percent of
Florida Asians provided between 10 percent and 16 percent of the top
students… Asian over-representation was enormous [in New York]: the Asian 7
.3 percent of the population—many of them impoverished immigrant families—
accounted for almost one-third of all top scoring New York students.”
According to standardized tests and talent competitions, there is strong
evidence that Asian Americans aren’t just doing pretty well, they’re
completely dominating.
Many Asians believe they are being held to a different academic standard
than whites, blacks, and latinos. Universities should release the data that
puts the debate to rest. But if Asians are under represented on American
college campuses relative to what their academic performance would predict,
this seems like the sort of discrimination that history would ultimately
judge very harshly.
History always repeats itself....