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Thursday, April 17, 2008

Are East Asians Just Too Smart?

Why did Chinese-American Jian Li, a Middle Class student who got a perfect 2400 on his SAT...still get rejected by Harvard, Princeton, UPenn, Stanford & MIT?

"I so good at math and science ... I the super smart Asian. Princeton the super dumb college, not accept me ... My dad from Kung Pao province. I united 500 years of Rice Wars ... I love Yale. Lots of bulldogs here for me to eat." - racist joke mocking Jian Li published in Daily Princeton
Is Admissions Bar Higher for Asians At Elite Schools?

based on their outstanding grades and test scores, Asian-Americans increasingly say their enrollment should be much higher -- a contention backed by a growing body of evidence.

Whether elite colleges give Asian-American students a fair shake is becoming a big concern in college-admissions offices. Federal civil-rights officials are investigating charges by a top Chinese-American student that he was rejected by Princeton University last spring because of his race and national origin.

research indicating colleges give less weight to high test scores of Asian-American applicants -- may push schools to boost Asian enrollment

His complaint seeks to suspend federal financial assistance to Princeton until the university "discontinues discrimination against Asian-Americans in all forms by eliminating race preferences, legacy preferences, and athlete preferences."

Mr. Li, who emigrated to the U.S. from China as a 4-year-old and graduated from a public high school in Livingston, N.J., said he hopes his action will set a precedent for other Asian-American students. He wants to "send a message to the admissions committee to be more cognizant of possible bias, and that the way they're conducting admissions is not really equitable," he said.

In 1990, a federal investigation concluded that Harvard University admitted Asian-American applicants at a lower rate than white students despite the Asians' slightly stronger test scores and grades. Federal investigators also found that Harvard admissions staff had stereotyped Asian-American candidates as quiet, shy and oriented toward math and science. The government didn't bring charges because it concluded it was Harvard's preferences for athletes and alumni children -- few of whom were Asian -- that accounted for the admissions gap.

In 1989, as the federal government was investigating alleged Asian-American quotas at UC's Berkeley campus, Berkeley's chancellor apologized for a drop in Asian enrollment. The next year, federal investigators found that the mathematics department at UCLA had discriminated against Asian-American graduate school applicants. In 1992, Berkeley's law school agreed under federal pressure to drop a policy that limited Asian enrollment by comparing Asian applicants against each other rather than the entire applicant pool.

Asian-American enrollment at Berkeley has increased since California voters banned affirmative action in college admissions. Berkeley accepted 4,122 Asian-American applicants for this fall's freshman class -- nearly 42% of the total admitted. That is up from 2,925 in 1997, or 34.6%, the last year before the ban took effect. Similarly, Asian-American undergraduate enrollment at the University of Washington rose to 25.4% in 2004 from 22.1% in 1998, when voters in that state prohibited affirmative action in college admissions.

The University of Michigan may be poised for a similar leap in Asian-American enrollment, now that voters in that state have banned affirmative action. The Center for Equal Opportunity study found that, among applicants with a 1240 SAT score and 3.2 grade point average in 2005, the university admitted 10% of Asian-Americans, 14% of whites, 88% of Hispanics and 92% of blacks. Asian applicants to the university's medical school also faced a higher admissions bar than any other group.

Mr. Reider, a former Stanford admissions official, said Stanford staffers were dismayed 20 years ago when an internal study showed they were less likely to admit Asian applicants than comparable whites. As a result, he said, Stanford strived to eliminate unconscious bias and repeated the study every year until Asians no longer faced a disadvantage.

Last month, Mr. Reider participated in a panel discussion at a college-admissions conference. It was titled, "Too Asian?" and explored whether colleges treat Asian applicants differently.

he is hearing more complaints "from Asian-American parents about how their children have excellent grades and scores but are being rejected by the most selective colleges. It appears to be an open secret."

Mr. Li, who said he was in the top 1% of his high-school class and took five advanced placement courses in his senior year
, left blank the questions on college applications about his ethnicity and place of birth. "It seemed very irrelevant to me, if not offensive," he said. Mr. Li, who has permanent resident status in the U.S., did note that his citizenship, first language and language spoken at home were Chinese.

Along with Yale, he won admission to the California Institute of Technology, Rutgers University and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. He said four schools -- Princeton, Harvard, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania -- placed him on their waiting lists before rejecting him. "I was very close to being accepted at these schools," he said. "I was thinking, had my ethnicity been different, it would have put me over the top. Even if race had just a marginal effect, it may have disadvantaged me."

He ultimately focused his complaint against Princeton after reading a 2004 study by three Princeton researchers concluding that an Asian-American applicant needed to score 50 points higher on the SAT than other applicants to have the same change of admission to an elite university.

"As an Asian-American and a native of China, my chances of admission were drastically reduced,"
Mr. Li claims in his complaint.

Just at the moment when Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have presidents named Rudenstine, Levin, and Shapiro, those institutions are widely suspected of having informal ceilings on Asian admissions, of the kind that were imposed on Jews two generations ago.

13 Comments:

At Saturday, August 29, 2009 at 12:47:00 PM PDT, Anonymous ahso said...

And the racial IQ gap just keeps widening...

 
At Tuesday, September 15, 2009 at 8:53:00 PM PDT, Anonymous Nerdlover said...

Lee and Yeh, two students (from MIT, of course) put together a low-budget rig to fly a camera high enough to photograph the curvature of the Earth. Instead of rockets, boosters and expensive control systems, they filled a weather balloon with helium and hung a styrofoam beer cooler underneath to carry a cheap Canon A470 compact camera. Instant hand warmers kept things from freezing up and made sure the batteries stayed warm enough to work.

Of course, all this would be pointless if the guys couldn’t find the rig when it landed, so they dropped a prepaid GPS-equipped cellphone inside the box for tracking. Total cost, including duct tape? $148.

 
At Friday, December 25, 2009 at 9:40:00 AM PST, Anonymous Ben said...

It's called "positive discrimination" best get used to it, yes it's shit but to make an unfair world appear fair, on paper at least... It's the same thing that stops any ethnicity getting what they want, if an organisation already has "their share" of a particular creed. Once their qouta is set and reached you have more chance of platting piss than changing their mind.

However, I would recommend Tianjin university, world leader for aerospace post grads. After all does the world need 1 more lawyer??

 
At Friday, January 8, 2010 at 8:40:00 PM PST, Anonymous herstory said...

SINCE its economic reform began in 1978, China has gone from being a poor developing country to the second-largest economy in the world. China has also emerged from isolation to become a political superpower. Its meteoric rise has been one of the most important global changes of recent years: the rise of China was the most-read news story of the decade, surpassing even 9/11 and the Iraq war.

Yet when it comes to science and technology, most people still think of China as being stuck in the past and only visualise a country with massive steelworks and vast smoking factories.

That may have been true a few years ago, but it is no longer the case. Very quietly, China has become the world's second-largest producer of scientific knowledge, surpassed only by the US, a status it has achieved at an awe-inspiring rate. If it continues on its current trajectory China will overtake the US before 2020 and the world will look very different as a result. The historical scientific dominance of North America and Europe will have to adjust to a new world order.

In the west, we are largely familiar with research systems in which money, people and output stay roughly the same from year to year. Research spending in Europe and North America has outpaced economic growth since 1945, but not by a dramatic amount.

Not so with China. Data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development shows that between 1995 and 2006, China's gross expenditure on R&D (GERD) grew at an annual rate of 18 per cent. China now ranks third on GERD, just behind the US and Japan and ahead of any individual European Union state.

Universities have experienced similar growth. China's student population has reportedly reached 25 million, up from just 5 million nine years ago. China now has 1700 higher education institutions, around 100 of which make up the "Project 211" group. These elite institutions train four-fifths of PhD students, two-thirds of graduate students and one-third of undergraduates. They are home to 96 per cent of the country's key laboratories and consume 70 per cent of scientific research funding.

China's student population has reached 25 million, up from just 5 million nine years ago

What impact has this had? I recently authored a report analysing China's research strengths and its patterns of international collaboration. The data was drawn from Thomson Reuters, which indexes scientific papers from around 10,500 journals worldwide.

In 1998, China's research output was around 20,000 articles per year. In 2006 it reached 83,000, overtaking the traditional science powerhouses of Japan, Germany and the UK. Last year it exceeded 120,000 articles, second only to the US's 350,000.

Compare that rate of growth with the US, where research output increased by about 30 per cent over the past decade, and it is clear that normal ideas about science management simply do not apply to China.

China is also diversifying its research base. A traditional industrial economy would focus its research on physical sciences and engineering, and our findings confirm that this is where China has been concentrating. But it is also rapidly shifting out of the old economy into new areas.

 
At Friday, January 8, 2010 at 8:40:00 PM PST, Anonymous herstory said...

China produces 10 per cent of the world's publications in engineering, computer sciences and earth sciences, including minerals. It now also produces 20 per cent of global output in materials sciences, with a leading position in composites, ceramics and polymer science and a strong presence in crystallography and metallurgical engineering. The implications for future industrial development are enormous, as China makes the transition from a manufacturing economy to a knowledge economy based on research coming out of its own institutions.

Agricultural research is also expanding as China takes a scientific approach to its vast food demand and supply. Its relatively small share of molecular biology and related areas - around 5 per cent - has suddenly become an investment focus too. If growth in biomedical sciences is as rapid and substantial as it has been elsewhere then China's impact on gene and protein research will be profound.

An obvious word of warning needs to be made here: quantity is not the same as quality. Measuring the volume of China's scientific output is clearly both valuable and surprising but it doesn't tell us whether that research was any good. For that we turn to a useful proxy: China's scientific collaboration with other countries better known for the high quality of their science. The results here, too, are eye-opening.

China is not doing science behind closed doors; its international collaborations are growing. Nearly 9 per cent of papers originating from Chinese institutions have a US-based co-author. Japanese and British co-authorship is also growing. Collaboration with South Korea and Singapore almost trebled between 2004 and 2008 and collaboration with Australia expanded too - signs, perhaps, of an emerging Asia-Pacific regional network.

So what does this all mean? Firstly, China's emergence as a scientific superpower can no longer be denied, and it is a question of when rather than if it will become the world's most prolific producer of scientific knowledge. Perhaps more importantly, China's expanding regional collaborations show that Asia-Pacific nations no longer rely on links to the European and American institutions that have traditionally led the science world.

The question for the EU and the US as we enter the new decade is no longer about whether we should collaborate with China, but what we can bring to the table to ensure that China wants to collaborate with us.

 
At Sunday, April 4, 2010 at 6:56:00 PM PDT, Anonymous 2AZN said...

YUP! First TOO SMART!
& now TOO ATHLETIC!

6'5" offensive lineman Ed Wang seeks NFL career!

Living legend Jeremy Lin seeks NBA career!

What will they do next to STOP US???

And hey Ben, there is no such thing as "positive" discrimination! ALL discrimination is NEGATIVE!!

 
At Tuesday, December 28, 2010 at 9:48:00 AM PST, Anonymous easternwiseazz said...

"So who the Magi are in this text is, they are descendants of Adam and Eve's third son, Seth. They live in this far eastern land. The text calls the land 'Shir' and from other ancient texts, it seems like the place it had in mind is the land of China."

Landau said the rediscovered text described the Magi as practicing religious rituals, waiting for the Star of Bethlehem to appear. When the star finally did, they embarked on their journey to the City of David.

the Star of Bethlehem not only led the Wise Men, but actually became the Christ child.

"The cave is filled with light," Landau said, describing the transcribed text. "They're kind of hesitant about this, but eventually the star...its light concentrates and reveals the small luminous human being...a star child, if you will...it's Christ."

"star child" spoke to the Magi.

"Christ tells them, 'This is one of many occasions on which I have appeared to the peoples of the world,'" Landau said. "So this text may even be saying that there are no non-Christian religions because Christ is the revelation behind everything."

 
At Monday, March 14, 2011 at 8:42:00 PM PDT, Anonymous YUS=FAIL said...

How Affirmative Action is used by liberals to stop the Yellow Peril!

1,623 - out of a possible 2,400 - not only separates Asians from other minorities (Hispanics and blacks average 1,364 and 1,276 on the SAT, respectively). The score also puts them ahead of Caucasians, who average 1,581. And the consequences of this are stark.

Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade, who reviewed data from 10 elite colleges, writes in “No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal’’ that Asian applicants typically need an extra 140 points to compete with white students. In fact, according to Princeton lecturer Russell Nieli, there may be an “Asian ceiling’’ at Princeton, a number above which the admissions office refuses to venture.
***
Blacks in the admission pool have more likely than Vietnamese students been children of parents who have attended college, not been faced with language problems and come from households with higher incomes. Thus, while the black students in the admission pool have typically lower academic achievement, their academic performance cannot be traced to socioeconomic disadvantages inasmuch as Asian students, especially Vietnamese, can demonstrate greater obstacles.

In response to the lack of academic competitiveness on the part of black students, leading to their "under-representation," black advocates complained that the admissions system was unfair to black students and needed to be changed. Predictably, UCLA administrators responded to their complaints by implementing the necessary changes to trigger higher rates of admission for black applicants.

So, we have a system which elevates subjective factors such as "adversity," leadership, and community service to a status equal to that of the more objective standards of academic achievement.

What UCLA has done is indefensible, it seems to me, and I believe the campus knows it. - Ward Connerly

"The shocking decline in 2006 in the number of African American high school students offered admission to UCLA -- combined with the small number of African American students who elected to attend the university -- became a catalyst for consideration of changes in the admissions process in 2006..." - Kevin Reed, UCLA's vice chancellor for legal affairs
***
Espenshade and Radford show the substantial admissions boost, particularly at the private colleges in their study, which Hispanic students get over whites, and the enormous advantage over whites given to blacks. They also show how Asians must do substantially better than whites in order to reap the same probabilities of acceptance to these same highly competitive private colleges. On an "other things equal basis," where adjustments are made for a variety of background factors, being Hispanic conferred an admissions boost over being white (for those who applied in 1997) equivalent to 130 SAT points (out of 1600), while being black rather than white conferred a 310 SAT point advantage. Asians, however, suffered an admissions penalty compared to whites equivalent to 140 SAT points.

 
At Saturday, December 3, 2011 at 9:42:00 PM PST, Anonymous AffirmativeRacism said...

A study by Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade examined applicants to top colleges from 1997, when the maximum SAT score was 1600 (today it's 2400). Espenshade found that Asian-Americans needed a 1550 SAT to have an equal chance of getting into an elite college as white students with a 1410 or black students with an 1100.

 
At Saturday, December 3, 2011 at 9:43:00 PM PST, Anonymous AffirmativeRacism said...

I'm an Asian female with a degree in Chemical Engineering. When I was getting my bachelor in engineering and applied for minority scholarship, I was turned down. The office of scholarship/financial aide told me that Asian is not considered as "minority" in health and science field. She told me that I would be considered if I'm African American, Hispanic, or Native American. I have a 3.9 GPA and working part-time and couldn't qualify for scholarship. Yet, illegal immigrants in California get scholarships. I work hard, study hard, and pay taxes to support illegals. What is wrong with this????? - LLED • Phoenix, United States

so what the hell are us full asians suppose to do? - Jason

The harder you work the more this society discriminates against you. The same thing happens if you work 2 jobs or longer hours, you pay a higher tax rate. - T • Los Angeles, United States

The situation is much worse than this article admits. I used to be a faculty representative on a college admissions committee and when students either didn't mark a racial category or marked "other" or "decline to state" I saw admissions officers google the surnames and then write an ethnic identify in pencil on the non-compliant applicant form. The committee then divided the applicants into piles for quotas based on the affirmative action goals. The point was always made that the percentage of each racial/ethnic group must mirror the percentage in "the community." Political correctness has ruined high education in this country, provided degrees to young people who can't read, write, and do arithmetic; and denied admission to hunreds of people I personally know about who were denied admission because they were members of the "wrong" ethnic or racial group. - david d • San Francisco, United States

As a white person, I have to admit that Asians work harder and generally are smarter at certain tasks. I accept that. I also accept that other races achieve much less. Affirmative action affirms nothing, and actually holds back incentive to improve. - • Chicago, United States

Because liberals are racists. They've always cared about racial issues. - Ron H • Los Angeles, United States

"The University of California-Berkeley, which is forbidden by state law to consider race in admissions, is more than 40 percent Asian — up from about 20 percent before the law was passed." So you are saying when you toss out quotas the ones who are most qualified to go get in? What a concept??!! Dang, that must be racist to make decisions that way. How about we get the entire country to toss out raced based quotas? - dave and ann

 
At Saturday, December 3, 2011 at 9:43:00 PM PST, Anonymous AffirmativeRacism said...

Rewarding mediocrity in the US for whatever reason has allowed other countries to catch up. - Luis H • St. George, United States

DEAR ASIANS: Welcome to the land of Reverse Discrimination--we Whites have been living with it since 1966. - calven

Typical of our country that if you excel, then you're penalized. Asians try hard and so they're rejected in greater numbers. Other groups don't try and the bar is dropped very low so they can get in. Not cool. - • San Diego, United States

A class action lawsuit is the best way to deal with this. Just because Asian ethnicity is 6% of U.S. population, you cannot limit their admission rate to about 6%. A good majority of the Asian families are here because of Immigration by Employment ( which means skills and academic credentials ). If a University has admitted Asians less than 20% of total students (or check by the % of Asians admitted to who applied), then there is a suspicion of discrimination. Secretary of Education should scrutinize them for admission process or else

CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT ! - TheIntellectual

I know about this all too well. As someone who is completely Asian, I had not choice but to answer Asian on my applications. I got rejected from Ivy leagues with an SAT score of 1590 (our of 1600) while my black and hispanic classmates got in with just a 1390. I know that I was rejected only because of race. Well, I'm in Austin now, and I don't regret anything, so its all good.....until its time for me to apply to grad school. Oh well, at least I'm a girl in engineering. So I'm not in the worst possible situation. - Zara Mikazuki • Austin, United States

 
At Tuesday, April 9, 2013 at 5:28:00 PM PDT, Anonymous jjjames said...

Fact: I am for affirmative action. It actually benefits the POOR and not just one race, and for those of you opposed to affirmative action, be careful what you wish for, here in California they removed affirmative action and now there are complaints because the asians have taken over every university. 50% of the students at UCLA are asian, so the same people who thought affirmative action only benefited blacks actually realized it benefited them too.

Fact: im white, but still watch how many hateful comments I receive for stating all thse facts. (f) uck u yahoo users, racists! We need affirmative action to STOP CHINKS!!!
James

 
At Sunday, March 16, 2014 at 10:21:00 PM PDT, Anonymous susannak said...

YES! TOO HOT & TOO SMART!!

 

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