Asian College Discrimination?

To most students, it would be a disaster if any vital part of a Common Application were left accidentally blank, especially if that application would be sent in to elite selective schools like Harvard. However, applications are indeed becoming more blank and it is no accident among the tens of thousands of hopeful Asian Americans that apply each year. The issue stems down to the ethnicity and race question under the demographics section of most college applications. While it seems like an extremely simple question, it can have drastic consequences, particularly towards Asian Americans. As the number of applying Asians immensely increases, Asian discrimination has become a more prevalent issue and that leads to many Asians preferring to ignore the question or choosing to entirely be marked as a different ethnicity. Why is the growing trend that competition for a spot in the elite schools gets increasingly more tough for Asian Americans?
There are two main problems that most people have been turning a blind eye to.

The first issue is that a large majority of Asian Americans focus towards the most selective schools, like the Ivy Leagues that include Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. The second is that acceptance rates for Asian Americans are the lowest among ethnicities mainly because the acceptance rates do not account for the immense growth of Asian American applicants. As there is more transparency of the holistic system that backfires on this ethnicity, discrimination is more visible in the secretive process behind closed doors. Often, the Asian Americans who apply to these elite schools are those of high academic standing with soaring GPA’s, grades, or stereotypically participate in math club, play either violin or piano or get involved with many STEM related competitions. In an admission officer’s point of view, this can get consistently tedious, as many academically robust Asian American applicants are referred to as “robotic,” “studying machine” or “just another violin playing student.” Vast numbers of Asian American applicants can easily be grouped into this hurtful stereotype and consequently, many are rejected because admission officers feel they “didn’t stand out” among the crowd.

As a result of the stereotype, admissions officers underlyingly have greater expectations of Asian Americans and those who fall short of these “requirements” are harshly denied, with their application tossed aside to the ‘rejected’ pile. Several admission officers have noticed this controversy, included Sara Harberson, former associate dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania and former dean of admissions and financial aid at Franklin & Marshall College. “For example, 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,” Harberson writes on her Op-Ed column. “In the end, holistic admissions can allow for a gray zone of bias at elite institutions, working against a group such as Asian Americans that excels in the black-and-white world of academic achievement.”

While Asian American discrimination in college applications may seem like a far-fetched conjecture, studies have actually been conducted to investigate this concern. A 2009 study by the National Study of College Experience shows that an Asian applicant must score 140 points higher than white applicants, 320 points higher than Hispanic applicants, and 450 points higher than black applicants on the SAT in order to be viewed equally on a college application, which is not fair in a holistic approach and considered discrimination. As news of this discrimination spreads over the country and gains crucial coverage, organizations have been taking action, such as the Asian American Coalition for Education (AACE). AACE filed several complaints at different highly selective schools through the Departments of Justice and Education, stating that as the number of Asian American applicants grew within the last 20 years, representation has remained stable or decreased, claiming that the schools have made “highly subjective and discriminatory” admissions decisions. After complaints were administered against Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Yale and Harvard, the number of Asians admission acceptances did rise, partly due to political pressure, but not enough to justify the booming rate of Asian American applicants.

As an Asian American high school student myself, there is no doubt that I am constantly exposed to Asian stereotypes and have fallen within that derogatory category. However, as I’ve grown up in America in the entirety of my existence, I’ve always stood by the message that students like me are all individual, diverse, unique, and can grow up to be anything we ever strived to be, no doubt ingrained in my head by all the Disney movies I have ever watched when I was a child full of imagination. I also learned that stereotypes were the type of childish jokes that people outgrew once they reached adulthood, which gave me relief when I was negatively impacted by them as a child. By the time I reached junior high, it came to me as no surprise that schools which possessed the caliber of the Ivy Leagues were often the leaders in rolling out positions of political or economical influence, and that is what I strived for by working as hard as I possibly could on school work, extracurricular activities, and utilizing my resources to the fullest potential in order to make a better future for myself.

Without hesitation, I hold great respect for the hard work that college application officers do and the responsibilities they have when selecting the world’s leaders and innovators for generations to come. However, when I came by the knowledge of Asian discrimination in college applications, I was deeply disappointed and shocked. It turns out that Asian Americans are more or less grouped and viewed as one big stereotype instead of each as diverse individuals, by the very people who said that we could be anything we ever wanted to be. When it comes down to deciding a crucial part in a person’s future, career, and everything down the line, shouldn’t that person be considered as an individual person?

In decisions that can shape the rest of a person’s life, they should at least be respected as such for their hard work and existence as unique human beings and not because of their skin color or other factors they simply can not control. Not only is discrimination at play in one of the most fundamental and life-changing steps within any student’s education, but limiting the number of Asians at such influential schools limits the representation of the Asian demographic as a whole in the United States and reducing a diverse ethnicity to only a stereotype is humanly degrading, not just to Asians but to every single ethnicity. Wanting to have the most successful future is an American dream and ‘American’ is not defined. People should have the ability to create a future for themselves and be judged fairly, no matter what race or religion.