Asian-Americans And Affirmative Action
The affirmative action debates are incomplete
There’s been a renewed sense of controversy surrounding affirmative action in recent years. Between the Fisher case and a variety of lawsuits and investigations pointed against schools like Harvard and Princeton, the debate around affirmative action has again become a prominent battle in a retrenched culture war. Most recently, it’s been reported that the Trump administration is looking to have the Department of Justice investigate the issue.
In particular, this is an issue that divides Asian-Americans. While the majority support affirmative action policies, ethnicity is a sizable predictor of opinion, with, for example, Chinese being mostly against and Filipinos and Vietnamese being mostly for. Some recent Chinese immigrants have shown robust opposition. But like most issues, there’s a great deal of incomplete information, confirmation bias, and other forms of muddled thinking. The result is that affirmative action seems to get an outsized proportion of coverage for an impact that is likely less than the hyperbole implies.
One example, frequently cited, is the SAT-score racial gap found by a Princeton study. Looking at the methodology, however, it seems the study didn’t control for income. Which is remarkable, because the SAT is insanely correlated with income, and thus undercuts the findings.
Another analysis comes from looking at MIT versus Harvard. Both are world-renowned, are located in Cambridge, and use a similar holistic admissions process. In contrast to the numerous lawsuits Harvard has faced, I haven’t heard of any discussions about potentially unfair admissions practices with MIT. Even Ron Unz, one of the men behind a variety of anti-affirmative action initiatives, claims MIT is more meritocratic than the Ivies.
Trying to distill merit among so many students is a task of near impossibility; most students at one top school would fit in fine at another and, at some point, the qualifications become a wash. Perhaps as a result, the current admissions process has a priority on creating a diverse learning environment, instead of what people seem to think of as a discrete measure of merit.
Why is this the case? Presumably because MIT’s Asian-American enrollment has been between 30 and 35 percent of the total number for the past few years, whereas Harvard has been at around 15 to 20 percent, with the latest class reaching 22 percent. And yet, MIT and Harvard still have fairly similar numbers of minority students who supposedly benefit from affirmative action, and both schools practice holistic admissions. What drives this difference?
There are three key differences between MIT and Harvard as it relates to admissions:
- There is no legacy preference at MIT, which by its nature, would favor white applicants.
- MIT is a Division-III athletic school, while Harvard is Division I. Despite making up 15 to 25 percent of the student body at the Ivy Leagues (all DI schools), Asian-Americans make up only around seven percent of the athletes. If you go to DI schools in general, that goes down to about two percent. And athletic recruiting is much more impactful at Harvard than MIT.
- But this is perhaps the most significant driver in terms of raw numbers: Harvard is roughly 50 percent STEM and MIT is over 97 percent STEM. When you consider how over-represented Asians are in STEM programs, this ends up having a major effect on undergraduate admissions. Demand for a STEM-focused education and career is high in general, and when programs like University of Washington’s Computer Science & Engineering are notorious for being highly competitive, that combined with the STEM-skewing for Asian-Americans can make the competition seem inflated. This is really important when you’re talking about the seats at MIT being double those at Harvard. STEM majors also tend to do better on standardized tests like the SAT or GRE; it’s in the nature of the tests and US curriculum.
All of this means that when studies aren’t controlling for many of these factors, you’re going to get misleading results.
These schools each claim they’re building a class. For a school like Harvard — especially when compared to MIT — that means balancing out the academic interests and backgrounds, which in turn means there are only so many STEM-focused students they can take. It also means the clubs and organizations and sports teams have to be somewhat representative of different parts of the US. (E.g., it’s likely easier to get into Harvard from Alabama than New England. ) Then there’s the international factor along with gender. (Note the Caltech gap.) A diverse student body is measured in other ways too, including socioeconomic considerations.
You can get an alternative idea of it if you look at an orchestra, which only needs so many violinists. At almost every elite school, the violin sections are usually 50 percent to over 66 percent Asian. If your strength as an applicant is around STEM and the violin, well, that’s going to be a competitive applicant pool that has a lot of Asian-Americans. Notably, if you look at Brown’s symphony orchestra, STEM majors are 70 percent of the group. This isn’t an accident: I think it’s safe to say many Asian-Americans can identify with this sentiment, from Jeremy Lin’s dad:
Gie-Ming, having successfully passed his passion for basketball on to his three sons, is a proud father. “The efforts were not in vain,” he told me. In Taiwan, he said, academics were emphasized at the expense of sports, and he saw the same attitude among many of the Chinese families he knew in California. [Emphasis mine.] Co-workers would wonder why Gie-Ming was investing so much time in his sons’ pursuit of basketball when it seemed that, for Asian-American kids, it would never lead anywhere.
Caltech, which reportedly does not consider race and is often regarded as one of the most meritocratic schools in terms of admissions, is 42 percent Asian-American. Note that this can be further skewed by California being roughly 15 percent Asian, compared to about six percent for the Northeast and the US in general. All things considered, this is not as significant a gap compared to MIT as one would initially think — and perhaps this is why MIT has avoided lawsuits, unlike Harvard.
The rhetoric around the topic is filled with confirmation bias and omissions. It’s hard to grasp that approximately 17,000 kids are going to score in the 99th percentile of the SAT and 16,000 will score in that percentile for the ACT. There are over 30,000 valedictorians in the nation and just as many salutatorians. That is a lot of academically qualified students just at the very top, especially when you consider that only 2,000 might gain admission to a single elite school.
Trying to distill merit among so many students is a task of near impossibility; most students at one top school would fit in fine at another and, at some point, the qualifications become a wash. Perhaps as a result, the current admissions process has a priority on creating a diverse learning environment, instead of what people seem to think of as a discrete measure of merit.
After all, people’s perception of merit is not so steadfast; one study shows how whites favor policies that place a high priority on test scores and GPA, until they learn Asian Americans do better under such circumstances.
Princeton was cleared of anti-Asian bias in 2015 by the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights. A relevant passage:
The university reported to OCR that the university “frequently accepted to the Class of 2010 applicants from Asian backgrounds with grades and test scores lower than rejected non-Asian applicants.” The university gave OCR specific examples of Asian-American applicants for the Class of 2010 whose grades and SAT scores were not near the top of the range usually seen by the university’s admissions officers, but who nonetheless were offered admission. These included an Asian-American applicant who had “only” a 3.45 GPA in high school, but who was a nationally recognized athlete; and two other Asian-American applicants with relatively low GPAs and SAT scores who were notable for other distinctions such as community service, overcoming impoverished backgrounds and working in a family business.
Added the OCR report: “As the university told OCR, regarding the Class of 2010, the university ‘denied admission to literally hundreds of non-Asian applicants for the Class of 2010 who were valedictorians, and over three thousand non-Asian applicants with a 4.0 GPA. These non-Asian applicants were not admitted despite the fact that many Asian students who did not have these academic credentials were admitted.
The core argument behind the Supreme Court’s defenses of affirmative action fall under two lines:
- Diversity is valuable in the context of education.
- Affirmative action is a factor of a factor.
Caught up in all the confirmation bias, anecdotes, and incomplete information is that in the end, admissions is incredibly competitive. The stories of hyper-competitive applicants who get into one school and not another are everywhere, but many others are often missing, including the above. With so many factors being considered and so many students who are qualified, it’s hard to pin anything down, but the MIT and Harvard example shows that something as simple as academic interest is likely to be a much more powerful factor.
So on that note, here’s an illustrious excerpt from Jeff Yang, an Asian-American writer, and his admissions story:
What saved my application was the optional interview I’d done on campus, in which I’d ended up talking about everything that wasn’t in my application: My aspirations to be a writer. The horror movie that I’d scripted and shot in secret at our high school. The subtle differences between anxiety, suspense and fear. The fact that I actually really, really suck at piano.
The interviewer made the case that I had intangibles that made me a potential asset to the student body, and pressed for me to be considered seriously, despite my middling distinction. Someone decided to take his advice. I hope they didn’t end up regretting it.
[Editor’s note: Asian-Americans here is used inclusive of people with roots in the whole continent. However, Asian-American is often popularly used only to refer to East and Southeast Asian populations, which further complicates the issue.]
David Chen is based in Boston.
