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i 1. I feel proud of what I created. I think I was passionate about my topic, and stayed true to my own writing style. The only thing i regret is the repetitive nature, and I wish i included more factors (such as wealthy white students) to add to the reason why Asians are discriminated against. I also do not like my conclusion, and feel that I didn’t end it with a very good ending.

2. I am most proud of my own ideas, and how these thoughts were from my own brain and not any one else.

3. The hardest part of the entire process was trying to make it flow, but still connecting the dots of how affirmative action relates to college admissions.

4. I have learned a lot about the college process and how unfair it is towards Asians.

5. I would want the world to know about every single detail about my topic because Asians aren't represented at all, and people don't focus on their current problems as they do with other races. This is just as much as racism as it would be if it happened to the black, white, Hispanic, or any other race. What irked me most was how when asked what my topic was by classmates, and I responded with "Asian College Discrimination," they were extremely confused because "Asians don't get any racism." I want to shed light on this one important issue so people would pay attention to other issues.

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Johnston Gate at Harvard University. A group suing Harvard says a trove of newly released documents show that admissions officials discriminated against Asian-American applicants. Credit Credit Hadley Green for The New York Times

Harvard consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than others on traits like "positive personality," likability, courage, kindness and being "widely respected," according to an analysis of more than 160,000 student records filed Friday by a group representing Asian-American students in a lawsuit against the university.

Asian-Americans scored higher than applicants of any other racial or ethnic group on admissions measures like test scores, grades and extracurricular activities, according to the analysis commissioned by a group that opposes all race-based admissions criteria. But the students' personal ratings significantly dragged down their chances of being admitted, the analysis found.

The court documents, filed in federal court in Boston, also showed that Harvard conducted an internal investigation into its admissions policies in 2013 and found a bias against Asian-American applicants. But Harvard never made the findings public or acted on them.

Harvard, one of the most sought-after and selective universities in the country, admitted only 4.6 percent of its applicants this year. That has led to intense interest in the university's closely guarded admissions process. Harvard had fought furiously over the last few months to keep secret the documents that were unsealed Friday.

The documents came out as part of a lawsuit charging Harvard with systematically discriminating against Asian-Americans, in violation of civil rights law. The suit says that Harvard imposes what is in effect a soft quota of "racial balancing." This keeps the numbers of Asian-Americans artificially low, while advancing less qualified white, black and Hispanic applicants, the plaintiffs contend.
[Read the court documents here and here.]
The findings come at a time when issues of race, ethnicity, admission, testing and equal access to education are confronting schools across the country, from selective public high schools like Stuyvesant High School in New York to elite private colleges. Many Ivy League schools, not just Harvard, have had similar ratios of Asian-American, black, white and Hispanic students for years, despite fluctuations in application rates and qualifications, raising questions about how those numbers are arrived at and whether they represent unspoken quotas.

Harvard and the group suing it have presented sharply divergent views of what constitutes a fair admissions process.

"It turns out that the suspicions of Asian-American alumni, students and applicants were right all along," the group, Students for Fair Admissions, said in a court document laying out the analysis. "Harvard today engages in the same kind of discrimination and stereotyping that it used to justify quotas on Jewish applicants in the 1920s and 1930s."

Harvard vigorously disagreed on Friday, saying that its own expert analysis showed no discrimination and that seeking diversity is a valuable part of student selection. The university lashed out at the founder of Students for Fair Admissions, Edward Blum, accusing him of using Harvard to replay a previous challenge to affirmative action in college admissions, Fisher v. the University of Texas at Austin. In its 2016 decision in that case, the Supreme Court ruled that race could be used as one of many factors in admissions.

"Thorough and comprehensive analysis of the data and evidence makes clear that Harvard College does not discriminate against applicants from any group, including Asian-Americans, whose rate of admission has grown 29 percent over the last decade," Harvard said in a statement. "Mr. Blum and his organization's incomplete and misleading data analysis paint a dangerously inaccurate picture of Harvard College's whole-person admissions process by omitting critical data and information factors."
[How do you rate a college applicant's personality traits. Read more here.]
In court papers, Harvard said that a statistical analysis could not capture the many intangible factors that go into Harvard admissions. Harvard said that the plaintiffs' expert, Peter Arcidiacono, a Duke University economist, had mined the data to his advantage by taking out applicants who were favored because they were legacies, athletes, the children of staff and the like, including Asian-Americans. In response, the plaintiffs said their expert had factored out these applicants because he wanted to look at the pure effect of race on admissions, unclouded by other factors.

Both sides filed papers Friday asking for summary judgment, an immediate ruling in their favor. If the judge denies those requests, as is likely, a trial has been scheduled for October. If it goes on to the Supreme Court, it could upend decades of affirmative action policies at colleges and universities across the country.

Harvard is not the only Ivy League school facing pressure to admit more Asian-American students. Princeton and Cornell and others also have high numbers of Asian-American applicants. Yet their share of Asian-Americans students is comparable with Harvard's.

In Friday's court papers, the plaintiffs describe a shaping process that begins before students even apply, when Harvard buys data about PSAT scores and G.P.A.s, according to the plaintiffs' motion. It is well documented that these scores vary by race.

The plaintiffs' analysis was based on data extracted from the records of more than 160,000 applicants who applied for admission over six cycles from 2000 to 2015.

They compare Harvard's treatment of Asian-Americans with its well-documented campaign to reduce the growing number of Jews being admitted to Harvard in the 1920s. Until then, applicants had been admitted on academic merit. To avoid adopting a blatant quota system, Harvard introduced subjective criteria like character, personality and promise. The plaintiffs call this the "original sin of holistic admissions."

They argue that the same character-based system is being used now to hold the proportion of Asian-Americans at Harvard to roughly 20 percent year after year, except for minor increases, they say, spurred by litigation.

White applicants would be most hurt if Asian-American admissions rose, the plaintiffs said.

On summary sheets, Asian-American applicants were much more likely than other races to be described as "standard strong," meaning lacking special qualities that would warrant admission, even though they were more academically qualified, the plaintiffs said. They were 25 percent more likely than white applicants to receive that rating. They were also described as "busy and bright" in their admissions files, the plaintiffs said.

One summary sheet comment said the Asian-American applicant would "need to fight it out with many similar" applicants. The plaintiffs' papers appeared to offer other examples of grudging or derogatory descriptions of Asian applications, but they had been redacted.

In its admissions process, Harvard scores applicants in five categories - "academic," "extracurricular," "athletic," "personal" and "overall." They are ranked from 1 to 6, with 1 being the best.

Whites get higher personal ratings than Asian-Americans, with 21.3 percent of white applicants getting a 1 or 2 compared to 17.6 percent of Asian-Americans, according to the plaintiffs' analysis.

Alumni interviewers give Asian-Americans personal ratings comparable to those of whites. But the admissions office gives them the worst scores of any racial group, often without even meeting them, according to Professor Arcidiacono.

Harvard said that while admissions officers may not meet the applicants, they can judge their personal qualities based on factors like personal essays and letters of recommendation.

Harvard said it was implausible that Harvard's 40-member admissions committee, some of whom were Asian-Americans, would conclude that Asian-American applicants were less personable than other races.

University officials did concede that its 2013 internal review found that if Harvard considered only academic achievement, the Asian-American share of the class would rise to 43 percent from the actual 19 percent. After accounting for Harvard's preference for recruited athletes and legacy applicants, the proportion of whites went up, while the share of Asian-Americans fell to 31 percent. Accounting for extracurricular and personal ratings, the share of whites rose again, and Asian-Americans fell to 26 percent.

What brought the Asian-American number down to roughly 18 percent, or about the actual share, was accounting for a category called "demographic," the study found. This pushed up African-American and Hispanic numbers, while reducing whites and Asian-Americans. The plaintiffs said this meant there was a penalty for being Asian-American.

"Further details (especially around the personal rating) may provide further insight," Harvard's internal report said.

But, the plaintiffs said in their motion Friday, there was no further insight, because, "Harvard killed the study and quietly buried the reports."

Harvard said that the review was discounted because it was preliminary and incomplete.

At the end of the admissions process, the class of applicants is fine-tuned through a so-called "lop list," which includes race. Almost the entire page in which the plaintiffs describe that fine-tuning has been blacked out. Mr. Blum, the founder of Students for Fair Admissions, said Friday that it was "disreputable" of Harvard to complain that information was being taken out of context while at the same time insisting on significant redactions of the evidence.

In a heavily redacted section, the plaintiffs describe how Harvard and 15 other elite schools share notes about the race of admitted students at a meeting of the Association of Black Admissions and Financial Aid Officers of the Ivy League and Sister Schools every year. The court papers portray them as a sort of secret society of admissions officers exchanging information about race, a sensitive aspect of admissions.

Harvard's class of 2021 is 14.6 percent African-American, 22.2 percent Asian-American, 11.6 percent Hispanic and 2.5 percent Native-American or Pacific Islander, according to Harvard's website.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Harvard Rates Asian-Americans As Less Likable, Plaintiffs Claim. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Harvard Rated Asian-American Applicants Lower on Personality Traits, Suit Says

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Harvard consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than others on traits like "positive personality," likability, courage, kindness and being "widely respected," according to an analysis of more than 160,000 student records filed Friday by a group representing Asian-American students in a lawsuit against the university.

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SAT and ACT scores become less important when other aspects of your application become more compelling. For example, if you have competed at the national level in athletics or you have patented a new advance in medical technology, the fact that you performed poorly on your verbal SAT will be less important because the remainder of your application is so strong.

Another time when standardized test scores don't matter as much is when you are applying to a specific major or program that is largely unrelated to them. If your calling is musical performance and you have performed on the national stage, successfully competed in high profile band competitions, and taught master classes at a local community college, your SAT or ACT scores aren't very relevant to your intended course of study.

Finally, some colleges simply don't weigh standardized tests very heavily. For example, Wesleyan, Bowdoin, Bates, and George Washington University don't require standardized tests at all anymore, and these are just a few of the colleges that now consider these tests optional. To learn more about testing-optional schools, check out our post The Reality of the Testing Optional Trend .

How Can I Use SAT and ACT Score Data to Help In the College Admissions Process?

Standardized test scores aren't just useful to college admissions committees. They can be useful to you, the applicant, as well. When you are choosing which colleges you'll apply to, you can use your SAT or ACT scores to help narrow your choices.

The simplest way to do this is by researching the SAT and ACT scores of admitted students at the colleges that interest you most. This data is typically readily available through a simple online query and is also often published by US News and World Report in their annual college review. When you review the scores of admitted students, you will usually see them broken down into percentile ranges.

For example, at Notre Dame, the 25th percentile SAT score is 1410, the 50th percentile SAT score is 1490, and the 75th percentile SAT score is 1550. This means that if you score a 1400 on the SAT, you should consider Notre Dame a reach school, because your score falls in the bottom 25% of admitted students.

Of course, this doesn't mean that you won't get in, but it does mean that your application will have to be more impressive in other ways to make up for it. On the other hand, if you score a 1570, you have a far better chance. While you still aren't guaranteed an acceptance, you can be assured that you won't be rejected due to your test scores.

To learn more about how SAT scores can shape your college list and where you choose to apply, check out our post The College List, Decoded: Safety, Target, and Reach Schools .

For help mastering both the content and strategy needed to boost your SAT score, consider the consider the benefits of CollegeVine's full service, customized SAT Tutoring Program , where the brightest and most qualified tutors in the industry guide students to an average score increase of 140 points.

For help preparing for the SAT and deciphering your SAT scores, see these valuable CollegeVine posts:
Tips to Prepare Yourself for Your SAT Test Day How to Pace Yourself on Every Section of the SAT Five SAT Strategies You Should Know 10 Tips to Prepare for the SAT What Parents Need to Know about ACT and SAT Studying Prep How Your SAT Score Impacts Your College Admissions What Is a Good SAT Score in 2018? The CollegeVine Guide to SAT Scores: All Your Questions Answered

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What Your SAT Scores Really Mean In College Admissions

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SAT and ACT scores become less important when other aspects of your application become more compelling. For example, if you have competed at the national level in athletics or you have patented a new advance in medical technology, the fact that you performed poorly on your verbal SAT will be less important because the remainder of your application is so strong.

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Students who graduated from high school this year had an average total SAT score of 1068, a slight increase over last year's average of 1060.

The College Board noted that it has worked to make free services available to help people prepare for the SAT. But Monica Noll, manager of teacher training at Kaplan Test Prep, offered a related theory via email: "The Class of 2017 was the first class to go through the new SAT and understandably had fewer new resources available, less time with the new content, and were making big decisions on when to test. Members of the Class of 2018 had more time and more resources available to prepare. There was an increased level of comfort because of this. Second, unlike members of the Class of 2017, who could either choose to take the old SAT or new SAT, members of the Class of 2018 had no such choice -- they could only take the new SAT. This allowed them to singularly focus."

This year 68 percent of those who took the SAT also took the essay portion. As more and more colleges have dropped the SAT essay as a requirement, many have questioned why students should be put through the stress of preparing for and taking the essay test.

Whatever the reason for the gain in the national average, it was not uniform. The average combined score of the mathematics and evidence-based reading and writing sections of the SAT of Asian Americans was 1223, up 42 points. That gain was far larger than those of other groups. Asian Americans now make up 10 percent of test takers, up from 9 percent a year ago. The results come at a time of increased scrutiny over the use of test scores in college admissions, and of trends showing that some groups, on average, earn much better scores than do others.
Average SAT Scores by Racial and Ethnic Group, 2018
The growing gap between scores of Asian Americans and others was also evident in this year's ACT scores, on which all groups showed declines except for Asian Americans.

This year's SAT data also show a continuation of a pattern in which higher scores are earned by those whose parents have higher levels of education.
Average SAT Scores by Parental Education Level, 2018

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SAT scores are up, but gaps remain significant among racial and ethnic groups

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Students who graduated from high school this year had an average total SAT score of 1068, a slight increase over last year's average of 1060. The College Board noted that it has worked to make free services available to help people prepare for the SAT.

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Significance

We find that the Asian-American educational advantage over whites is attributable mainly to Asian students exerting greater academic effort and not to advantages in tested cognitive abilities or socio-demographics. We test explanations for the Asian-white gap in academic effort and find that the gap can be further attributed to ( i) cultural differences in beliefs regarding the connection between effort and achievement and ( ii) immigration status. Finally, we highlight the potential psychological and social costs associated with Asian-American achievement success.

Abstract

The superior academic achievement of Asian Americans is a well-documented phenomenon that lacks a widely accepted explanation. Asian Americans' advantage in this respect has been attributed to three groups of factors: ( i) socio-demographic characteristics, ( ii) cognitive ability, and ( iii) academic effort as measured by characteristics such as attentiveness and work ethic. We combine data from two nationally representative cohort longitudinal surveys to compare Asian-American and white students in their educational trajectories from kindergarten through high school. We find that the Asian-American educational advantage is attributable mainly to Asian students exerting greater academic effort and not to advantages in tested cognitive abilities or socio-demographics. We test explanations for the Asian-white gap in academic effort and find that the gap can be further attributed to ( i) cultural differences in beliefs regarding the connection between effort and achievement and ( ii) immigration status. Finally, we highlight the potential psychological and social costs associated with Asian-American achievement success.

Explaining the Asian-American Advantage in Education

Three explanations have been offered to account for Asian Americans' advantage in education. The first explanation suggests that Asian-American youth's academic advantage can be attributed to advantages in socio-demographic factors. Relative to whites, their parents tend to be better educated, and they are more likely to live in stable, two-parent families with higher incomes ( 5). This explanation, however, is insufficient because advantages in socio-demographic factors only partially explain the achievement gap ( 2, 3, 5). Moreover, Asian Americans are not uniformly advantaged in terms of family socioeconomic background. For example, the poverty rates of Chinese and Vietnamese are higher than they are for whites ( 5). However, the disadvantaged children of Chinese and Vietnamese immigrant families routinely surpass the educational attainment of their native-born, middle-class white peers ( 6, 7).

The second explanation posits that Asian American's advantage in education is due to their superior cognitive ability. An Asian-American advantage in tested cognitive ability over whites has been noted for children as early as age 2 ( 8), although these initial cognitive advantages may gradually erode over time once children enter school ( 9, 10). Popular attention has been paid to the large Asian-American advantage in high-stakes college entrance examinations such as the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) ( 1). For example, although Asian-white differences in verbal SATs are not noticeably different, Asian-American test-takers outperform whites in the quantitative math subtest by nearly 0.38 SD ( 11). Some scholars have contended that differences in tested cognitive ability are rooted in genetics ( 12). These arguments, however, have been rejected by other scholars who find little difference in general intelligence between native Chinese/Japanese children and white American children ( 12⇓ ⇓ - 15). Most researchers instead attribute observed racial differences in measured cognitive ability to variations in parents' socio-economic status, parental expectations, and access to educational resources at home and in communities ( 2⇓ - 4, 13⇓ - 15).

The third explanation attributes Asian Americans' educational advantage to their greater work ethic and motivation. A growing body of evidence now confirms that academic success is not determined by cognitive ability alone but also by a multidimensional set of capabilities that are referred to as "noncognitive skills" by economists ( 16⇓ - 18) and "self-control" and "motivation processes" by psychologists ( 19⇓ - 21). These studies show that qualities such as attentiveness, self-control, motivation, and persistence may be as important as cognitive abilities in positively affecting academic performance. Asian-American parents may engage in parenting practices that better cultivate these qualities that, in turn, enable their children's academic success. It is widely documented that Asian-American parents hold higher educational expectations for their children than white native-born parents ( 2, 3, 22). Asian and Asian-American parents are also more authoritarian and less permissive than white American families ( 23, 24). Also in contrast to white American parenting, some scholars argue that Asian-American parenting fosters greater interdependence and collectivism within the family, which helps Asian-American parents to more easily inculcate values such as high educational expectations and strong work ethic in their children ( 25). The proposed explanation that increased academic effort explains Asian-American youth's academic advantage is consistent with popular perceptions of Asian-American youth being studious, hard-working, narrowly focused on academic matters, and highly motivated in the classroom. However, little empirical evidence is yet available pertaining to the validity of this explanation relative to the two other competing explanations.

Data and Methods

The ECLS-K is a national, longitudinal study of a cohort of students who entered kindergarten in 1998. Students were interviewed in kindergarten and in the first, third, fifth, and eighth grades. The ELS is a national cohort of high school sophomores in 2002 with reinterviews in 2004. Grade point averages (GPAs) are available for each year from 9th to 12th grade. Both surveys oversampled Asian Americans. We analyze a sample of Asian American and white students in the same school environments, meaning that we only include white (Asian) students who attended schools where at least one Asian-American (white) student was also surveyed. We exclude individuals who had missing values for academic achievement in any wave. Individuals with missing values for cognitive ability and/or academic effort in two or more waves in the ECLS-K are also excluded. In the ELS, individuals with missing values for cognitive ability and effort at baseline are excluded. For those included in the final sample, we use multiple imputations to compute missing values. To test the sensitivity of our findings, we also analyze samples that ( i) are restricted to nonmissing values on achievement, ability, and academic effort and ( ii) impute values for ability and academic effort. Our results do not substantively differ. Our final analytical sample for the ECLS-K consists of 1,368 whites and 244 Asians who were continuously followed from kindergarten to eighth grade. The final analytical sample for the ELS consists of 2,878 whites and 745 Asians. Our sample of Asians Americans is large enough for analysis of Asian-American ethnic groups in the ELS but not those in the ECLS-K.

Measurement of academic achievement in the ECLS-K came from teachers' ratings of students in terms of their proficiency in reading, math, and general knowledge/science (1 = not yet proficient, 5 = proficient) from kindergarten to eighth grade. In the ELS, we use GPA from 9th to 12th grade. Cognitive ability is measured using item response theory (IRT) scores derived from standardized tests of math and reading. Although academic achievement and cognitive ability measurements are highly correlated, they differ in source of information. Whereas measurement of academic achievement was given by teachers, measurement of cognitive ability came from standardized tests. Tests are administered in the ECLS-K at each wave. In the ELS, they are administered only when students are in 10th grade. To measure academic effort, we rely on teachers' evaluations of students' classroom behavior and attitudes. In the ECLS-K, we use the approaches to learning scale, which is based on teacher ratings of students' attentiveness, task persistence, and eagerness to learn on a four-point scale. In the ELS, math and reading teachers were asked two questions aimed at capturing students' work habits and motivation. The first item asked teachers to rate students in terms of their attentiveness on a four-point scale ranging from never attentive to attentive all of the time. The second asked teachers whether they agreed or disagreed that the student works hard for his/her grades. Responses to these two questions were combined using an additive index, with each response assigned equal weight. Measures of achievement, cognitive ability, and academic effort are standardized at each wave to have a mean of 0 and SD of 1. In addition, we include socio-demographic characteristics in our analysis, such as parental education, family income, family structure, child sex, number of books in the house, and immigration status ( Table S1).

We use the following methods. First, we plot the Asian-white gap in academic achievement, cognitive skills, and academic effort based on within-school comparisons. Second, we use decomposition techniques to determine the relative contribution of each of our three explanations of the achievement gap. Because the explanatory factors are likely correlated with one another, estimating the contribution uniquely attributable to each factor is not possible. Instead, we can estimate upper and lower bounds for what can be attributed to each explanatory factor.

For each grade level, we estimate the following school fixed-effect regressions to obtain within school comparisonsY i s=δ  Asian i s+β  X i s+η s+ε i s, [1]

where Y is alternatively represents an outcome-academic achievement, cognitive ability, and academic effort-for the ith child and in school s. Asianis is a dichotomous variable indicating that child i is Asian (vs. white). Time invariant characteristics of children and their families are represented by X is. Factors that differ across schools-such as rigor of course work, teacher quality, and the socioeconomic composition of schools-are all captured by school-level fixed-effects η s. The residuals are represented by ε is.

We use decomposition techniques to estimate the percentage change in achievement gaps and gaps in academic effort when controlling for different explanatory factors ( 26). To do so, we vary the baseline model of Eq. 1 (i.e., models that control for socio-demographic factors) under two different scenarios and compare changes to the Asian coefficients, δ asian, at each grade level to measure the explanatory power of the individual factors. We obtain the lower bound when comparing δ asian from the model that includes the full set of factors to δ asian from the model that excludes a particular explanatory factor (omitting subscripts) L=δ Full−k−δ Full , [2]

where δ Full indicates the Asian coefficient for the full model, which includes all covariates, and δ Full-k indicates the Asian coefficient for the model in which the kth factor is excluded. L represents the additional explanatory effects of the kth factor that are uncorrelated with all other factors. To obtain estimates of the upper bound, we compare δ asian from the baseline model to δ asian from the model that subsequently includes the kth factor in addition (again, omitting the subscript for Asian) U=δ Baseline −δ Baseline+k. [3]

U offers an upper bound estimate because the explanatory power attributable to the kth factor according to Eq. 3 contains shared explanatory power due to the correlation between this factor and other explanatory factors.

All analyses compare Asian and white students who attend the same school rather than students who attend different schools. This method allows us to address two sources of bias: ( i) differences in the types of schools that Asian Americans and whites are likely to attend (e.g., school quality, course difficulty, socio-demographic composition of student body) and ( ii) self-selection of Asian Americans into school districts. Restricting analysis to within-school comparisons reduces the Asian-white gap in academic achievement and academic effort. Therefore, within-school estimates are methodologically conservative estimates.

Growing Gains: Asian-American Advantage in Academic Achievement

Figs. 1- 3 plot the within-school Asian-white gaps in academic achievement, cognitive ability, and academic effort, respectively. Fig. 1 shows that Asian Americans enter school with no discernible academic advantage over whites but that an advantage grows over time. By fifth grade, Asian Americans significantly outperform whites. The Asian-white gap peaks at 0.3 SD in 10th grade. Fig. 2 shows almost no difference between Asians and whites in tested cognitive abilities and a declining trend over grade. In contrast, Fig. 3 shows that Asian-American students enter schools with an approximate 0.2 SD higher score in academic effort compared with whites. This difference grows to nearly a 0.4 SD gap in 10th grade. Overall, these results suggest that the growing achievement gap can be attributed to a widening gap in academic effort rather than to differences in cognitive ability.

We consider ethnic heterogeneity by disaggregating Asian Americans into four groups: East Asians, Filipinos, Southeast Asians, and South Asians. Unadjusted, within-school differences in academic achievement, cognitive skills, and academic effort between these ethnic groups and whites are presented in Fig. 4. All Asian ethnic groups outperform whites in academic achievement, including Southeast Asians, who came from poorer and less educated families relative to whites ( Table S2). Only East Asians have a sizable advantage in cognitive ability. All Asian ethnic groups exert greater academic effort than whites. In sum, our results by ethnicity confirm a pattern found in the earlier analysis, namely, that Asian ethnic groups are consistently advantaged relative to whites in terms of achievement and academic effort but not in terms of cognitive ability.

Decomposition analysis shows that socio-demographic factors offer limited explanatory power for Asian Americans' advantage in academic achievement ( Table S3). Controlling for socio-demographic factors explains at most about 30% of the achievement gap in 9th grade; in 11th and 12th grades, the gap actually increases with the inclusion of socio-demographic controls. Together, cognitive ability and academic effort explain a larger portion of the achievement gap than socio-demographic factors. For example, controlling for cognitive ability and academic effort reduces the gap from 0.20 to 0.05 in 8th grade and from 0.19 to 0.04 in 9th grade; in 11th and 12th grades, this explains about one-third of the achievement gap net of socio-demographics ( Table S3). When considering ethnic heterogeneity, we see that controlling for socio-demographic factors explains a large portion of the South Asian-whites gap as well as a smaller portion of the Filipino-white and East Asian-white gaps and actually increases the Southeast Asian advantage ( Table S4).

Fig. 5 plots the attribution of this additional explanatory power of the Asian-white achievement gap to either cognitive ability or academic effort (net of socio-demographic controls). In eighth grade, between 9% and 58% of this gap is attributed to cognitive ability but between 42% and 91% is attributed to academic effort. In 12th grade, between 1% and 25% is attributed to cognitive ability, but between 75% and 101% is attributed to academic effort. In sum, the results suggest that Asian Americans' greater academic effort primarily explains their achievement advantage; the explanatory power of socio-demographics and cognitive ability are both limited.

We also consider potential differences by sex by reestimating all our results separately for boys and girls. Asian-American girls are not significantly different from Asian-American boys in terms of achievement outcomes, cognitive ability, and academic effort.

Explaining Asian Americans' Advantage in Academic Effort

What accounts for Asians' greater academic effort than whites? The cultural orientation explanation proposes that Asian-American youth are harder working because of cultural beliefs that emphasize the strong connection between effort and achievement ( 14). Studies show that Asian and Asian-American students tend to view cognitive abilities as qualities that can be developed through effort, whereas white Americans tend to view cognitive abilities as qualities that are inborn ( 14, 27). These differences matter because students who consider effort important demonstrate greater intrinsic interest in academic tasks and are more likely to interpret challenges as cues to increase effort ( 20). The belief that achievement is not predestined but is the result of hard work may motivate Asian-American parents to set high educational expectations for their children ( 2, 14). Some scholars have speculated that these beliefs are rooted in Confucian teachings that emphasize the perfectibility of human beings through education and self-cultivation ( 15). Although the Confucian explanation may apply to East and Southeast Asians, it is inapplicable to Filipinos and South Asians. Regardless of its origin, the effect of culture wanes as youth assimilate to American norms over generations such that by the third generation, Asian Americans no longer differ from whites in terms of their educational profiles ( 5).

Another explanation posits that differences in attitudes toward academic effort are rooted in Asian Americans' status as immigrants. First, regardless of ethnicity, immigrants are self-selected in terms of their motivation to succeed and their optimism for future success ( 28, 29). The very decision to migrate in search of better opportunities can be seen as a manifestation of this optimism. Second, given their marginal position as relative newcomers to the United States with few political and social resources, Asian Americans may see educational credentials as not only having symbolic value in terms of conferring social prestige but as having great instrumental value as the surest way to attain upward mobility ( 30). This explanation is applicable to all Asian ethnic groups, because they share a common status as relative newcomers. Asian Americans are also aware that they are viewed as a single racial group and that they can all benefit from the success of other Asian-American groups ( 31).

Using the ELS, we apply the same decomposition method used earlier to estimate the relative contributions of cultural orientation toward achievement and immigration status to explain observed differences in academic effort. We rely on the following measures to capture cultural orientation: students' responses to three survey items asking the extent to which they agreed to the statement that ( i) they "need to be born with ability to be good at math," ( ii) they "learned to be good at math," and ( iii) their parents expected them to succeed. Responses were measured on a four-point scale with higher values indicating greater agreement. All measures were standardized to have a mean of 0 and SD of 1. To measure immigrant status, we rely on two indicator variables that measure generational status, namely, whether the target student and mother are foreign born.

Fig. 6 plots the estimated within-school, Asian-white gap in cultural orientation based on models that adjust for socio-demographic factors. Consistent with the cultural orientation hypothesis, the results show that Asian Americans are less likely than whites to believe that ability is inborn and more likely to believe that one can learn to be good at math. Asian-American students report greater parental expectations of academic success than comparable whites. In a supplementary analysis, we found no significant variation in cultural orientations across Asian ethnic groups. These results suggest that all Asian ethnic groups emphasize the strong connection between effort and achievement and that this orientation may have origins that do not solely stem from Confucian traditions. We do find, however, ethnic variation in parental expectations: South Asian parents have the highest educational expectations relative to whites (β = 0.46, P < 0.05), followed by Filipinos (β = 0.38, P < 0.05), Southeast Asians (β = 0.37, P < 0.05), and East Asians (β = 0.17, P < 0.05). We found no significant differences by sex. In sum, Asian Americans of all ethnic groups benefit both from cultural orientations that reinforce the importance of effort over inborn ability and greater parental pressures to succeed than in the case of comparable white peers.

We further evaluate the relative contributions of cultural orientations vs. immigration status in explaining the achievement gap ( Table S5). For the overall comparison between Asians and whites, socio-demographic differences explain almost none of the overall Asian-white gap in academic effort; including socio-demographic factors reduces the overall Asian-white gap from 0.35 to 0.34. Including controls for cultural orientation and immigration status further reduces the gap to 0.23. Of the gap explained jointly by cultural orientation and immigration status, between 20% and 30% is attributed to differences in cultural orientation and about 69-80% is attributed to differences in immigration status. Overall, these results reveal that ( i) socio-demographic factors have very limited explanatory power and ( ii) both cultural orientation and immigration status are explanatory factors, but immigration status explains relatively more than cultural orientation. This pattern generally holds true across different Asian ethnic groups, except that socio-demographic factors explain a significant portion of the South Asian-white gap in academic effort.

Growing Pains: Cost of Academic Success

Asian-American youth's academic successes may come with costs. Studies show that Asian-American youth are less psychologically adjusted ( 32) and socially engaged ( 33) in school than their white peers. They may experience more conflict in relationships with parents because of the high educational expectations their parents place on them ( 32). Asian-American youth are under pressure to meet extraordinarily high standards because they consider other high achieving coethnics, rather than native-born whites, to be their reference group ( 7). In this section, we examine the psychological and social costs of their academic success. We present results from the ECLS-K and the ELS, as well as from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a longitudinal and nationally representative study of adolescents in grades 7-12 during the 1994 and 1995 school year, also with an oversample of Asian Americans. Eighth graders from the ECLS-K were asked to what extent they agreed with the statement "I feel good about myself" on a four-point scale. Tenth graders from the ELS were asked how often they spend time with friends on a four-point scale ranging from "rarely" to "almost every day." Seventh through 12th graders in Add-Health were asked to rate their relationships with their fathers and mothers in terms of satisfaction with parent-child communication on a five-point scale, with higher values indicating greater satisfaction. All variables are standardized.

Fig. 7 presents the main results pertaining to the within-school, Asian-white gap based on models that adjust for socio-demographic factors. The results show that Asian Americans rate ∼0.3 SDs lower than whites in terms of positive feelings toward themselves. They report spending ∼0.3 SDs less time with friends than their white peers. They also have more conflict with both parents than comparable white peers. We further considered ethnic variation using ELS and Add-Health but did not find significant ethnic differences in terms of feeling good and spending time socializing with friends. We did find some ethnic variations in conflict with parents, with East Asian and Filipino youths experiencing the most conflict among all Asian ethnic groups. We found no significant sex differences.

Interpretation and Discussion

Three main findings emerged from our study. First, the growing Asian-American advantage in academic achievement relative to whites is due more to a growing Asian-white gap in academic effort than to a gap in cognitive ability. Second, there is support for two explanations for the Asian-white gap in academic effort: cultural orientation and immigration status. Third, Asian-American youth pay high psychological and social costs for their academic success, as measured by many indicators of subjective well-being.

Cultural orientation, immigrant selectivity, and adaptive strategies that emphasize the instrumental value of education for upward mobility all play a part in shaping Asian-American youth's outlook toward the value of effort in attaining achievement. However, this outlook is sustained and reinforced by important processes that we do not directly observe. These processes include ethnic communities that offer newly arrived Asian immigrants access to ethnic-specific resources such as supplemental schooling, private tutoring and college preparation, and vital information necessary for navigating the education system, resources that are often unavailable to other immigrant groups and poor or working-class natives ( 4). These communities not only provide critical resources but also serve to legitimize beliefs regarding the importance of effort and help reinforce parental expectations for academic success ( 4, 34). Beyond ethnic communities, Asian-American youth may benefit from popular stereotypes that portray them as "model minorities" who are destined to succeed. These positive stereotypes may help bolster Asian-American achievement just as negative stereotypes have been shown to hinder the achievement of African-American youth ( 35). Positive stereotypes help frame Asian-American youths' understanding of academic success as both attainable and expected of them ( 7, 34). These positive stereotypes may also cause teachers to perceive and evaluate Asian-American students in ways that positively enhance their performance ( 36). Although a variety of cultural and social resources help produce and sustain Asian Americans' achievement, their educational advantages decline over generations, suggesting that third- and later-generation Asian Americans do not benefit from these resources as much as first- or second-generation Asian Americans in facing the forces of assimilation ( 5).

Similarly, we do not yet know what concrete causal mechanisms may underlie Asian Americans' lower subjective well-being. We propose two possibilities. First, the extraordinarily high educational expectations that Asian-American youth hold for themselves, as well as the expectations parents and society set for them, cause those who fail to meet expectations to feel like failures. Even those who manage to excel academically may feel unsatisfied either because their achievements were already assumed or because they are expected to achieve even more ( 7). Second, Asian Americans continue to occupy a complicated position in a racially stratified United States. They are simultaneously recognized for their work ethic and intelligence and marginalized for seeming less patriotic and civically engaged ( 37). Their "outsider" status may undercut their achievement success and prevent their full integration into American society.

One caveat to note is that we rely on teacher ratings of student motivation and work ethic. Although such measures are more objective than self-reported academic effort, teacher ratings will capture both true behavioral differences among students and teachers' perceptions of differences between students. Our study cannot disentangle these two effects from one another. We speculate that both are likely to matter. Asian-American students exert greater effort in the classroom. They also benefit from the positive expectations that teachers may hold for them which, in turn, may motivate Asian Americans to demonstrate greater effort. Nevertheless, we provide strong evidence that the Asian-American youth's advantage in education can be attributed mainly to their work ethic, whether real or perceived, rather than to advantages in cognitive skills or socioeconomic status.

Acknowledgments

We thank Chang Hwan Kim, Louis-André Vallet, and Cindy Glovinsky for comments on an earlier version of the paper and Airan Liu for valuable research assistance.

View Abstract

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Explaining Asian Americans' academic advantage over whites

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We find that the Asian-American educational advantage over whites is attributable mainly to Asian students exerting greater academic effort and not to advantages in tested cognitive abilities or socio-demographics. We test explanations for the Asian-white gap in academic effort and find that the gap can be further attributed to ( i ) cultural differences in beliefs regarding the connection between effort and achievement and ( ii ) immigration status.

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u canot rememedy past discrimination with new discrimination edwrd blum

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u canot rememedy past discrimination with new discrimination edwrd blum

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Columbia University's commencement in 2005. Asian-Americans have higher educational attainment than any other group in the United States, including whites. Credit Credit Peter Turnley/Corbis

THIS is an awkward question, but here goes: Why are Asian-Americans so successful in America?

It's no secret that Asian-Americans are disproportionately stars in American schools, and even in American society as a whole. Census data show that Americans of Asian heritage earn more than other groups, including whites. Asian-Americans also have higher educational attainment than any other group.

I wrote a series of columns last year, "When Whites Just Don't Get It," about racial inequity, and one of the most common responses from angry whites was along these lines: This stuff about white privilege is nonsense, and if blacks lag, the reason lies in the black community itself. Just look at Asian-Americans. Those Koreans and Chinese make it in America because they work hard. All people can succeed here if they just stop whining and start working.

Let's confront the argument head-on. Does the success of Asian-Americans suggest that the age of discrimination is behind us?

A new scholarly book, "The Asian American Achievement Paradox," by Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou, notes that Asian-American immigrants in recent decades have started with one advantage: They are highly educated, more so even than the average American. These immigrants are disproportionately doctors, research scientists and other highly educated professionals.

It's not surprising that the children of Asian-American doctors would flourish in the United States. But Lee and Zhou note that kids of working-class Asian-Americans often also thrive, showing remarkable upward mobility.

And let's just get one notion out of the way: The difference does not seem to be driven by differences in intelligence.

Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology who has written an excellent book about intelligence, cites a study that followed a pool of Chinese-American children and a pool of white children into adulthood. The two groups started out with the same scores on I.Q. tests, but in the end 55 percent of the Asian-Americans entered high-status occupations, compared with one-third of the whites. To succeed as a manager, whites needed an I.Q. of 100, while Chinese-Americans needed an I.Q. of only 93.

So the Asian advantage, Nisbett argues, isn't intellectual firepower as such, but how it is harnessed.

Some disagree, but I'm pretty sure that one factor is East Asia's long Confucian emphasis on education. Likewise, a focus on education also helps explain the success of Jews, who are said to have had universal male literacy 1,700 years before any other group.

Immigrant East Asians often try particularly hard to get into good school districts, or make other sacrifices for children's education, such as giving prime space in the home to kids to study.

There's also evidence that Americans believe that A's go to smart kids, while Asians are more likely to think that they go to hard workers. The truth is probably somewhere in between, but the result is that Asian-American kids are allowed no excuse for getting B's - or even an A-. The joke is that an A- is an "Asian F."

Strong two-parent families are a factor, too. Divorce rates are much lower for many Asian-American communities than for Americans as a whole, and there's evidence that two-parent households are less likely to sink into poverty and also have better outcomes for boys in particular.

Teachers' expectations can also play a role. This idea was explored in a famous experiment in the 1960s by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson.

After conducting I.Q. tests of students at a California school, the experimenters told the teachers the names of one-fifth of the children who they said were special, and expected to soar. These special students in first and second grades improved dramatically. A year later, 47 percent of them had gained 20 or more I.Q. points.

Yet in truth, the special students were chosen at random. This "Pygmalion effect" was a case of self-fulfilling expectations. Teachers had higher expectations for the special students and made them feel capable - and so that's what they became.

Lee and Zhou, for their part, think that positive stereotyping may be part of an explanation for the success of Asian-Americans in school.

"They're like, 'Oh, you're Chinese and you're good in math,'" the book quotes a girl called Angela as saying. "It's advantageous when they think that."

(Of course, positive stereotypes create their own burden, with sometimes tremendous stress on children to earn those A's, at the cost of enjoying childhood. And it can be hard on Asian-American kids whose comparative advantage isn't in science or math but in theater or punk rock. Among Asians, there's sometimes concern that there's too much focus on memorization, not enough on creativity.)

Another factor in Asian scholastic success may be the interaction of social stereotypes and self-confidence. Scholars like Claude Steele have found that blacks sometimes suffer from "stereotype threat": Anxiety from negative stereotypes impairs performance. Lee and Zhou argue that Asian-Americans sometimes ride on the opposite of "stereotype threat," a "stereotype promise" that they will be smart and hard-working.

Lee and Zhou also say the success of Asian-Americans, far from revealing a lack of discrimination, is in part a testament to it. They say Asian-Americans work hard to succeed in areas with clear metrics like math and science in part as a protection against bias - and in any case, many Asians still perceive a "bamboo ceiling" that is hard to break through.

To me, the success of Asian-Americans is a tribute to hard work, strong families and passion for education. Bravo! Ditto for the success of Jews, West Indians and other groups that have shown that upward mobility is possible, but let's not exaggerate the lessons here.

Why should the success of the children of Asian doctors, nurtured by teachers, be reassuring to a black boy in Baltimore who is raised by a struggling single mom, whom society regards as a potential menace? Disadvantage and marginalization are complex, often deeply rooted in social structures and unconscious biases, sometimes compounded by hopelessness and self-destructive behaviors, and because one group can access the American dream does not mean that all groups can.

So, sure, let's celebrate the success of Asian-Americans, and emulate the respect for education and strong families. But let's not use the success of Asians to pat ourselves on the back and pretend that discrimination is history.

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THIS is an awkward question, but here goes: Why are Asian-Americans so successful in America? It's no secret that Asian-Americans are disproportionately stars in American schools, and even in American society as a whole. Census data show that Americans of Asian heritage earn more than other groups, including whites.

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In this week’s Race/Related newsletter: a conversation with experts, plus a personal essay about discrimination.

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Decades ago, the Ivy League colleges thought they had a problem: too many Jews. These recent immigrants, from a culture that prized education and academic achievement, had an unfortunate characteristic: They worked harder, studied longer and cared more about school. In short, they had all the attributes required for success in the Ivy League.

Problem was, the Ivy League didn't really want them. Being first-generation students, these applicants didn't have rich alumni parents who would be likely to donate big bucks. Being from an ethnicity not associated with America's governing class, they didn't help the Ivy League with its biggest selling point - that going to college there provides an opportunity to rub shoulders with America's governing class. And they were seen as boring grinds who studied too hard and weren't much fun.

The result was a change in admissions criteria to reward "leadership," and "well-rounded" candidates - a thin disguise for "WASPs" - and, following closely on, actual quotas for Jewish students, so that no matter how many applied, their numbers on campus would stay just about the same. After several decades, this came to be seen as racist and unfair, and the quotas were dropped. (Though by then, conveniently enough, the Ivy League was able to find Jewish applicants with plenty of money, polish and governing-class connections without too much trouble).

But while the quotas for Jews are gone, the Ivy League now, by all accounts, has quotas for Asian students. They are seen as people who study too hard, boring grinds who aren't much fun - and, of course, their parents aren't as rich and connected. And though the numbers of highly qualified Asian applicants have grown dramatically, the number of Asians admitted stays pretty much the same every year.

Now the Asian students are suing. In a lawsuit against Harvard, they are claiming that Harvard demands higher qualifications from Asian students than from others, and that it uses "racial classifications to engage in the same brand of invidious discrimination against Asian Americans that it formerly used to limit the number of Jewish students in its student body."

These claims are almost certainly correct. Discrimination against Asian students - and not just by Harvard, but throughout higher education - has been an open secret for years. Asian students, we're told, face a "bamboo ceiling" as a result.

Where today's discrimination is different from the Ivy League's old quotas against Jews is that those old quotas were removed as part of efforts to fight racism. The Ivy League's new quotas, meanwhile, are often defended on the same grounds - or, at least, as a means of attaining "diversity."

But that's harder to do in a nation that is made of minorities. In the old days, affirmative action was about overcoming white resistance to opening up institutions to blacks. If a black student with lower SAT scores got a spot in college at the expense of a white student, well, that white student probably had benefited to some degree from growing up, or having had parents who grew up, in a racially-segregated society. And, given many white institutions' history of lying and foot-dragging when it came to desegregation, affirmative action was a way of ensuring that we got results, not excuses.

But it has been more than 60 years since Brown v. Board of Education, and, what's more, racial issues in America are no longer black-and-white. The Vietnamese child of boat people or the Indian " untouchable " immigrant who applies to Harvard didn't benefit from racial segregation, and probably overcame more obstacles pre-college than an African-American born in New York. Why should these Asian applicants be disadvantaged so that universities can ensure that there aren't too many of the wrong kind of people on campus?

Thirty years ago, my old law professor Burke Marshall wrote an article in the Yale Law Journal on non-discrimination in a "nation of minorities." He opined that affirmative action was still about breaking down white power structures. Maybe that was still true in 1984. But now universities - all of which, including "private" schools like Harvard, are heavily fed by taxpayer funds - are engaging in racial discrimination in order to produce what they regard as a pleasing bouquet of race and ethnicity. Is that a good enough reason to deny individuals a fair chance? I don't think so. And I suspect that courts will feel the same way.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself.

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Decades ago, the Ivy League colleges thought they had a problem: too many Jews. These recent immigrants, from a culture that prized education and academic achievement, had an unfortunate characteristic: They worked harder, studied longer and cared more about school. In short, they had all the attributes required for success in the Ivy League.

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The value of equal opportunity is being trampled.The creditability of elite colleges suffers. Meritocracy is compromised.

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For decades now, Asian Americans have been regarded as a "model minority," with high achievement in school and doing well overall, particularly at the top of the curve. But there's much more to the achievement of Asian Americans than that, and we've set out to share some truths about just how well Asian Americans are doing today. We've discovered that although Asian Americans do live up to their reputation, there are disparities, including failures to make it to top positions like CEOs, as well as significant difficulties for certain Asian groups. Read on, and we'll discuss 20 amazing and surprising statistics concerning Asian-American achievement.

1. In an exploration of Tiger Mother parenting, the New York Daily News discovered that the typically high achievement of Asian-Americans may not be due to harsh parenting, but rather, because they spend more time studying than other kids, and not necessarily because their parents force them to. In one study cited by the article, it was found that Asian-American 11th graders spent six more hours per week studying than white students of the same age. The article points out the extra study time can improve feelings of competence, self worth, and joy from completing a monumental task.

2. Asian-American men are more likely to ask for a raise, but less likely to actually get one. Even with a bachelor's degree, Asian-Americans will earn less than their Caucasian counterparts. In fact, according to Forbes, it adds up to a lot: $400k less over the course of a lifetime.

1. Chinese-Americans and South Asians personify the high-achieving Asian stereotype most people have come to know, but there are other Asian-American groups who are struggling to make things work. According to Asian Nation, for every Chinese-American or South Asian with a college degree, there's an equal number of Southeast Asians struggling to adapt to living in the U.S. Specifically, Vietnamese-Americans only have a college degree attainment rate of 20%, and Laotians, Cambodians, and Khmer have a rate less than 10%.

2. Asian-American students may be doing well overall, but often, they're simply not ready for college. In California in particular, students are really struggling. The Education Trust published a study, Overlooked and Underserved: Debunking the Asian 'Model Minority' Myth in California Schools. In this study, researchers found that about 7 out of 10 Asian students and 9 out of 10 Pacific Islander students are not prepared for college-level coursework upon high school graduation. Further, less than 10% of Filipinos, Cambodians, Laotians, and Samoans are ready for college math.

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20 Amazing Stats About Asian-American Achievement

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For decades now, Asian Americans have been regarded as a "model minority," with high achievement in school and doing well overall, particularly at the top of the curve. But there's much more to the achievement of Asian Americans than that, and we've set out to share some truths about just how well Asian Americans are doing today.

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1. I think I will organize my ideas by doing first my introduction, then go on to explain the problem and examples of it from a few colleges. Then I will say what is being done to fix the issue, and any possible counter arguments.

2. I will need to refer to the fact that statistically Asian students do better in school, and how they aren’t being accepted into any major colleges.

3.I plan to keep track of my sources by outlining my ideas and finding any sources with the evidence to back up my claim in notes, and maybe writing down any quotes I think are necessary to make a reasonable argument.

4. For my introduction, I plan on referencing the typical Asian stereotype in school, and maybe even using my own life (my parents and how they want me to go to a good college) as an example.

5. I think I will need around 4-6 paragraphs depending on how much information I can get.
-introduction/how well asians do in school stats.
-why this is a problem/ex.
-another example
-counter arguments
- what is being done to prevent this
-conclusion

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1. I feel pretty satisfactory about my information so far, but think I should expand on it more. I have mostly  researched about affirmative action against Asians and the Harvard/Ivy League cases regarding the case, but feel that I need to dig a little deeper about the counter arguments and possibly what is being done to fix the issue.

2. I have mostly information regarding affirmative action, Harvard’s unfair application process, and the statistics of acceptance rates due to race.

3. I feel that I know my topic pretty well, but need to learn more about what is being done about this racism, any possible other cases about it besides major universities, and maybe even to see if careers/jobs are being cast away from Asians as well.

4. I think that my research gets a little messy when talking about the difference between African Americans and Hispanics to Whites and Asians in the academic world. (how each race benefits/ is discriminated against.)

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Do Harvard and other elite universities illegally discriminate against Asian-American applicants?

I'm not sure. But there's another group of people who definitely face routine prejudice in college admissions. They're the quiet types who keep to themselves, often preferring a relaxed evening at home to a rowdy night out. They like to study alone, not in groups. And they're often the last ones to speak up in class.

I'm talking about introverts, of course. And if there's one thing we've learned from reports on the recent lawsuit against Harvard University's admission system, it's that introverts routinely get the short end of the stick.

The lawsuit alleges that Harvard has engaged in unlawful "racial balancing" by systematically discriminating against Asian-Americans, who were given lower "personality" scores by admission officers. It's a hard charge to prove. If an Asian applicant received a lower personality score, how can we know if that's because she was Asian?
RELATED: Ivy League schools brace for scrutiny of race in admissions "
We can't, without evidence. But here's what seems apparent: Harvard's "personality" evaluation favors people who are outgoing, gregarious and comfortable in the spotlight: in a word, extroverts.

Consider this example, which The New York Times drew from the hundreds of documents that have been filed in the Harvard lawsuit. An Asian-American applicant was described as a "hard worker," but "would she relax and have any fun?"

Other Asian-American candidates were characterized the same way - industrious and high-achieving but often lacking in "distinguishing excellence" (or "DE" in admissions shorthand). Nor were they likely to be seen as "leaders," the figures who stand out from the crowd by standing in front of it.

And that's what our elite schools are looking for, unabashedly and unapologetically. When Harvard says it wants people with a "positive personality" who are "widely respected," two other criteria the Times extracted from the court filings, it's not talking about the kid who will stay in her dorm room on Saturday night to study or watch a video. Introverts aren't always shy - sometimes they can be quite chatty - but they also need time alone.
EDITORIAL: A collision of values: Does Harvard cheat Asian-American applicants? "
And they definitely don't need to be the center of attention, which makes them markedly less attractive to admissions committees. Colleges want the applicants who will take the bull by the horns and the campus by storm! That means joining as many groups as possible and ideally being the president of each one. And it means participating in - maybe dominating - every available conversation, in and out of class.

That would be defensible if we knew that extroverts were more intelligent or successful than other people. But they're not. As Susan Cain shows in her indispensable 2012 book, "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking," extroverts have us snowed. We perceive people who talk a lot - and, especially, those who talk quickly - as more able. And there's zero evidence for that.

Ditto for the presumption that they make better leaders. As Cain shows, there are plenty of introverts - including Bill Gates and Charles Schwab - who have become famously effective leaders. They govern by example rather than charisma, by listening rather than talking.

Going back to the 1950s, some colleges have argued that the corporations that hire graduates - and that also donate millions to the colleges - preferred the "gregarious, active type," as one dean told sociologist William Whyte, author of the 1956 classic "The Organization Man." The dean added: "We see little use for the 'brilliant' introvert."

That's still generally the case at our selective universities, as recent research on admissions suggests. Never mind that not all of our students intend to enter the corporate world, or that a wealth of research demonstrates that introverts can flourish in that world as much as extroverts can. We want "strong" personalities, who make their mark in public performance rather than behind the scenes.

And we're sticking with that story, despite evidence that Asians are less likely to display these traits than Westerners are. Cross-cultural studies have demonstrated that people in the East tend to emphasize traits such as humility and hard work, while Americans more often favor cheerfulness and enthusiasm.
COMMENTARY: Asian-Americans are indeed treated unfairly in admissions, but the culprit is not affirmative action. "
So do our admissions policies. I don't know if that makes them racially discriminatory. But I do know that they're scientifically indefensible, especially in light of everything we have learned about personality over the past half-century.

This week, the rest of the Ivy League - including my employer, the University of Pennsylvania - closed ranks behind Harvard, defending the use of race in college admissions and emphasizing "the profound importance of a diverse student body for their educational missions," as the schools wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief. I agree with them. I just wish they were friendly to diverse personalities, not just diverse races. Without that, we'll end up with students who look different from each other but think and act the same.
The Washington Post Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of "Campus Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know." This commentary originally appeared in The Washington Post. Join the discussion on Twitter @Trib_Ed_Board and on Facebook.

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One group definitely faces prejudice in college admissions. It's not who you think it is.

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Do Harvard and other elite universities illegally discriminate against Asian-American applicants? I'm not sure. But there's another group of people who definitely face routine prejudice in college admissions. They're the quiet types who keep to themselves, often preferring a relaxed evening at home to a rowdy night out.

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Asian-American Coalition for Education (AACE) is a non-political, non-profit national organization, the proven leader in fighting for Asian-American children's equal education rights.

Our journey began in late 2014 when AACE founders decided to unite Asian-American communities to fight against Ivy League schools' discriminatory admissions practices. On May 15, 2015, the founders of AACE united 64 Asian-American organizations and jointly filed a civil rights complaint with the Department of Education (DOE) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to request that they conduct investigations into Harvard University's discriminatory admissions practices against Asian-American applicants. As the largest joint action taken by Asian-American communities over the last few decades, our complaint filing immediately attracted enormous media attention and exposed Ivy League Schools' discrimination against Asian-American children on the national and international stages. It also garnered strong support from various groups in the American society, particularly bipartisan support from members of the U.S. House of Representatives. It was a historic event.

From this encouraging start, AACE has made great strides in our arduous fight for Asian-American children's equal education rights. The followings are a few highlights:
* On September 10, 2015, representing 117 Asian-American organizations, AACE and Asian American Legal Foundation (AALF) jointly filed an Amicus Brief with the U.S. Supreme Court urging a total ban of racial discrimination in college admissions.
* Since summer 2015, AACE has encouraged and supported Asian-American students who were unfairly rejected by top American universities to speak out. In response to our call, five discriminated-against Asian-American students have filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR) against Ivy Leagues schools.
* On May 23, 2016, representing 132 Asian-American American organizations all over the nation, AACE submitted an administrative complaint to the DOE and the DOJ to request that they conduct an investigation into Yale University, Brown University and Dartmouth College for their discriminatory admission practices against Asian-American applicants.
* Since late 2015, AACE has been taking aggressive actions to support Asian Americans' fight against various attempts to unlawfully use racial balancing in K-12 education in Montgomery County, Maryland, as well as in Specialized High Schools of New York City.
* Starting from November 2017, our tireless efforts have generated tangible results: in response to our civil-rights complaints against Harvard University in 2015 and against Yale University in 2016, the federal government announced its investigation of Harvard November 2017 and that of Yale University in September 2018. As a major milestone in our pursuit of equal education rights for Asian-American children, the U.S. government's investigations into Harvard University and Yale University have sent a strong warning to many other colleges, as the pressure is on for them to refrain from their unlawful admissions practices. Consequently, the admission probability of Asian-American children at these schools can be significantly improved, as demonstrated by the case of Princeton University after it was complained by Asian-American students.
* Between January 2017 and June 2018, the AACE leadership traveled to multiple cities to meet with U.S. government officials and other policy influencers to urge the U.S. Government to enact a policy reform in college admission to rescind Obama-era policy guidelines that promoted racial balancing and condoned discrimination against Asian-American children. AACE's policy recommendations were adopted by the federal government in July 2018 when it abolished the Obama-era policy guidelines and restored Bush-era policy guidelines that prohibit the illegal use of racial quotas and racial stereotypes in college admissions. This is a triumphant moment for AACE when our relentless efforts are accommodated by the federal government and crystalized into a major policy reform. It marks a new chapter for millions of Asian-American children. If the new policy is faithfully implemented, Asian-American children will have a higher chance to be admitted into their dream colleges.
* On July 30, 2018, representing 156 Asian-American organizations, AACE and AALF jointly filed an Amicus Brief with the United States District Court in Boston to oppose Harvard University's discriminatory admissions practices and to support the plaintiff (Students for Fair Admissions, SFFA) in its lawsuit against Harvard University. One month later, the DOJ joined our side with a United States' Statement of Interest denouncing Harvard's anti-Asian discrimination in admissions.
Our records have proven: AACE has become the most effective and impactful civil-rights organization fighting for Asian American interests.
Nevertheless, our honorable fight is far from completion. Many American colleges have not stopped their discriminatory admissions practices against Asian-American children. Much more work must be done in the areas of public policies, legislations, and public opinions. It is imperative for us to carry on our endeavors to abolish racial discrimination in college admissions and other educational aspects for our children and all future generations of this great nation.
AACE uses the following democratic approaches to advance our cause:
1. Conduct media campaigns and community outreach to increase public awareness and expand our alliance;
2. File administrative complaints and/or take legal actions against institutions that discriminate against Asian-American applicants;
3. Encourage and support discriminated-against Asian-American students to file individual complaints or take legal actions;
4. Advocate for policy and/or legislative changes in favor of equal education rights;
5. File position papers on relevant policy and legal issues.

Please join our fight against racial discrimination in college admissions. Please take actions:

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Asian American Coalition for Education | equal education rights for asian americans

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Asian-American Coalition for Education (AACE) is a non-political, non-profit national organization, the proven leader in fighting for Asian-American children's equal education rights. Our journey began in late 2014 when AACE founders decided to unite Asian-American communities to fight against Ivy League schools' discriminatory admissions practices.

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(in the context of the allocation of resources or employment) the practice or policy of favoring individuals belonging to groups known to have been discriminated against previously.

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Asian-American Harvard Applicants Saw Lowest Admit Rate of Any Racial Group From 1995 to 2013

Over a nearly two-decade period starting in 1995, Asian-American applicants to Harvard saw the lowest acceptance rate of any racial group that applied to the school, according to data presented in the Harvard admissions trial Thursday.

Over a nearly two-decade period starting in 1995, Asian-American applicants to Harvard saw the lowest acceptance rate of any racial group that applied to the school, according to data presented in court Thursday as part of the Harvard admissions trial.

Data for that time period - which begins with the admissions cycle for applicants to Harvard's Class of 2000 and ends with the cycle for the Class of 2017 - show that Asian-American candidates on average saw an admission rate of 8.1 percent. By comparison, white applicants saw an average acceptance rate of 11.1 percent in that time period, African-American applicants saw an average acceptance rate of 13.2 percent, and Hispanic-American applicants saw an average acceptance rate of 10.6 percent.

The data surfaced during court testimony when Harvard's lead trial lawyer William F. Lee '72 stepped up to continue his marathon questioning of the College's long-serving Dean of Admissions William R. Fitzsimmons '67. Thursday marked the fourth day of the trial; Fitzsimmons has testified each day for several hours since proceedings kicked off Monday.

The trial, expected to last for at least three weeks, is the latest development in a four-year-old lawsuit that alleges Harvard illegally discriminates against Asian-American applicants. Anti-affirmative action advocacy group Students for Fair Admissions filed suit against the University in 2014. Experts have said that - should the case wind up before the Supreme Court - it could decide the fate of race-conscious admissions in the United States.

The dataset Lee presented Thursday, which appears to be sourced from internal Harvard records, breaks down College applicants into eight categories: white, Asian-American, African-American, Hispanic-American, Native-American/Native-Hawaiian, international citizen, "Other,"and "Unknown."

Charts displayed on three pages of the 16-page dataset detail the number of applicants and the number of admits belonging to each racial group for 18 Harvard admission cycles starting in 1995. The Crimson calculated yearly admit rates for each demographic group.

The analysis showed that Native-American and Native-Hawaiian students saw an average acceptance rate of 10.4 percent in that time period - but the statistic is likely less meaningful given the relatively small pool of applicants hailing from those racial backgrounds. Significantly fewer Native Americans and Native Hawaiians applied to the College each year than did members of other racial groups.

On average, 4,910 Asian-American, 1,938 African-American, 2,082 Hispanic-American, and 8,685 white students applied to Harvard in any given year included in the dataset. Just 233 Native-American and Native Hawaiian students did the same.

Harvard is typically tight-lipped about anything related to its famously secretive admissions process, though the College's admissions office does publish the racial demographics of its admitted classes each year.

But it has never before released as detailed a breakdown as the one Lee unveiled Thursday.

The average acceptance rate overall during the time period covered by the dataset clocked in at 9.3 percent. Asian-Americans were the only racial group whose acceptance rate dips below that average.

The numbers also show how the pool of prospective applicants to Harvard has changed since the mid-1990s.

From 1994 to 2014, Harvard saw a 257 percent increase in applications from African-American students and a 208 percent increase in applications from Hispanic-American students. The number of Asian-American applicants increased by 94 percent and the number of white applicants increased by 63 percent.

The acceptance rates for every single racial group decreased during that time period - consistent with the fact that the Harvard admissions process has grown increasingly competitive in recent years. In 2018, the College saw an acceptance rate below 5 percent for the first time in school history.

But the acceptance rates for all racial groups did not fall at the same rate. African-American applicants saw the steepest decline - their acceptance rates fell by 12.4 percentage points over 18 years. In the 1995-1996 admissions cycle, 19.2 percent of African-American Harvard hopefuls earned a spot at the College; in the 2012-2013 cycle, just 6.8 percent of African-American applicants did so.

Hispanic-Americans saw the second-steepest decline of 8.9 percentage points, while white students saw a decline of 5.4 percentage points. Asian-American applicants saw the smallest decrease: their acceptance rate fell by just 3.6 percentage points in that time period.

The overall decline in acceptance rates for all students measured 5.6 percentage points.

The relatively large decrease in acceptance rates for African-American and Hispanic-American applicants likely reflects the fact that Harvard has increased its outreach efforts to communities of color over the past few years. Admissions officers regularly conduct "extensive outreach to minority applicants" as part of the Undergraduate Minority Recruitment Program, according to Harvard-submitted court documents.

Overall, the data shows, admit rates for applicants of all races have grown increasingly similar over the past two decades or so. And all racial group-specific acceptance rates have inched closer to Harvard's overall acceptance rate.

The trial is slated to continue Friday morning.

-Crimson editors Brian P. Yu and Phelan Yu contributed reporting.

-Staff writer Shera S. Avi-Yonah can be reached at shera.avi-yonah@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter at @saviyonah.

-Staff writer Molly C. McCafferty can be reached at molly.mccafferty@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter at @mollmccaff.

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Asian-American Harvard Applicants Saw Lowest Admit Rate of Any Racial Group From 1995 to 2013 | News | The Harvard Crimson

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Over a nearly two-decade period starting in 1995, Asian-American applicants to Harvard saw the lowest acceptance rate of any racial group that applied to the school, according to data presented in the Harvard admissions trial Thursday.

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1. I chose my topic of Asian discrimination in college and universities, (specifically the college acceptance of Asians) because as an asian american, I feel that there isn’t enough discussion about this topic; especially when seemingly rarely anyone knew this was an issue to begin with.

2. I am very intrigued with the admission rate between races based on SAT scores. This rate means that between an Asian who scores a 1450, a white person who scores a 1310, and an African American who scores an 1000, they all have an equal admission rate —which clearly is not equal.

3. I did not know about the SAT scores and “equal” admission rates until I began to research my topic.

4. I am wondering if this discrimination towards Asians is also occurring in not just Ivy-League Universities, but also local colleges and UC’s. I also want to see if there has been any legal action against this issue (lawsuits, protests...)

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crazy rich caucasians> minorities in ivy leagues 

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crazy rich caucasians> minorities in ivy leagues 

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“It’s unlikely that the Ivy League is overtly racist. Admissions officers don’t read an application and say, “well, he’s Asian, I think I’ll pass.” Rather, discrimination against Asian Americans is indirect, propagated by a number of unfair heuristics that favor wealthy white students.”
-crazy rich caucasians>>>>>>>>
-colleges/unis. want to look "not racist" by accepting african americans/hispanics but this logic makes zero sense (????) when they ignoreprimarily asians
-

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A recent lawsuit by Students for Fair Admissions argues that Asian American students are discriminated against in college admissions at Harvard.

It's unlikely that the Ivy League is overtly racist. Admissions officers don't read an application and say, "well, he's Asian, I think I'll pass." Rather, discrimination against Asian Americans is indirect, propagated by a number of unfair heuristics that favor wealthy white students.

This first is legacy admissions. 10-15% of Ivy League students have a parent or grandparent who attended their university. The second is a preference given to "feeder schools." Since feeder schools - including a slew of New York City private schools - tend to be predominantly white and wealthy, this creates a structural advantage for the students who can afford to attend. Finally, the wealthy can afford to hire advisors to help their children with essays and pay for resume-builders (like charity trips to Africa or South America), whereas lower-income families cannot afford to do so.

All three of these qualities do not uniquely disadvantage Asians - they simply help ensure a white majority at Ivy League schools. Recognizing that their traditional admission standards are unfair, Ivy League schools import diversity via affirmative action. They bring in black and Latino students to ensure that these minorities are represented. Because Asian Americans are a " model minority" and tend to outperform other racial groups academically, they are deemed unworthy of affirmative action.

The result of this process is exactly what Ivy League schools are looking for - a student body with a white majority that is flanked by students from a variety of racial backgrounds. If the floodgates were opened, the Ivy League might no longer be majority white. The University of California - Berkley, which is ranked by U.S. News as one of the top 20 colleges and has race blind admissions - is 47% Asian.

Ivy League schools are by their very definition, are conservative organizations. Just as they hoped to prevent Jews from forming a critical mass on college campuses in the 20th century, Ivy League schools now hope to prevent Asians from achieving organic growth. Harvard hopes to keep its Asian population below 17%, forcing Asian Americans to complete amongst themselves for the coveted spots. This only drives up standards to the point where white students no longer need to be of the same caliber as their Asian peers to gain admission to elite universities.

This is reflected by the research that has been conducted on the topic. Thomas J. Espenshade, a Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, found that on average, Asian students accepted to top universities scored 140 points higher on their SATs than did their white peers and 450 points higher than African American students.

We decided to take a deeper look at our own high school experiences - as non-Asian students in a predominantly Asian American high school - to look for parallels with nation-wide statistics. What we found is telling.

During our senior year, we requested and were granted access to college admission data for our alma mater. We used the class of 2007 - with its more than 800 graduates - as a case study. For each student, we found the rank of the top school to which they were admitted on the Forbes' America's Top Colleges. Then we conducted a multivariate regression analysis holding GPA, SAT score, income (mealcode), and AP Classes taken constant. We found that being Asian reduced the Forbes ranking of the top school to which the student was admitted by 8.4 ranks.

If colleges are to be meritocracies, then they need to completely overhaul their admission procedures. They must consider how lurking biases may impact decision-making. Instead of responding defensively to concerning data about the racial impact of their admissions policies, they should look internally to identify its cause. Leveling the playing field should be the goal - not pretending there is no problem.

In college, we learn to check our assumptions at the door and engage in a meaningful pursuit of knowledge. Our universities need to take their own advice.

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What's Behind Asian Discrimination in College Admissions?

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A recent lawsuit by Students for Fair Admissions argues that Asian American students are discriminated against in college admissions at Harvard. It's unlikely that the Ivy League is overtly racist. Admissions officers don't read an application and say, "well, he's Asian, I think I'll pass."

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asians are being discriminated against in school :
-SAT scores
-college acceptance
-admissions/enrollment

*disadvantages toward Asians for having academic advantages (aka:being /statistically/ smarter than other applicants)

"In this narrative, Asian people are the victims of any racial remedies. The long history of discrimination against Asians — and the real struggle Asians face in accruing cultural clout and ascending to the highest echelons of politics and business — are tied to the anchor of affirmative action."

**COUNTER// whites are (kindve) a l s o getting discriminated against:
"Underlying this thinking is the idea that there is some unadulterated metric that measures merit — one that often puts white people on top — but affirmative action takes away that advantage."
-basically discr. for being "better than other races" so that advantage is taken away ????

SAT docced points:
African American:1000
White:1310
Asian:1450
all can score the above scores, but in college's eyes have an equal rate of acceptance
--asians have to work harder than other races for the sake of being asian
-hard work is hard work and should not b determined by race

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I first heard about the "penalty" my junior year of high school. I was sitting in an SAT prep class because I had barely broken 1000 on my first practice SAT. During a snack break, another Asian kid in the class said to me, "You know we have to do better than even the white kids, right?"

I had never heard affirmative action framed that way - as a "bonus" for black and brown people and a "penalty" for white and especially Asian people.

At the time, I didn't understand just how pernicious it was to think about affirmative action in those terms. Not only does that frame gloss over the reasons why race-conscious policies are necessary; it's also the first step toward arguing that all race-conscious policies are unfair.

But I was fed a certain story about affirmative action, so when I saw this data a few years later, it only solidified this mental model:

The data is from an influential 2009 book in whichtwo Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandra Radford, quantified how well you needed to score on your SATs to have an equal chance of admission as someone of another race. It implies that a black student who scores 1000 on her SATs would have an equal chance of admission as a white student who scores 1310 or an Asian-American student who scores 1450.

This study gave legs to a longstanding conservative argument that affirmative action is a misguided progressive policy to help black and Hispanic people while unfairly penalizing Asian and white people.

And the argument is resurfacing again.

When Trump first took office, the Justice Department dug up a two-year-old complaint against Harvard that alleges the school has quotas on how many Asian Americans it accepts. It opened an investigation into Harvard's admissions practices, which many feared would create a chilling effect on other schools with affirmative action programs.

Then in October, a federal court heard arguments on a lawsuit that alleges the same thing. And in the lead-up to thetrial, the Trump administration wrote a statement of support for the plaintiffs, who echoed the exact argument conservatives have been making for decades:

...the record evidence demonstrates that Harvard's race-based admissions process significantly disadvantages Asian-American applicants compared to applicants of other racial groups - including both white applicants and applicants from other racial minority groups.

In short, conservatives are taking another swing at dismantling affirmative action - hoping the case makes it to the Supreme Court, where a new conservative majority could rule broadly and outlaw affirmative action. And, yet again, they are centering the debate around Asian Americans.

This story, of racial bonuses and penalties due to affirmative action, has created an internal tension for Asian Americans: Many of us know race-conscious policies are necessary to remedy systemic racism. But we are also told that Asian Americans are penalized for those same policies.

It's a tension white affirmative action opponents have exploited, time and again, to make theirargument against race-conscious policies and to seek a broader coalition for their movement.

But if Asian Americans have long resisted being recruited to their cause, this latest campaign has a new wrinkle. "This time around, there is a wealthier, very small, and extremely vocal group of Asians who are on board - and very willing to play the part," said Colorado State University education professor OiYan Poon, who has been studying this group.

The story on which this movement is built contains some fundamental misunderstandings. The idea that affirmative action doles out bonuses and penalties obscures the far more complicated reality of how the policy actually works. But of greater concernis that this story - of merit artificially tweaked to engineer a certain racial demographic - implies thatthere is an objective way to measure who is deserving and who isn't. And it suggests that if we went purely by this idea of merit, it is white and Asian people who would be on top, and that that is the natural state of the world.

The "racial mascoting" of Asians

The use of Asian Americans as a political prop isn't new.

In the mid-1980s, Asian-American groups started to uncover admissions practices that hurt Asian applicants. Eventually, top schools like Stanford and Brown conceded there was real bias against Asians in their admissions policies.

The Reagan administration saw an opportunity in these controversies.

William Bradford Reynolds, then the head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and a longtime opponent of affirmative action, said in a 1988 speech that Asian Americans faced discrimination because of efforts to help other minority groups:

While university officials are understandably loath to admit that they are discriminating against qualified Asian-Americans, rejection of such applicants ironically appears to be driven by the universities' "affirmative action" policies aimed at favoring other, preferred racial minorities.

But Asian-American leaders were horrified that their cause was being co-opted by conservatives to dismantle policies that helped other racial minorities- and they refused to play the part.

UC Berkeley professor L. Ling-Chi Wang wrote to Reynolds, "At no time has anyone in the Asian American community linked these concerns to the legitimate affirmative action program for the historically discriminated, underrepresented minorities."

Law professor and activist Mari Matsuda argued Asians shouldn't be used to "deny educational opportunities to the disadvantaged and to preserve success only for the privileged."

DePaul professor Sumi Cho coined a term for this conservative tactic: " racial mascotting."

This fight over admissions at highly selective private schools might seem inconsequential for most people. But as Harvard education professor Natasha Warikoo wrote in her recent book, The Diversity Bargain:

I see these elite universities as sites for symbolic meaning-making around merit and race. The universities hold symbolic value not only for their students, but also in the wider society. They are especially important for our understanding of meritocracy, because many see admissions to those universities as the ultimate demonstration of merit.

In short, these fights shape the ways we talk about who is worthy, who is not - and why.

And 30 years later, we're back here again, having the same debate with affirmative action opponents, who are again using Asian Americans as mascots. And again, there's a large group of Asian-American leaders rejecting this role in the debate.

But now another group of Asian Americans is making this debate more confusing.

"We contribute to society. Why are Asian Americans being punished?"

The latest challenge to affirmative action began with a lawsuit filed by Edward Blum, who also launched the previous attack on affirmative action. In that case, Blum recruited Abigail Fisher, a white student who claimed she was rejected by the University of Texas Austin because of her race. That case went to the Supreme Court, and many believed it would finally strike down affirmative action - but it didn't.

For his next act, Blum took another swing at affirmative action - this time, using Asian Americans as the victims in a lawsuit against Harvard.

But shortly after Blum filed his lawsuit, something interestinghappened: A coalition of more than 60 Asian-American groups filed a Justice Department complaint largely mimicking Blum's lawsuit.

Leading that charge was a Chinese-American man named Yukong Zhao, a Florida businessman in his 50s.

Zhao is the president of the Asian American Coalition for Education, the collection of groups that filed the DOJ complaint. And he and his followers are ideal allies for white, anti-affirmative action conservatives. They not only claim that race-conscious policies are unfair but argue convincingly that they are victims.

What's unique about Zhao is his large audience; he's a star on the Chinese social media platform WeChat, which has turned into a kind of " virtual Chinatown," as activist Steven Chen puts it. It's an isolated place populated by mostly first-generation immigrants from mainland China, with high barriers to entry for everyone else. And it has become an echo chamber for stories ofanti-Asian discrimination.

Zhao has been one of the loudest voices on this front. "In the future," he told me, "our dream, just like Martin Luther King, is we want every child to be judged on their talent and content of their character, not by their skin color."

This group can feel large in numbers and has earned a lot of media attention. They can beespecially intimidating in the WeChat world.

But Poon, the education researcher, found that they're actually much smaller and more homogenous than the coalition's profile suggests.

She interviewed 36 Asian Americans last year who have advocated for or against affirmative action. And she found that those who have advocated against affirmative action are almost entirely recent immigrants from mainland China - the same group that spends time on WeChat. They tend to be affluent and educated, but also racially isolated. They work in places that are predominantly white, and occupy social spaces that are predominantly Chinese.

Poon also said most of them had stories about experiencing racial discrimination. If you combine that with Zhao's rhetoric that affirmative action penalizes them in favor of black and Hispanic applicants, you can see how they might believe the US is anti-Asian:

Zhao says the way to address racial discrimination is to remove all race-based policies, echoing other affirmative action opponents. Otherwise, he says, Asian Americans become victims - perhaps like his son, who he says experienced racial discrimination from at least two Ivy League schools who rejected him, despite an application that was more than deserving.

"We're hardworking, we never ask for any government favors," he told me. "But you blame us as overrepresented. We contribute to society. ... Why are Asian Americans being punished?"

Then Zhao dials down the rhetoric and presents data that Asians are being hurt by affirmative action: the Espenshade data, which seems to prove affirmative action penalizes Asians while helping black and Hispanic people.

Once evidence of a "penalty" for Asian Americans is introduced in the conversation, it can be difficult to rebut.

Why the "penalty" and "bonus" language is so pernicious

The myth of a racial bonus/penalty persists, especially in more isolated Asian-American communities, where anecdotes about anti-Asian discrimination inform a certain worldview.

And sometimes, those anecdotes prove true, like when a federal investigation unveiled documents that showed admissions officers at Princeton wrote disparagingly of Asian-American applicants, stereotyping them with labels like "standard premeds." (They also wrote disparagingly of black and Hispanic applicants.)

But this simplistic framework doesn't reflect the long, winding journey affirmative action has taken - and just how much it's been stripped down along the way.

When the Supreme Court first ruled on affirmative action in 1978, it ruled that affirmative actioncould not specifically help black and Hispanic students at the expense of other students.

However, schools could consider race if the practice was "narrowly tailored" to serve a "compelling" interest. The Court ruled thatthe goal of remedying structural racism wasn't narrow enough. So that left only a single path for affirmative action to walk: Race could only be considered to create diversity on campuses.

From there, affirmation action was further limited with each successive ruling.

In the 2003 decision Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in the majority opinion that race should be considered alongside "all factors that may contribute to student body diversity."

This meant schools could only consider a student's race as one factor among many others in a "holistic" review of an application. It essentially turned race into a peripheral characteristic, alongside things like whether you played sports.

Then in 2013, the Court laid out strict rules for when race can be used in a holistic review, further limiting affirmative action:

Most recently, in a 2016 decision, the Court further constrained the consideration of race.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote it can only be a "factor of a factor of a factor."

Let's say a school is looking for strong leadership qualities, and an applicant lists leadership experience that is grounded in their racial identity. Only then can a schoolconsider their race.

Ultimately, this means that schools are severely limited in how they can think about race in admissions.

If we look more closelyat the Espenshade data within this context, we begin to see why the chart of racial bonuses and penalties paints a misleading picture of affirmative action. For one, Espenshade and Radford used data from just a handful of schools in 1997, and it was data from before major court rulings changed how schools can consider race.

But more importantly, the Espenshade analysis paints a picture of an alternate reality in which we went down a caricatured version of the other path. It portrays a world where racial bonuses are awarded to disadvantaged groups and racial penalties are levied against Asian and white students.

That's just not the reality of affirmative action. As even Espenshade has reiterated time and again, his study doesn't prove discrimination against Asian Americans.

The other attempts to portray Asian Americans as victims

That hasn't stopped affirmative action opponents from using Espenshade - and from reaching for other arguments to make their case.

In 2012, Ron Unz, a former publisher of the American Conservative, argued that Ivy League schools have an Asian quota. His main piece of evidence was the lack of growth in the Asian-American population at Ivy League schools, despite the growing percentage of college-age Asians nationwide. As a counterexample, he compared Asian enrollment at these schools to Caltech, where they don't have affirmative action:

There are several flaws with this analysis. It assumes the quality of the Asian applicant pool has stayed the same as the population grows, as Poon points out.

It also only looks at how many students enroll in the school, and not how many students are admitted to the school. Jenn Fang, who writes at Reappropriate.co, found that the limited growth in Asian-Americans students at Harvard wasn't out of the ordinary:

Another popular argument is that after California passed Proposition 209, which banned affirmative action, Asian-American enrollment increased at the most competitive California schools, like UC Berkeley:

But, again, this just looks at enrollment numbers, not admission rates.

So when Poon looked into Asian admissions rates, she found that after affirmative action was banned, the schools admitted a smaller percentage of Asian applicants - even though more Asian students ended up enrolling at the selective schools:

None of this means that discrimination against Asian Americans doesn't exist in admissions.

But the fact that we're focused so much on this question - and will be focusing on it again with the Trump administration - shows just how successful conservatives have been in the affirmative action debate. They've managed to make the affirmative action debate about Asian Americans - and white people - being victims of a zero-sum game.

The ultimate stakes of how this story is told

If you ask Americans whether they favor affirmative action for racial minorities, most of them say they do.

But it's easy to change those views.

That's because the process of applying to elite schools is often framed like a game, where every attribute on your application is either a bonus or a penalty. So it's easy to talk about racial identity as if it's one of those scored attributes, in which schools are artificially awarding extra "points" to black and brown applicants while taking away "points" from Asian and white students.

When there's even a hint that your race can help or hurt your chances of success, support for affirmative action plummets.

This latter frame - of people being hurt based on their race - is exactly how affirmative action opponents want to tell this story. And they've been wildly successful.

This version of the story may be a contributing factor in why most white Americans believe that discrimination against them is a major problem.

Underlying this thinking is the idea that there is some unadulterated metric that measures merit - one that often puts white people on top - but affirmative action takes away that advantage.

But it's important to understand that our measures of merit are, themselves, flawed. As Jerome Karabel wrote in his 2005 book :

... the definition of "merit" is fluid and tends to reflect the values and interests of those who have the power to impose their particular cultural ideals.

In other words, people who have economic and political clout - people who are predominantly white - decide what we measure and how we measure those things. That is how "merit" is engineered into the American education system, which in turn recreates wealth and power in America.

That's why the stories we tell about affirmative action - especially the characters we cast and the roles we accept - are crucial.

One story is about how race-based disadvantages exist, and how we perpetuate them using the American education system.

Another story implies racial hierarchies are the natural state of the world, and that any race-based remedy is a form of charity - and even unjust. In this narrative, Asian people are the victims of any racial remedies. The long history of discrimination against Asians - and the real struggle Asians face in accruing cultural clout and ascending to the highest echelons of politics and business - are tied to the anchor of affirmative action.

That some Asian Americans are now more receptive to this story doesn't make it any more true.

It's a compelling story, though, and it may well be winning.

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Asians are being used to make the case against affirmative action. Again.

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I first heard about the "penalty" my junior year of high school. I was sitting in an SAT prep class because I had barely broken 1000 on my first practice SAT. During a snack break, another Asian kid in the class said to me, "You know we have to do better than even the white kids, right?"

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trump is actually a g a i n s t racism ?

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trump is actually a g a i n s t racism ?

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-trump admin. sides w asians and opens up for laws against affirm.action

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The Trump administration has sided with a group suing Harvard University over claims it discriminates against Asian-American applicants in a case that could ultimately challenge federal laws over affirmative action.

The case, filed in 2014, pits America's oldest university against a group called Students for Fair Admissions, run by Edward Blum, a financial analyst and conservative activist from Maine who since the 1990s has made a name for himself challenging affirmative action policies.

Opponents of Mr Blum say that he is deliberately setting out to harm African-Americans and other groups by removing admissions policies like Harvard's.

Harvard, the most selective university in the US, admitted only 4.59 per cent of applicants this year. Princeton and Columbia admitted 5.5 per cent, while Yale took 6.3 per cent of those wishing to attend.

Of those accepted to Harvard this year, 22.7 per cent described themselves as Asian-American, 14.5 per cent as African-Americans, 10.8 per cent as Latino and 2.3 per cent as Native American and Native Hawaiian.

Asian-Americans compromise 5.6 per cent of the US population, according to the latest census.

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Trump administration sides against Harvard in Asian-American affirmative action case

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The Trump administration has sided with a group suing Harvard University over claims it discriminates against Asian-American applicants in a case that could ultimately challenge federal laws over affirmative action.

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-harvard uni. uses "personal ratings" in application proccess:
-likability
-courage (??)
"The suit says Asian American applicants bring stronger academic records than any other race, yet they are admitted at the lowest rate. The group says that is because Harvard consistently gives them low scores on the personal rating, which, according to a document revealed by the group on Monday, is only loosely defined in Harvard policies."

-asians statistically have the strongest academic record. but accepted at lowest rate???
-but according to Harvard lawyer:
“Race alone is never the reason a student is granted admission,” Lee said. “And race is never the reason a student is denied.”
-race should s u p p o s e d l y increase favoring/benefits but ONLY if you are black/white/hispanic/not asian
-not believable for 92% of the asians who apply to get shot down for being “not likeable” ...

-if students case wins> > harvard law s/rule/rules mor als could b changed

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Harvard uses vague 'personal rating' to reject Asian Americans, court hears

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University accused of favoring applicants from other ethnicities in case with potentially big implications for other colleges