Statistics from the 2013 America’s Best Colleges
by U.S. News & World Report for 2011-12 freshman class.

School	% accepted	total applicants	number accepted	% Asian-Am. in student body
Juilliard School	5.96	2,566	153	12
Harvard	6.26	34,950	2188	18
Columbia	6.95	34,810	2418	18
Stanford	7.10	34,348	2437	18
U.S. Naval Academy	7.45	19,145	1426	5
Yale	7.730	27,283	2109	15
Cooper Union	7.731	3415	264	18
Princeton	8.46	27,189	2300	18
Brown	8.91	30,944	2757	14*
MIT	9.73	17,909	1742	24
Dartmouth	10.14	22,385	2270	14*
U.S. Military Academy	10.56	13,954	1473	5
U.S. Air Force Academy	10.78	12,732	1372	7*
U. of Pennsylvania	12.43	31,663	3935	19
CalTech	12.77	5,225	667	39
Amherst	13.32	8461	1127	11
Duke	13.99	28,145	3938	21*
Pomona	14.03	7207	1011	10*
Claremont McKenna	14.12	4412	623	11*
Swarthmore	15.08	6547	987	14
Bowdoin	16.11	6554	1056	7
U.S. Coast Guard Academy	16.13	2374	383	4
U. of Chicago	16.26	21,761	3,538	17
Vanderbilt	16.42	24,837	4078	7
Washington (St. Louis)	16.52	28,823	4763	15
Average				14.4

*decrease from prior year

5/16/13 Acton Institute: “Affirmative Action Limits Opportunities For Asian Americans”
by Anthony Bradley
One of the realities of using race to socially engineer the racial make-up of college freshman classes
by elite decision-makers, is that it does nothing but perpetuate the injustice of institutional and planned
discrimination. This is the greatest irony of affirmative action education policy. The attempt to redress
past injustices does nothing but set the stage for new forms of injustice against other groups.
Today, Asian-American high-school students are faced with the reality that, if they are high achievers,
top schools do not want too many of them. In fact, checking �Asian-American� on your college admissions
application can prove to be a real liability.
James Liu, a student at Amherst College, expresses the ongoing tensions regarding Asian-American
students in The Amherst Student, an independent student newspaper at the college, by telling us a story
about a friend:
My friend was, for lack of a better term, a statistical aberration. He possessed a bizarre talent for
shading in bubbles. On his first sitting, he clocked a perfect score of 2400 on the SAT Reasoning Test.
No one-hit wonder, by the end of junior year, he had added perfect scores of 800 on two SAT Subject
Tests and on eight AP exams to his repertoire. With a 4.0 GPA, multiple club leadership positions
and an amicable character, he was well regarded by both his teachers and peers. Needless to say,
his college expectations were high.
Then, April came. The initial blow was more of a curious surprise than an outright disappointment.
My friend was waitlisted by Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Dartmouth, his four top college choices.
Remaining optimistic, he would joke that the waitlist is even more selective than the admitted class,
after all, the odds of being waitlisted by all four schools was smaller than being admitted to any given
one. After that, however, it was a slow defeat by attrition. That year, Princeton accepted zero students
of its waitlist. Harvard accepted about only 25. Eventually, Yale and Dartmouth bid their farewells, and
in the end, he was rejected by all but one of the schools that he applied to regular decision.
Why would someone be wait-listed at Harvard with test scores like this? Honesty demands that we
all admit that if a black student had applied to Harvard with those exact same test scores, I doubt we
would be reading about her being wait-listed. Liu highlights the following data from his research:
In “The Opportunity Cost of Admission Preferences at Elite Universities”, Thomas J. Espenshade
and Chang Y Chung of Princeton Univ. state, “African-American applicants receive the equivalent of
230 extra SAT points (on a 1600-point scale), and being Hispanic is worth an additional 185 SAT
points.” Other things equal, recruited athletes gain an admission bonus worth 200 points, while the
preference for legacy candidates is worth 160 points. Asian-American applicants face a loss
equivalent to 50 SAT points.  In another 2009 study of more than 9,000 students who applied to
selective universities, Espenshade along with Alexandria Walton Radford found that “white students
were three times more likely to be admitted than Asians with the same academic record”.
In the end, Lui asks a provocative question, “how does preferential admissions treatment for an
applicant whose parents immigrated from Argentina in the 1990s do anymore to remedy the
vestiges of historic immigration than providing that same treatment to an applicant whose Japanese
grandfather was interned during World War II, or whose great-grandmother was prohibited from
attending an all-white high school in Mississippi (Lum v. Rice) or whose Filipino grandfather could
not marry the woman he loved because a 1953 Utah statute declared marriage between a “white and Malayan” void?
This is a great question, and many of us are unsure how those in favor of race-based preferential
treatment in college admissions would make such a distinction. In an effort to move beyond this,
Lui concludes that affirmative action should be based on class and not race because “race is an
inadequate indicator of disenfranchisement. The best indicator that a person suffers from present
and historic discrimination is persistent poverty.”  On the surface this may seem more helpful but the
underlying paternalism behind this view may not be as helpful as one might imagine. Institutional
classism is not better than institutional racism.
Unfortunately, exchanging class for race does not solve the riddle either because schools will still
discriminate against people on the basis of reported household income – this is still institutional
discrimination. Preferential treatment by class only means that high-achieving students who were
born, by no fault of their own, into higher-income families will be treated unfairly. This is not justice.
Why should high-achieving students from upper-income families be penalized because of
providence?
We must also keep in mind that families move in and out of classes over time. There is no way
to accurately determine the “class” of any given applicant without more discrimination. A laid-off
corporate executive could technically qualify as “lower-class” because, in America, we generally
judge class on the basis of income. I can only imagine all of the perverse incentives this would
create for families to find a way to appear poor on paper in order to increase the chances of their
children being admitted to an elite school.
It seems that what would be best for college admissions is a world without any imposed
preferential treatment on the basis of race or class. If this means, for example, that Harvard and
Yale end up being 80 percent Asian-American then it is what it is. If high-achieving students want
to attend schools that are not as competitive but have more ethnically diverse populations, those
schools would gladly welcome them. It would be a trade-off for sure, but one in which everyone is
treated equally, because using discrimination to redress discrimination does nothing but
perpetuate the injustice of discrimination.
http://blog.acton.org/archives/54875-affirmative-action-limits-opportunities-for-asian-americans.html

5/13/13 The Dartmouth: “Li: Character Not Color”
By Jonathan Li, Contributing Columnist
In one month, the Supreme Court will decide Fisher v. University of Texas, a case that has the
potential to dramatically alter the college admissions process. In 2008, Abigail Fisher was denied
admission to the University of Texas at Austin. She now argues that her rejection in favor of less
qualified minority applicants violates her Fourteenth Amendment rights. The University of Texas
appealed to precedent: in 2003, the Supreme Court deemed that racial profiling of applicants in
university admissions was permissible in the name of pursuing diversity. However, that decision may
soon be overturned. Even if the Supreme Court does not overturn its past ruling, the underlying
question still remains: to what extent should race and ethnicity be considered in college admissions,
if at all?
Race and ethnicity play large roles in college admissions. After all, the modern college admissions
process, requiring essays and alumni interviews, was purposefully conceived to enable colleges
to identify and discriminate against Jewish applicants in the early 20th century. It is often argued that
these same devices are used today to systematically discriminate against Asians. Both ethnicities
wound up with the short end of the stick, regardless of their above-average test scores – which is
why some people have labeled Asian-Americans “the new Jews.”  Conversely, other minorities are
helped by positive discrimination, with college admissions giving preference to applicants of certain
race or ethnicity. The implication is that applicants are not judged by their merits but by their heritage,
for better or for worse.
In the past, most universities have justified this racial discrimination and affirmative action by
emphasizing the need to create a diverse student body. It has been argued that greater diversity
improves the quality of education, and empirical evidence has shown that greater diversity is
correlated with higher post-graduation earnings. But while the pursuit of diversity is admirable and
provides clear benefits, the means of that pursuit should be open to criticism. Using race and ethnicity
as an underlying categorization of applicants easily lends itself to a systematic, prejudiced review of
applicants, far from the holistic review that so many colleges claim to uphold.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to prove claims of racial discrimination at an individual level, as
admissions processes are largely subjective and secretive in nature. Nonetheless, it is common
knowledge that racial disqualification is a widespread and commanding force in aggregate. Some
empirical research has shown that Asian applicants are generally held to higher academic standards.
Under the current admissions process, two racially different applicants from similar socioeconomic
and academic backgrounds will be evaluated differently, even when all of their qualifications are
identical.
Does a difference in appearance directly indicate different and unique ways of thinking?
Probably not. I would argue that two individuals from the same socioeconomic background are much
more similar than their racial differences may suggest. To achieve a truly diverse student body,
admission preferences should instead be given to applicants who strive to succeed in the face of
socioeconomic disparity. This sort of inclusiveness lends itself to both cultural and socioeconomic
diversity and to social mobility, while upholding racial and ethnic equality.
Some have argued that the sudden exclusion of racial and ethnic categorization may result in a
harmful demographic redistribution of college students. When the University of California was forced
to stop using affirmative action, this initially led to a large increase in the number of Asian students
and a decline in the number of other minority students. However, as of late, the numbers have shown
the reverse: under this meritocracy, all minority groups have seen increased enrollment. It is clear that
meritocracy actually benefits the pursuit of racial and ethnic diversity and equality. A meritocracy
evaluates character, not color.
Race and ethnicity should not be blanketing characteristics in college admissions. To foster diversity,
admission preferences should only be given in cases of socioeconomic disparity; race itself should
never differentiate applicants. The current evidence suggests that there is injustice within the system,
but a correction to this may come as soon as June.
http://thedartmouth.com/2013/05/13/opinion/li?comments_page=1

4/4/13 Nonprofit Quarterly: “Harvard `Reject’ to Establish Asian American University”
by Erwin de Leon
Before long, Asian American students may have an alternative to Harvard and other top colleges.
Hun Loo Gong, a self-made tech billionaire and Harvard reject, is reportedly establishing a university
in California for students he calls “vengeful rejects” of elite institutions, “students who want to let
Harvard and Berkeley and Stanford know the schools made a great, big mistake.”
http://www.nonprofitquarterly.org/policysocial-context/22076-harvard-reject-to-establish-asian-american-university.html

4/1/13 Brown Daily Herald: “U. accepts second-lowest percentage of applicants ever;
Students of color comprise 45 percent of admitted students in the class of 2017”
by Maggie Livingstone
The University admitted 9.2 percent of applicants to the class of 2017, the second-lowest acceptance
rate in Brown’s history.
A total of 2,649 out of 28,919 applicants received acceptance letters to the University’s 250th incoming
class, according to a University press release.
Forty-five percent of admitted students in the class of 2017 identify as students of color, and 17.5
percent are first-generation college students, both record-high numbers. Of the admitted students,
approximately 12 percent identify as black, 14 percent identify as Latino, 18 percent identify as Asian
and 2 percent identify as Native American, wrote Jim Miller ’73, dean of admission, in an email to
The Herald.
The University anticipates 1,515 members will join the class of 2017 for a predicted yield of
57 percent. Admitted students must decide whether to accept their offers of admission by May 1.
http://www.browndailyherald.com/2013/04/01/u-accepts-second-lowest-percentage-of-applicants-ever/

3/31/13 diverseeducation.com: “Rejected Asian Americans Start New `Historical Asian American
College and University’ Movement”
by Emil Guillermo
Hun Loo “Lincoln” Gong, a self-made billionaire who designed the first chip that enabled laptops to
automatically read both Apple and PC software in Chinese and English, was rejected from Harvard in 1981.
He has never forgotten that, nor the fact that it’s impossibly difficult for Asian Americans to get beyond
the limitations of top institutions with increasingly high percentages of Asian American students.
Gong knew of other high level executives in the tech field who were Asian immigrants, now naturalized
citizens, but were rejected from their top choices like Harvard, UC Berkeley, and Stanford. Last month,
during a poker night in San Jose, Calif., Gong got his millionaire buddies to pool close to $1 billion dollars
to create a full-fledged university based in California, that would cater to what he called the “vengeful rejects.”
Then they will set up a virtual online university that will give opportunities to Asian immigrants abroad
to receive American degrees, as well as Asian Americans who got rejected from the top schools.
http://diverseeducation.com/article/52302/#

3/29/13 Harvard Crimson: “Harvard College Accepts Record Low of 5.8 Percent to the Class of 2017”
By Zohra D. Yaqhubi
For the seventh consecutive year, a record low number of applicants received offers of admission to
Harvard College. A total of 5.8 percent of 35,023 applicants were admitted to the Class of 2017, the
University announced Thursday.
Of the students offered admission to the class, 19.9 percent are Asian-American, 11.5 are percent
African-American, 11.5 percent are Latino, 2.2 percent are Native American, and 0.5 percent are
Native Hawaiian.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/3/28/class-of-2017-admissions/

3/11/13 WBUR Boston: “Discrimination Against Asians In College Admissions; College
acceptance letters are coming. A call to accept more qualified Asian students”
Carolyn Chen: “At the end of this month, high school seniors will submit their college
applications and begin waiting to hear where they will spend the next four years of their lives.
More than they might realize, the outcome will depend on race. If you are Asian, your chances of
getting into the most selective colleges and universities will almost certainly be lower than if you
are white.”
Carolyn Chen, director in Asian American Studies at Northwestern University, where she is
also professor of sociology. In December she wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled,
“Asians: Too Smart for Their Own Good?”
http://onpoint.wbur.org/2013/03/11/asian-discrimination

2/27/13 Brown Daily Herald: “U. refutes claims of ethnic quotas: The SAT scores of Asian Americans
are not held to a higher standard, the dean of admission said”
By Mark Valdez
In response to claims that the Ivy League uses quotas when admitting Asian American students,
Dean of Admission Jim Miller ’73 said the University does not use quotas or discriminate against any
ethnic group in determining who is admitted to Brown.
Several commentators alleged that the constancy of Asian American enrollment in Ivy League institutions
“despite an increase in the number of college-age Asian Americans” is evidence of a quota system,
according to an opinions spread published Dec. 20 in the New York Times.
Since 2002, Asian American enrollment at Brown has had little variation. According to data from the
Office of Institutional Research, the number of Asian American students enrolled has ranged between
773 and 913 since 2002.
“The Asian American applicant pool has grown in concert with the pool generally. We can control who
we admit,” Miller said. “What we can’t control is who shows up.”
He noted the Admission Office has accepted between 380 and 530 Asian American applicants within
each incoming class in the last decade, which is higher than the number of Asian Americans who
matriculated since 2007, according to data released by the admission office.
For full story, see http://www.browndailyherald.com/2013/02/27/u-refutes-claims-of-ethnic-quotas/

Dear Mr. Miller,

For over 10 years, I have asked admission officers to release data on: (1) Asian Americans who apply
(number, average and median SAT scores), (2) Asian Americans who are accepted (number, average
and median SAT scores), and (3) the same data on all applicants and all students admitted. If 20% of
applicants are Asian American, but Brown accepts only 10% of them, Brown is probably discriminating
against Asian Americans. The Bigots for the Left who run universities ignore me. So I encourage Asian
American applicants to file civil rights complaints and I encourage Asian Americans to stop donating to
universities run by Bigots for the Left.

Don W. Joe
Asian American Politics
http://www.asianam.org

2/11/13 The Daily Tar Heel
‘Racist’ Duke fraternity party angers Asian-American students, faculty
By Sarah Brown
A recent Duke University fraternity party has provoked angry responses from Asian and
Asian-American students and faculty at Duke and UNC.
The party, hosted Feb. 1 by Kappa Sigma fraternity and dubbed “Asia Prime,” involved
students dressing up in stereotypical Asian costumes and was promoted on Twitter with the
hashtag #RacistRager.
Duke’s Asian Students Association and Asian-American Alliance filed a formal complaint with
the university last week.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2013/02/51185b8399b4f

2/7/13 Cornell Sun: “Cornell: Asian Americans Not Held to Higher Admissions Standard”
By Margaret Yoder
Discrimination against Asian Americans in the college admissions process grabbed national
attention when an Asian American student claimed that Princeton University and Harvard University
rejected him because of his race. Cornell administrators and professors, however, have split on
their views of whether this phenomenon is present on Cornell’s campus.
A.T. Miller, vice provost for academic diversity, said that in his experience, Asian Americans are
not held to a higher standard during the admission process at Cornell.
“We don’t have specific Asian-American admissions. We don’t admit by identity,” Miller said.
In fact, the percentage of Asian Americans in the incoming freshman classes has increased over
the past three years. Asian Americans comprised 14.9 percent of the Class of 2014, 16.4 percent
of the Class of 2015 and 16.9 percent of the Class of 2016, according to the University’s Institutional
Research and Planning.
http://www.cornellsun.com/section/news/content/2013/02/07/cornell-asian-americans-not-held-higher-admissions-standard

1/24/13: The College Fix: “Polls Find Disdain for Race-Based College Admission Preferences”
by Danielle Charette – Swarthmore College
A Supreme Court decision on whether universities can use race as an admissions factor is expected
by June, however the court of public opinion has already weighed in on the matter, and Americans of
all stripes stand largely against affirmative action, according to a variety of recent polls.
In those surveys, at least half if not more of those polled voiced opposition to race-based preferences.
http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/12482

1/23/13 Brown Daily Herald: “Apps for class of 2017 third highest in U. history”
By Mathias Heller
A record 38 percent of applicants identified as racial minorities for the class of 2017.
The University received about 28,900 total applications this year, the third-highest number
of applications in its history.
The Admission Office had counted 28,733 total applications received as of Jan. 15 – 25,723 students applying in the regular decision process and 3,010 applying early decision – but that total will likely rise to 28,900 after sorting materials and receiving late applications, said Jim Miller ’73, dean of admission.
The Admission Office announced last month it had accepted 18.5 percent of early decision
applicants.
International applicants came from 145 countries – a record for the University, with four more countries represented than last year – and accounted for an unprecedented 17 percent of the overall applicant pool. While China once again contributed the most international  applicants, India surged to second place this year with a record 400 applications submitted, up from 317 last year.
Roughly 38 percent of applicants identified as racial minorities, a record high, Miller said. Asians accounted for 20 percent of the overall applicant pool, Hispanics made up 10 percent and blacks represented 9 percent.
For full story, see: http://www.browndailyherald.com/2013/01/23/apps-for-class-of-2017-third-highest-in-u-history/

1/10/13 Center for Equal Opportunity: Preferences at the Service Academies
Racial, Ethnic and Gender Preferences in Admissions to the U.S. Military Academy and
the U.S. Naval Academy
By Robert Lerner, Ph.D and Althea K. Nagai, Ph.D
There is no evidence that Asian applicants receive special preference at either the U.S. Military Academy or the U.S. Naval Academy.  In fact, there is evidence that the Asian applicants with the same academic qualifications find it somewhat more difficult to obtain admission than do their white counterparts at both academies.
The four-year graduation rates of white and Asian students are higher than those of blacks and Hispanics at both academies. This is consistent with the existence of racial and ethnic preferences and similar to gaps which we have found elsewhere, indicating that preferences have a negative impact on graduation rates.
For full report, see http://www.acri.org/blog/wp-content/ceousa-service-adademies.pdf

1/10/13 US News & World Report- FAQs on Recent Data Misreporting by Colleges
By Robert Morse
Several institutions have publicly announced that they misreported rankings data to U.S. News.
Claremont McKenna College: Correcting Claremont McKenna’s 2010 Admissions Statistics
In the cases where the misreported data improved a school’s numerical ranking, we have dropped
that school from our rankings tables for the current year of the rankings where the misreported data
were originally included.
The school is dropped from the rankings until at least the time that the next edition of the rankings
is published. We restore the school to the next year’s ranking when it has provided assurances that
the data it is providing are accurate.
http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/college-rankings-blog/2013/01/10/faqs-on-recent-data-misreporting-by-colleges_print.html

12/22/12 Washington Monthly: “Discrimination against Asian American students in Ivy League admissions”
By Kathleen Geier
The New York Times has been having an interesting debate about the issue of anti-Asian quotas in
the Ivy League. There was this op-ed earlier in the week, as well as a series of essays arguing various
sides of the question as part of the Times “Room for Debate” feature.
Participants mostly debated whether quotas limiting Asian students in the Ivies really exist. But of that
there can be little doubt. While the Harvard guy in the “Room for Debate” forum predictably swears up
and down that their admissions committee “does not use quotas of any kind,” that appears to be almost
statistically impossible.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_12/discrimination_against_asian_a041954.php#

12/21/12 The Atlantic: “Is the Ivy League Fair to Asian Americans?  An admission officer’s uncomfortable
explanation for why they don’t get in as often as their test scores would predict suggests it’s not.”
By Conor Friedersdorf
Are Ivy League institutions discriminating against Asian Americans by limiting how many are admitted?
That’s the subject of a debate published this week in the New York Times. Let’s start with the folks who
believe that there’s effectively a race-based quota limiting Asian Americans.
Ron Unz makes the most powerful argument for that proposition. “After the Justice Department closed
an investigation in the early 1990s into charges that Harvard University discriminated against Asian-
American applicants, Harvard’s reported enrollment of Asian-Americans began gradually declining,
falling from 20.6 percent in 1993 to about 16.5 percent over most of the last decade,” he writes.
“This decline might seem small. But these same years brought a huge increase in America’s college-age
Asian population, which roughly doubled between 1992 and 2011, while non-Hispanic white numbers
remained almost unchanged. Thus, according to official statistics, the percentage of Asian-Americans
enrolled at Harvard fell by more than 50 percent over the last two decades, while the percentage of whites
changed little. This decline in relative Asian-American enrollment was actually larger than the impact of
Harvard’s 1925 Jewish quota, which reduced Jewish freshmen from 27.6 percent to 15 percent.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/12/is-the-ivy-league-fair-to-asian-americans/266538/

12/22/12 patheos.com: “Still Retreating from Race: Asian Americans in the Ivy League,”
By Jerry Park
“Claims that Asian American students were as well qualified but less likely than whites to gain entry to
the elite schools set in motion a tedious debate over the definition of “excellence,” “merit,” and “diversity.””
When do you think this was written? Would you believe it was 1992 when this first appeared in Dr. Dana
Takagi’s Retreat From Race: Asian American Admissions and Racial Politics (p. 176)? This award-winning
work chronicled the affirmative action and racial preference debates taking place at the elite level of higher
education (the schools that are usually around the top 15 or 25 research university schools listed in US
News and World Report).
In it, Takagi shows that the political groups and actors involved in these arguments back in the 1980s
and 1990s grew more and more mixed in their views on the merits of affirmative action and better
alternatives to it (assuming it was not ameliorating social inequalities). As she states:
“Both conservatives and liberals support equal opportunity and abhor discrimination” but they disagree
over how to achieve the former and how to discourage the latter. In the battleground over policy, the two
leading strategies for achieving equal opportunity – racial preferences and color-blind policies – do not
neatly correspond to conservative or liberal politics.” (184).
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/blackwhiteandgray/2012/12/affirmative-action-and-asian-americans-in-the-ivy-league/

12/20/12 New York Times: “Statistics Indicate an Ivy League Asian Quota,”
Ron Unz is a software developer and publisher of The American Conservative, where he elaborated
on these thoughts in a recent article . He is a graduate of Harvard University.
Just as their predecessors of the 1920s always denied the existence of “Jewish quotas,” top officials
at  Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the other Ivy League schools today strongly deny the existence of “Asian  quotas.”  But there exists powerful statistical evidence to the contrary.
Each year, American universities provide their racial enrollment data to the National Center for
Education Statistics, which makes this information available online. After the Justice Department
closed an investigation in the early 1990s into charges that Harvard University discriminated against
Asian-American applicants, Harvard’s reported enrollment of Asian-Americans began gradually
declining, falling from 20.6 percent in 1993 to about 16.5 percent over most of the last decade.
This decline might seem small. But these same years brought a huge increase in America’s
college-age Asian population, which roughly doubled between 1992 and 2011, while non-Hispanic
white numbers remained almost unchanged. Thus, according to official statistics, the percentage of
Asian-Americans enrolled at Harvard fell by more than 50 percent over the last two decades, while
the percentage of whites changed little. This decline in relative Asian-American enrollment was
actually larger than the impact of Harvard’s 1925 Jewish quota, which reduced Jewish freshmen
from 27.6 percent to 15 percent.
The percentages of college-age Asian-Americans enrolled at most of the other Ivy League schools
also fell during this same period, and over the last few years Asian enrollments across these different
universities have converged to a very similar level and remained static over time. This raises
suspicions of a joint Ivy League policy to restrict Asian-American numbers to a particular percentage.
Meanwhile, the California Institute of Technology follows a highly selective but strictly race-neutral
admissions policy, and its enrollment of Asian-Americans has grown almost exactly in line with the
growth of the Asian-American population.
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/12/19/fears-of-an-asian-quota-in-the-ivy-league/statistics-indicate-an-ivy-league-asian-quota

12/19/12 New York Times: “Asians: Too Smart for Their Own Good?”
By Carolyn Chen
AT the end of this month, high school seniors will submit their college applications and begin waiting
to hear where they will spend the next four years of their lives. More than they might realize, the outcome
will depend on race. If you are Asian, your chances of getting into the most selective colleges and
universities will almost certainly be lower than if you are white.
Asian-Americans constitute 5.6 percent of the nation’s population but 12 to 18 percent of the student
body at Ivy League schools. But if judged on their merits – grades, test scores, academic honors and
extracurricular activities – Asian-Americans are underrepresented at these schools. Consider that
Asians make up anywhere from 40 to 70 percent of the student population at top public high schools
like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science in New York City, Lowell in San Francisco and Thomas Jefferson
in Alexandria, Va., where admissions are largely based on exams and grades.
In a 2009 study of more than 9,000 students who applied to selective universities, the sociologists
Thomas J. Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford found that white students were three times
more likely to be admitted than Asians with the same academic record.
Sound familiar? In the 1920s, as high-achieving Jews began to compete with WASP prep schoolers,
Ivy League schools started asking about family background and sought vague qualities like “character,””vigor,” “manliness” and “leadership” to cap Jewish enrollment. These unofficial Jewish quotas weren’t
lifted until the early 1960s, as the sociologist Jerome Karabel found in his 2005 history of admissions
practices at Harvard, Yale and Princeton.
In the 1920s, people asked: will Harvard still be Harvard with so many Jews? Today we ask: will
Harvard still be Harvard with so many Asians? Yale’s student population is 58 percent white and
18 percent Asian. Would it be such a calamity if those numbers were reversed?
As the journalist Daniel Golden revealed in his 2006 book “The Price of Admission,” far more
attention has been devoted to race-conscious affirmative action at public universities (which the
Supreme Court has scaled back and might soon eliminate altogether) than to the special preferences
elite universities afford to the children of (overwhelmingly white) donors and alumni.
The way we treat these children will influence the America we become. If our most renowned
schools set implicit quotas for high-achieving Asian-Americans, we are sending a message to all
students that hard work and good grades may be a fool’s errand.
Carolyn Chen is an associate professor of sociology and director of the Asian American
Studies Program at Northwestern.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/20/opinion/asians-too-smart-for-their-own-good.html?_r=0

11/29/12 The Brown Daily Herald: “Poll: Most students opposed to use of race in admissions,”
by Adam Toobin
Just more than 58 percent of students oppose  the University’s consideration of race in student admissions decisions, while over 34 percent of students said they supported the policy, according to a recent Herald poll. Of the students who are opposed to the consideration of race, more than half support the consideration of an applicant’s socioeconomic status. Just over a quarter of students oppose the consideration of race, socioeconomic status or any other demographic factor in admission decisions.
Most students said their answers were tied to their beliefs about the University’s race-based affirmative action policy. Currently, the University considers an applicant’s race as a single factor among many – including grades, test scores and extracurricular activities – and does not weigh socioeconomic status in determining whether the applicant should be admitted to Brown.
Students who oppose the use of race in admission decisions but support using socioeconomic status as a factor in admission usually said race no longer plays a large enough part in American society to warrant the policy. Many of these students told The Herald they support nurturing a student body with diverse backgrounds, opinions and world views and that using socioeconomic status as an admission criterion would adequately serve this purpose.
Supporters of race-based affirmative action often pointed to the University’s preferential treatment of legacy applicants and recruited athletes as real violations of its merit-based admissions process.
Only 16 percent of Asian students said they favored the use of race in admissions decisions – the least of any demographic group. But almost half favored consideration of socioeconomic status instead of race. The percent of Asian students who oppose the use of both race and socioeconomic status was only slightly higher than average, at 30 percent.
These demographic breakdowns loosely correlate to affirmative action’s reported effects on each group. A study from the University of California at Los Angeles found that when affirmative action policies were suspended at public universities, admission rates rose for Asian students but fell for white, black and Hispanic students, The Herald reported in 2008.
http://www.browndailyherald.com/poll-most-students-opposed-to-use-of-race-in-admissions-1.2798318

8/6/12 Stanford The Dish: “Alumna Colleen Lim returns to Stanford to become director of admission,”
COLLEEN LIM, senior associate commissioner for governance and administration at the West Coast Conference, has been named associate dean and director of admission at Stanford.
The appointment marks a return to Stanford for Lim, who served as the university’s assistant dean of admission from 2007 to 2009. In that post, Lim supervised the process of recruiting and evaluating prospective students. She also served as the liaison to the Stanford Alumni Association and the Stanford Office of Development.
“We are extremely thrilled to have Colleen Lim return to Stanford,” said RICHARD SHAW, dean of admission and financial aid. “She brings 22 years of management and operations experience, and we have full confidence that she will be an exceptional leader for the undergraduate admission office.”
At Stanford, Lim will direct the daily operations of the admission office and play a key role in shaping the overall direction the university takes with respect to its admission initiatives and programs, including outreach, multicultural programming, international admission and intercollegiate athletics, and the composition of each freshman and transfer class.
Lim will begin her new job Sept. 22. She succeeds BOB PATTERSON, who left Stanford last June for Chegg Inc., where he is the director of college outreach.
Lim, who earned a master’s degree in the Stanford Teacher Education Program in 1980, earned a bachelor’s degree in physical education at the University of California-Berkeley.
Lim joined the West Coast Conference (WCC) in 2009 as associate commissioner for governance and administration, and was promoted to senior associate commissioner for governance and administration in 2011.
At the WCC, Lim managed governance and operations, including conference legislation, cabinets and committee administration. She served as liaison to senior women administrators and to faculty athletics representatives, and to selected coach groups and cabinets. She also oversaw the internal operations of the conference, including supervision of compliance, student services, business, finance and human resources. Lim was appointed to the NCAA Division I Women’s Volleyball Committee in 2010.
Prior to joining Stanford in 2007, Lim worked at Yale University for nearly 20 years, as senior assistant director of athletics (1990-1994), as associate director of athletics (1994-1998) and as senior associate director of athletics (1998-2007).
At Yale, Lim was very active in the NCAA governance structure, having chaired the Division I women’s soccer committee and the Division I field hockey committee, while also serving on the Committee on Athletics Certification, the Championship and Competition Cabinet and the Initial Eligibility Waivers Committee. In addition, she supervised several sports programs, managed the varsity sports operations and student services staffs, and administered the NCAA and Ivy League compliance and eligibility program for 33 Division I sports.

5/24/12 City Journal: “Lessons from Claremont, Part 2.
Did racial preferences play a part in the college’s fabrications?”
by Charles C. Johnson
Claremont McKenna College, a private liberal arts college 60 miles east of Los Angeles, drew national attention earlier this year when its dean of admissions, Richard Vos, was caught deliberately misreporting the SAT scores that students had achieved before attending CMC. Vos’s goal was to reach the coveted 1400 SAT average for highly selective liberal arts colleges. He resigned soon after the scandal emerged in January, but not before touching off a debate about the lengths to which colleges will go to boost their rankings.
The Claremont Port Side, a left-wing student publication, revealed a wider system of manipulation by the admissions office; in some years, some individual SAT scores were simply made up. A report released last month by O’Melveny & Myers, the college’s outside counsel, shows still more deception.  Evidently, Vos didn’t merely fake SAT scores; he faked ACT scores, the percentage of students admitted from the top 10 percent of their high school classes, and the college’s overall acceptance rate.
It’s probably no coincidence that Vos’s manipulations began soon after the college received a $700,000
grant to expand racial preferences in its admissions. In March 2002, the admissions office changed its
policies in accord with a “Campus Diversity Initiative” grant that it received from the James Irvine
Foundation. The grant’s conditions called for a 2 percent yearly increase in nonwhite enrollment for three
years. CMC also promised to deliver a student body that would be 37 percent nonwhite at the end of the
grant’s term.
Vos was an enthusiastic supporter of racial preferences and a vocal critic of California’s Proposition 209, which in 1996 banned state colleges from admitting students on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex. During his tenure, CMC’s admissions policies led to higher acceptance rates for blacks and Latinos and lower ones for whites and Asians. According to the Claremont Independent in 2006, “statistics provided by the admissions office show that it admitted roughly 45 percent of both black and Hispanic applicants, [versus] 22 percent of the white applicants and 17 percent of Asian applicants.” Given this history, it’s probable that Vos’s preferential policies resulted in lower average SAT scores than he would have liked and led him to make his disastrous fabrications.
Meantime, the college received an undeserved gift in April, when U.S. News & World Report announced that it wouldn’t drop Claremont from its list of the nation’s top ten liberal arts colleges. (Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, however, dumped CMC, declaring that the school had “unfairly earned its place.”) U.S. News is sending a terrible message to other schools, which might interpret the influential magazine’s forgiveness as tacit permission to continue gaming the rankings.
Charles C. Johnson is a writer in Los Angeles and author of a forthcoming biography of Calvin Coolidge from Encounter Books. He is an alum of Claremont McKenna.
For full story, see http://www.city-journal.org/2012/cjc0524cj.html 

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.