Statistics from the 2014 America’s Best Colleges
by U.S. News & World Report for 2012-13 freshman class.

School	% accepted	total applicants	number accepted	% Asian-Am. in student body
Harvard	6.05	34,303	2,076	19
Stanford	6.61	36,632	2,423	19
U.S. Naval Academy	6.78	20,601	1,396	5
Cooper Union	7.02	3,573	251	19
Yale	7.05	28,977	2,043	16
Juilliard School	7.32	2,269	166	11*
Columbia	7.42	31,851	2362	20
Princeton	7.85	26,664	2,094	19
MIT	8.946	18,109	1,620	24
U.S. Military Academy	8.951	15,171	1,358	5
Brown	9.599	28,742	2,759	12*
Dartmouth	9.78	23,110	2,260	14
U.S. Air Force Academy	9.89	12,274	1,214	5*
CalTech	11.76	5,537	651	40
U.S. Merchant Marine Academy	12.35	2,211	273	5
U. of Pennsylvania	12.60	31,218	3,935	19
Pomona	12.956	7,456	966	11
Amherst	12.959	8,565	1,110	12
U. of Chicago	13.24	25,273	3,345	18
Duke	13.42	30,374	4,077	21
Claremont McKenna	13.60	5,058	688	11
Swarthmore	14.19	6,589	935	14
Vanderbilt	14.23	28,348	4,034	8
Northwestern	15.32	32,060	4,912	18
Pitzer	15.68	4,227	663	8
Average				14.92

*decrease from prior year

 

4/28/14 Stuyvesant Spectator: “Ivy Day is Asian Discrimination Day; And Whites Reap the Benefits”
by David Cahn
At 5PM on Thursday, March 27,my Facebook newsfeed exploded. It was Ivy Day and America’s top universities had released their long-awaited decisions. Within minutes, my screen sparkled with fancy college names, gleeful classmates, and hundreds of hearty congratulations to each accepted student. I joined in, ecstatic at my friends’ accomplishments, and cheering them on just as they had supported me when I received my early acceptance in December.
But soon an eerie pattern emerged in the college acceptance statuses. Whites were being accepted in disproportionate numbers compared to their Asian peers. I decided to conduct an empirical analysis to assess whether or not this observation could be statistically confirmed. I relied on data collected by The Spectator, to measure race. To determine Ivy League admittance rates, I used Stuyclodpedia, a webpage on which Stuyvesant students post their college decisions. This was the best metric available because it is almost universally used and official statistics are not yet available. The numbers tell a disturbing story.
Though 67% of students identified as East/Southeast Asian, these students represented only 48% of students admitted to the Ivy League. By contrast, the 20% of seniors who identified as Caucasian/Middle Eastern represented 32% of admitted students. East Asians were 19% under-represented, compared with a 12% over-representation of Caucasians. This difference in admission was not merit-based – The Spectator’s survey found no statistical relationship between race and GPA or extra-curricular participation. [*For in-depth discussion of statistical robustness and possible confounds, please see my note at the end of this article].
These findings are consistent with national trends. Thomas J. Espenshade, a sociologist at Princeton and the author of “No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life,” has found that, all else being equal, Asians must score 140 points high on the SAT to get into elite schools. The explicit Ivy League quota for Asian students is usually approximated at around 17%.Admissions officers routinely deny the existence of these quotas despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, though they justify race-based admission on the grounds that it allows them to create diverse classes.
Disadvantaging students on the basis of their race (rather than evaluating the content of their character, as Martin Luther King Jr. famously said) is antithetical to the basic American principle of equal opportunity. It denies Asian American students access to the same education as whites and devalues merit in favor of superficiality. Asian students are not faceless. They are the hardworking and ambitious students who I have spent the past four years going to school with – and they deserve fair treatment.
Moreover, the Asian quota does not promote diversity when would-be Asian seats are simply taken by Caucasians. Over the past 20 years, the number of Asian Americans earning Presidential Scholarships and National Merit Awards have skyrocketed, but their admission rates to Ivy League colleges has fallen. White students continue to be admitted at historic levels. If colleges can tolerate huge white populations (45% of Harvard undergraduates were white in 2011), then they should also feel comfortable with large Asian ones. The case for diversity has legitimate role to play in the affirmative action debate, but cannot justify restricting Asian admission.
The college process reeks of racism. Discrimination against Asians is used to maintain college campuses that are plurality white, not to advantage minorities. Colleges may preach the virtues of “diversity,” “equality,” and “human rights.” But they are not innocent. Their Gentleman’s Agreement is a subtle method of entrenching racial and cultural norms and it pervades every high school in America. Ivy Day should be re-named Asian Discrimination Day – a day to remember that the fight for civil rights has not yet been won and that we must continue striving for racial equality in America.
*Notes on Statistical Analysis:
http://www.stuyspec.com/opinion/ivy-day-is-asian-discrimination-day-sub-title-and-whites-reap-the-benefits

2/10/14 Los Angeles Times: “UCLA and USC investigate racist, sexist fliers sent to campuses; UCLA and
USC campus police are investigating fliers with racist and sexist language”
By Larry Gordon
UCLA and USC campus police are investigating similar fliers filled with derogatory references to Asian
women that were mailed to Asian American organizations on the two campuses recently, officials said.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-racist-fliers-20140210,0,6650242.story#axzz2sjJ2WAUM

1/15/14 Slate: “Silent Technical Privilege: As a novice computer programmer, I always got the benefit of the doubt— because I looked the part.”
By Philip Guo
I started programming when I was 5, first with Logo and then BASIC. The picture above is me, age 9 (with horrible posture). By the time this photo was taken, I had already written several BASIC games that I distributed as shareware on our local BBS. I was fast growing bored, so my parents (both software engineers) gave me the original dragon compiler textbook from their grad school days. That’s when I started learning C and writing my own simple interpreters and compilers. My early interpreters were for BASIC, but by the time I entered high school I had already created a self-hosting compiler for a nontrivial subset of C. Throughout most of high school, I spent weekends coding in x86 assembly, obsessed with hand-tuning code for the newly released Pentium II chips. When I started my freshman year at MIT as a computer science major, I already had over 10 years of programming experience. So I felt right at home there.
OK, all of the above was a lie.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/programmer_privilege_as_an_asian_male_computer_science_major_everyone_gave.html

12/13/13 Harvard Gazette: “992 admitted under Early Action; Those accepting will join Harvard College Class of 2018 in August”
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/12/992-admitted-under-early-action/
Admission notifications were sent today under the Early Action program to 992 prospective members of the Harvard College Class of 2018, which is scheduled to enter next August. Last year, 892 were admitted early, and 774 the year before, when Early Action was restored after a four-year absence.
This year, 4,692 students applied for Early Action, compared to 4,845 last year and 4,228 the year before.
“Minority Early Action admissions increased once again this year,” said Marlyn E. McGrath, director of admissions. “Latino admissions rose significantly from 70 last year to 104. African-Americans rose from 77 to 98, and Asian-Americans from 193 to 209. Native Hawaiians remained the same at 2, while Native Americans declined slightly from 14 to 9,” she said.
In addition to the 992 admitted students, 3,197 were deferred and will be considered again in the Regular Action process, while 366 were denied, 18 withdrew, and 119 were incomplete. The Regular Action process concludes in March, with notification to students on March 27.

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