Lanya Olmstead was born in Florida to a mother who immigrated from Taiwan and an American father of Norwegian ancestry. Ethnically, she considers herself half--Taiwanese and half--Norwegian. However, when applying to Harvard, Olmstead checked only one box for her race: white.
“I didn’t want to put ‘Asian’ down,” Olmstead says, “because my mom told me there’s discrimination against Asians in the application process.”
For years, many Asian--Americans have been convinced that it’s harder for them to gain admission to the top US colleges.
Studies show that Asian--Americans meet these colleges’ admissions standards far out of proportion to their 6 percent representation in the US population and that they often need test scores hundreds of points higher than applicants from other ethnic groups to have an equal chance of admission.
Critics say these numbers, along with the fact that some top colleges with race-blind admissions have double the Asian percentage of Ivy League schools, prove the existence of discrimination.
The way it works, the critics believe, is that Asian-Americans are evaluated not as individuals, but against the thousands of other ultra-achieving Asians who are stereotyped as boring academic robots.
Now, an unknown number of students are responding to this concern by declining to identify themselves as Asian on their applications.
For those with only one Asian parent, whose names don’t give away their heritage, that decision can be relatively easy. Harder are the questions that it raises: What’s behind the admissions difficulties? What, exactly, is an Asian--American — and is being one a choice?
Olmstead is a freshman at Harvard and a member of the Half-Asian People’s Association (HAPA). In high school, she had a perfect 4.0 grade-point average and scored 2,150 out of a possible 2,400 on the SAT college admission test, which she calls “pretty low.”
College applications ask for parent information, so Olmstead knows that admissions officers could figure out a student’s background that way. She did write in the word “multiracial” on her own application.
Still, she would advise students with one Asian parent to “check whatever race is not Asian.”
“Not to really generalize, but a lot of Asians, they have perfect SATs, perfect GPAs ... so it’s hard to let them all in,” Olmstead says.
Amalia Halikias is a Yale freshman whose mother was born in the US to Chinese immigrants; her father is a Greek immigrant. She also checked only the “white” box on her application.
“As someone who was applying with relatively strong scores, I didn’t want to be grouped into that stereotype,” Halikias says. “I didn’t want to be written off as one of the 1.4 billion Asians that were applying.”
However, leaving the Asian box blank felt wrong to Jodi Balfe, a Harvard freshman who was born in South Korea and came to the US at age three with her South Korean mother and white American father. She checked the box against the advice of her high school guidance counselor, teachers and friends.
“I felt very uncomfortable with the idea of trying to hide half of my ethnic background,” Balfe says. “It’s been a major influence on how I developed as a person. It felt like selling out, like selling too much of my soul.”
However, other students feel no conflict between a strong Asian identity and their response to what they believe is injustice.
Asian students have higher average SAT scores than any other group, including whites. A study by Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade examined applicants to top colleges from 1997, when the maximum SAT score was 1,600 (today it’s 2,400). Espenshade found that Asian-Americans needed a 1,550 SAT to have an equal chance of getting into an elite college as white students with a 1,410 or black students with a 1,100.
Top schools that don’t ask about race in admissions process have very high percentages of Asian students. The California Institute of Technology, a private school that chooses not to consider race, is about one-third Asian. (Thirteen percent of California residents have Asian heritage.) The University of California, Berkeley, which is forbidden by state law to consider race in admissions, is more than 40 percent Asian — up from about 20 percent before the law was passed.
Yale, Harvard, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania declined to make admissions officers available for interviews for this story.
Kara Miller helped review applications for Yale as an admissions office reader and participated in meetings where admissions decisions were made. She says it often felt like Asians were held to a higher standard.
“Asian kids know that when you look at the average SAT for the school, they need to add 50 or 100 to it. If you’re Asian, that’s what you’ll need to get in,” says Miller, now an English professor at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth.
Highly selective colleges do use much more than SAT scores and grades to evaluate applicants. Other important factors include extracurricular activities, community service, leadership, maturity, engagement in learning and overcoming adversity.
However, applicants are not ranked by results of a qualifications test, says Rosita Fernandez-Rojo, a former college admissions officer.
“It’s a selection process,” she says.
In the end, elite colleges often don’t have room for Asian students with outstanding scores and grades.
That’s one reason why Harvard freshman Heather Pickerell, born in Hong Kong to a Taiwanese mother and American father, refused to check any race box on her application.
“I figured it might help my chances of getting in,” she says. “But I figured if Harvard wouldn’t take me for refusing to list my ethnicity, then maybe I shouldn’t go there.”
She considers drawing lines between different ethnic groups a form of racism — and says her ethnic identity depends on where she is.
“In America, I identify more as Asian, having grown up there and actually being Asian, and having grown up in an Asian family,” she says. “But when I’m back in Hong Kong, I feel more American, because everyone there is more Asian than I am.”
“Identity is very malleable,” says Jasmine Zhuang, a Yale junior whose parents were both born in Taiwan.
She didn’t check the box, even though her last name is a giveaway and her essay was about Asian-American identity.
“Looking back I don’t agree with what I did,” Zhuang says. “It was more like a symbolic action for me, to rebel against the higher standard placed on Asian-American applicants.”
“There’s no way someone’s race can automatically tell you something about them, or represent who they are to an admissions committee,” Zhuang says. “Using race by itself is extremely dangerous.”
Editor’s note: This is a condensed version of the original story.
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