Asian American Discrimination in Harvard Admissions [pdf]

This is very clearly a throwaway. I found my experience as someone born in Asia who moved to the United States at a young age terrible, with regards to college admissions. We lived in a 1 bedroom apartment when we moved here, and didn't really advance more. I took quite literally every AP offered at school and did well, played a Varsity sport, and got a perfect 2400 out of 2400 on the SAT, in addition to various extracurriculars like a well-developed photography portfolio and robotics. I also happened to go to a very good public high school because my parents focused on my education instead of buying a house where they could afford one. I was rejected from every school I applied to, from the most prestigious to even "lowly" and "safe" Cal States, except for one. My sister, several years younger than me, with lesser metrics, ended up at a top 5 school with nearly a full ride in scholarships earned. I don't think it was from a lack of a good essay too, because I won several writing awards as a kid, and wrote many of my friend's college essays too, and they all got in.

I feel like it set me back tremendously in my life in the things that I value. There's a lot of bitterness here, but even more confusion.

Not really sure what else to say.

How did they know you are Asian? Could you have just checked a different box and got in, at least to state schools which don't do interviews?

(I am in no way suggesting that it's right to make people misrepresent their ethnicity to get fair treatment.)

Not sure if you're serious, but don't they generally have access to a person's name?

My name is a dead giveaway that it is foreign.

> My sister, several years younger than me, with lesser metrics, ended up at a top 5 school with nearly a full ride in scholarships earned

I'm unsure how to interpret this. Did your sister get into a top 5 school because the policy had changed several years later?

I think the implication is that she got in because there are many more outreach programs for women to get into college. But I could be wrong.

Things eventually have to add up. If they could de-rail your train because you’re the wrong race/gender, you were on the bullshit track to begin with--even if the world hasn't gotten wise to it yet.

Lonnie Johnson grew up in segregation-era Alabama. That probably set him back, but it did not stop him.

There's almost no other explanation, unfortunately. Opinion on it does tend to be pretty closely tied to conventional political orientation, but I know plenty of women in tech (or other traditionally male dominated spaces like gaming) that don't really like this kind of stuff because they have a lot of friends from over-represented groups that have had a lot of difficulty in life that's basically ignored based on their demographics.

Honestly, I find this very difficult to believe-it almost sounds like you've left something out. As with a lot of these types of stories on the internet, it feels like something else is amiss.

The SAT score alone puts you in a pretty small group of people (< 600 people scored 2400 out of 1-2 MILLION SAT takers in 2014, according to some light googling). This combined with uncommon extracurriculars and a "good essay" would easily land you in any cal state.

If you're saying that these are your qualifications, with no caveats, then literally 95%+ of the Asian males in California would get rejected from all but the "lowliest" schools.

I can imagine being Black with an Asian name.

Did you apply to UC Irvine, UC Riverside, UC Merced, UC Davis?

What are you leaving out if you don’t mind sharing?

Have you seen this?

found that people with Chinese, Indian or Pakistani-sounding names were 28% less likely to get invited to an interview than the fictitious candidates with English-sounding names, even when their qualifications were the same.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/05/job-applications-resu...

Yes. I applied to a lot of UC's.

Sir, if I wanted pity points or pity clout, I'd use my real name. Why would this be a lie?

Thanks for sharing this. Will read. I'm not surprised.

Well the GPA/ranking was left out (which could have guaranteed admission to a UC if it was in the top 9 percent or whatever). Though it's hard to imagine it being that bad if the person is so great at test taking.

Either way though, yes I am also pretty skeptical of this story because of the Cal State part. At that tier a top student should get a full scholarship. I guess Cal Poly is pretty selective, but still their average SAT score is pretty low. It's probably more about applicants self-selecting for UC's instead of Cal States.

I'm not really sure what else to say. I hadn't even gotten a parking ticket at the time when I applied to colleges. It's not like I was a convicted felon or anything. I had good academics, and got rejected just about everywhere I applied to. I'm just voicing my frustrations.

The entire reason why my family moved to the US was because my parents believed that their kids could get a superior education. I've taken that to heart. It's hard to move thousands of miles for fleeting opportunism and feel like you failed. I spent all my time as a kid viewing education as a competition, studying for hours, and training to be better in every task compared to my peers. I viewed college admissions as proof that I did what I was supposed to correctly, but clearly I failed.

My sister grew up in the exact same cultural context. She was a good student, but her scores weren't close to the same as mine, and her outcome is far better. I don't really have much to say beyond that.

I'm closer to 30 than I am to 20. I wake up everyday feeling quite empty and unfulfilled, having seen and currently living the downstream effects of what I feel was a subpar formal college education, experience, and post-facto opportunities, irregardless of if I "deserved" a better one or not. It's not pleasant.

Lots of people far superior to me academically have had worse outcomes. Please don't be skeptical to things you read online because they don't make sense to you. Often times reality is stranger than fiction. I ended up going to a middling UC, having been rejected by better and worse ones.

Do state schools really look at names? It's hard for me to imagine a state school looking at peoples names or pictures and reclassifying the races of applicants. It would be fairly disturbing if they did, in fact.

(Again, I'm not suggesting that you should have to misrepresent your race to be treated fairly. I'm just suggesting that, from a practical standpoint, you could probably avoid discrimination in state school college applications by ticking a box that would be more favorable to you.)