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Post-affirmative action,Asian Americans are stressed about college admissions

• underseacables 3y ago
  https://archive.ph/gPl3Z https://archive.ph/gPl3Z
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    • Proven 3y ago
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• svarlamov 3y ago
  Why are university admissions so much more competitive now than they were just a decade ago? "In 2010, USC's acceptance rate was 26.3%. By 2015, the acceptance rate had dropped to 18%. In 2020, USC's acceptance rate was 16%. For the Class of 2027, USC's acceptance rate further decreased to 9.75%." https://www.crimsoneducation.org/us/blog/usc-admission-rate/#:~:text=In%202010%2C%20USC's%20acceptance%20rate,rate%20further%20decreased%20to%209.75%25 https://www.crimsoneducation.org/us/blog/usc-admission-rate/....
  • throwawaymaths 3y ago
    Why more competitive? Basic math. Kids apply to more schools. Why do they apply to more schools? Because the schools have gotten more competitive.
    • hw-guy 3y ago
      The correlary to that is that the "yield" goes down for all but the very most competitive colleges, so colleges have to build longer waitlists to ensure a full class. And more uncertainty for everybody.
      • throwawaymaths 3y ago
        That's nonlinear. Because if schools get more competitive also fewer kids get into more than one.
    • esafak 3y ago
      You stopped short: why did they get more competitive? Because demand is outstripping the supply of desirable schools. Second tier schools need to improve their offering, and burnish their prestige, which takes time.
      • throwawaymaths 3y ago
        I don't think there's a satisfactory monolithic reason for this. Maybe it's questions all the way down until, why do the common people need to get good jobs/hobnob with the upper classes? Because central banking policy of inflation?
  • LordKeren 3y ago
    The application process to many universities has been dramatically streamlined. It is in a students best interest to cast the widest net of applications for suitable schools— so naturally rates go down as the volume of applications per student is going up. It has also long been an open secret that universities are encouraging as many applicants as they can in order to reduce their acceptance rates to boost their prestige and rankings. We need the actual data on university acceptance criteria itself (i.e. mandatory SAT score minimums) to truly assess the competitiveness of these schools over time. Raw % acceptance has become a diluted metric
  • 2devnull 3y ago
    Foreign online applications.
    • 2devnull 3y ago
      “ Recent trends in college admissions include increased numbers of applications, increased interest by students in foreign countries in applying to American universities,[10] more students applying by an early method,[8] applications submitted by Internet-based methods ” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_admissions_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_admissions_in_the_Un...
• koliber 3y ago
  I don’t know what affect striking down of affirmative action had on the stress level of college admissions. High achievers and the families that support them always had a lot of stress about college admissions. I read this article as “in 2023, college admissions continue to be very stressful. “
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• throwaway318 3y ago
  Back in my day you got predicted grades, went to an interview, got an offer (or didn't get, but that was rare, the interview would however sometimes result in a lower than standard offer) then got the grades, or didn't, but holding a cascade of offers down actual grades was common/recommended. Was that system worse? [UK]
  • kaashif 3y ago
    The UK and US have very different systems. In the UK, all students have already specialised into A levels (only studying four subjects) before applying to university. In the US, I think it works differently: some students may have done some AP classes, but these aren't universal and don't represent the same degree of specialisation as A levels.
  • guitarsteve 3y ago
    Interesting! I’ve never heard of that system. Is there somewhere we can read about it, or maybe you can explain a bit more? Is the offer of the form “we accept you, so long as your grades satisfy the following requirements…”? Is the interview performance pass/fail or if you do poorly do they give you a less agreeable offer? (higher grades required?)
    • kaashif 3y ago
      My experience in the UK was as follows: (1) In the final two years of secondary school (16/17 to 18) you choose a set of 3 or 4 subjects to study for A levels. This is usually done with a specific course at university in mind. For example, someone aiming for Chemistry might study Maths, Chemistry, and Physics. Some people also add Further Maths (if they're aiming for Maths at a top university, this adds things like group theory, differential equations) or a language (e.g. if you already know French, it's not all that difficult to do French A-level too). (2) Before your final exams, you apply to universities and they have some process for giving you an offer. This process isn't standardised. Some universities have pre-interview exams (e.g. Oxford), some have extra exams you take alongside your A-level exams (e.g. to do Maths at Cambridge, you have to take STEP exams which are...super hard). My interview process for Maths at Oxford was pretty stressful, I had seven interviews, all very technical, at various colleges. Some I no doubt bombed, some I did okay in. I also had a phone interview with the college that ended up getting me. (3) You get some offer, either conditional (get these grades and we'll let you in) or unconditional (you got in, grades don't matter). My offer was to just get all top grades so I really had to grind studying and was super stressed on results day. (4) You pick two unis to go with. Usually one primary and one backup. (5) You do your exams, then get results. If you met your offer, great! If not, you go into clearing where you can maybe go into a "leftover" place at some uni somewhere. (6) You go to uni and study something. You got a place on a Maths course, you study Maths. I'm mentioning this because it works differently in the US. There are pros and cons to this process. Specialising early means the baseline for a Maths course at uni is higher than in the US. But because you're asking 15 year olds to decide what they want to study for the next 5-6 years, lots of people probably pick the wrong thing. And if you're not good at Maths and don't study Maths at A-level, you're just locked out of anything STEM e.g. Chemistry, Physics, Maths, Computer Science, all require a Maths A-level. So you get a lot of kids making poor decisions they later regret and can't reverse.
• nunez 3y ago
  Part of this too is status. If everyone in your friends group has children going to an Ivy League school while yours is going to Boston College (as mentioned in the article; BC is a great school, btw), you're gonna get left out. It's dumb, but it happens.
• passwordoops 3y ago
  "he views college admissions as a crapshoot. “I don’t really know what they are looking for,” he said." And therein lies the problem. I understand the bed too deviate from standardized testing and evaluate holistically. But when those evaluations are opaque, then anything goes, really, and it's impossible to tell what will work for your target school
• gedy 3y ago
  I'm not sure what this article is getting at regarding "post affirmative action" since Asian Americans were not benefited by it in recent decades. As top academic applicants, the recent challenges were that they were discriminated against in admissions in favor of other minority races in the name of affirmative action.
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• rayiner 3y ago
  Race-conscious admissions for Asians is comically racist. The median income for Bangladeshi Americans is around the same as for Hispanics. It’s that way for the same reason—both are relatively recent immigrants from relatively poor countries. But Bangladeshis are treated as privileged because Indians and Pakistanis are rich. (Pakistanis—who tried to genocide us like five minutes ago—are lumped together with us.) There’s also the cultural discrimination inherent in the process. My brother-in-law’s girlfriend is applying to college, and she has great grades and test scores, along with a compelling “adversity” story. But she’s Filipino, and in most Asian cultures, poverty is shameful, so that didn’t come out in her essays. She’s taking a year off to try her application cycle again, and this time we are having her work with an admissions consultant who will be able to help her target her essays to the white people at the admissions offices.
  • skissane 3y ago
    > The median income for Bangladeshi Americans is around the same as for Hispanics. It’s that way for the same reason—both are relatively recent immigrants from relatively poor countries. But Bangladeshis are treated as privileged because Indians and Pakistanis are rich. I'm wondering how much longer that's going to be true. If we look, not at Bangladeshi Americans, but at Bangladeshis in Bangladesh - on most economic and developmental measures (GDP per capita, poverty, life expectancy) Bangladesh is now equalling or beating India, and both are leaving Pakistan way behind. In 2022, Bangladesh's GDP per capita (nominal) was US$2688, versus US$2411 for India and US$1589 for Pakistan. [0] In 2018, Bangladesh's life expectancy at birth was 73, India's was 71, Pakistan's was only 66. [1] The most recent figures for adult literacy have Bangladesh at 75% (2020), India at 76% (2022), Pakistan at 58% (2019). [2] [0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=BD-IN-PK https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location... [1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?locations=BD-IN-PK https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?location... [2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?locations=BD-IN-PK https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?location...
    • rayiner 3y ago
      The differential in the US has more to do with immigration patterns, and I think that will continue for awhile. Most immigration to the US is family reunification, with H1B being second. Lots of relatively higher class Indians and Pakistanis came here as doctors and engineers. Meanwhile lots of Bangladeshis came here as cab drivers and hospitality workers. I suspect that will be self-perpetuating for awhile.
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• lacrimacida 3y ago
  This is just a battle for shots at elite schools.
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• jaldhar 3y ago
  Study shows that Asian students are Asian.
• yedava 3y ago
  As Indian-American parents, we are leaning towards letting our kid have a relatively normal childhood instead of enrolling them in the grueling rat race of chasing "success". We know that this might mean the kid will have a lower or no chance of getting into an Ivy and so lose some lucrative career opportunities. Having seen successful people have no more luck in being happy and content with their lives than the losers, we just don't see the point in wasting our kids life the way we wasted ours.
  • onetimeusename 3y ago
    I don't know if I would recommend forcing your kids to try to get in. Whether people are willing to admit it or not the degrees are closer to a Rolex watch than they are 'success'. Framing it as if you need a Harvard/MIT/Princeton/Stanford degree to succeed is a false dichotomy. The students at these places commit a lot of academic fraud, my school is changing the honors code to adjust to this new reality. The parents of the students hire consultants to help them create fake credentials to help them get in, they play obscure sports, they join academic clubs like the math team they don't even like. It's not a pretty site. Although objectively, students from these schools have more opportunities, the opportunities are at the kind of places that are themselves kind of fake like top financial firms and it's much easier to create a fake startup when you have a nice degree. I'm put off by how toxic this all is. Goodhart's Law is playing out. I am in favor of having good STEM schools, which is what the schools should do, but I don't think we can do that and simultaneously overvalue prestige rankings. The schools have contributed to tribalism across the country. They are really becoming a net negative I think.
  • Ferret7446 3y ago
    While that sounds perfectly reasonable given the realities, are you not frustrated that your kid's success is being limited by racism?
  • alexpotato 3y ago
    I went to a a top tier US public high school, was top 20% in my class and ended up going to a state university. Over 15 years in finance, including working at multiple top 10 hedge funds, I've gotten to work with a lot of top Ivy and non-Ivy graduates. I've come to a couple conclusions: - There doesn't seem to be a difference in the smartest people from an Ivy and the smartest people from state schools - Going to a Ivy or top university definitely gives you an advantage at some firms and there is something to be said for the network these schools have both from an alumni perspective but also from people you went to school with. - I would argue that state schools are a better preparation for "life in general" b/c you learn how to deal with a larger variety of people, organizations, social backgrounds etc than you do at an Ivy - There are a LOT of senior people at firms that prioritize Ivy league graduates who did NOT go to an Ivy league school. That would lead me to believe that there are many paths to success outside of getting an Ivy league degree.
• monero-xmr 3y ago
  I recommend that students join affinity groups and write an essay that implies they are a race that colleges prefer. They can't directly ask anymore, so they have to go by reading the tea leaves, so just create the illusion that you are someone they want.
• SuperNinKenDo 3y ago
  What is this piece trying to say? I feel like maybe the headline, which would have been chosen hy an editor and not the author, created a bit of a red-herri g here. But even so, the issue of "post-affirmative action" admissions comes up throughout, and I can't really grok to what purpose. The article seems to be unsure what it's trying to do. No great sin, although probably made more grating by the choice of title, and I can't understand why it was published or why it's here.
• rayiner 3y ago
  Jay Caspain Kang had a great analysis of some of the things that are contributing to that stress: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/why-the-champions-of-affirmative-action-had-to-leave-asian-americans-behind https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/why-the-champi... > In Sotomayor’s telling, Asian Americans who are concerned about being racially stereotyped should attend “diverse” universities, where they can help dispel people’s misconceptions by simply existing and getting along with their peers. She then goes on to argue that race-conscious admissions allow Asian American applicants “who would be less likely to be admitted without a comprehensive understanding of their background” to “explain the value of their unique background heritage, and perspective” and allow colleges to “consider the vast differences within [that] community.” It’s hard not to read this as a premise for Asian American teen-agers to essentially dance for acceptance, or to try to distinguish themselves from other Asian Americans by explaining to the good people at the Harvard admissions office why, say, a Vietnamese applicant is more valuable to the Ivy League cultural texture than just another Chinese one. The subjective processes employed at elite schools today are both unpredictable and unseemly. Of course people are upset about them.
• angryasian 3y ago
  I hate that the largest continent in the world is always bundled as one large super ehtnicity. This is the first problem in trying to fix the issue. Second no one knows what they want during the admissions process and is the sole issue. Transparency in the process is what people should be demanding.