Remember when you had to apply for college?
I do.
When I applied for college back in 2007, all I can remember now was how frantic and stressed out I was about making sure the package I had, as a student, was PERFECT. As a Korean-American student, born into the 2nd generation category with parents who immigrated to the States years ago, I definitely felt the pressure.
Were my SAT scores good enough? Was my GPA high enough? Did I take the best number of AP classes? Could I have taken more? Did I enroll in Kaplan SAT prep courses in time? Did I spend enough hours studying not only for school but for these frustrating SATs? A party you said? CAN’T. GOTTA STUDY.
Now let’s hone in on the Asian American stereotype. Let’s just say that if I were to actually try and make myself comparable to what I perceive to be the stereotypical level of achievement, looking back now, I don’t think I was good enough. Sure I studied hard, practiced hard, worked hard over all. But maybe my writing skills could have been better. Maybe I could have fit more AP classes. Maybe I could’ve volunteered for more hours. Maybe I could’ve, oh, I don’t know, founded some kind of organization or something.
I’m going to risk it and put myself out there, and admit that I applied to nearly 13 universities, a few of which included some of those “top-tier” schools (like Brown and Columbia). Did I even think I was good enough to? NOT AT ALL. But what was more important for me at the time was to have hope that I was even at all good enough to be considered, considering how much I studied for school, how much I studied for SATs, how much I practiced piano (yes, piano) to win local piano competitions, and even how much i could pack in with helping lead an a-cappella group, a political-interest club that I BARELY had time for, volunteering, an “experiential learning” requirement, my involvement with yearbook, and teaching piano. I’m not saying that I’m looking at myself pessimistically, but, for the sake of writing this, that’s my own personal outlook.
“But what about those students who get straight A’s, nail their SATs and still don’t get into elite universities like Harvard and Yale because… well, they’re Asian-American?”
This is exactly what Radio Boston touched upon just a few minutes ago on their show entitled, "Sometimes, Admission Odds Stacked Against Asian-American Students.“
Guests on the show included Jon Marcus, a reporter for the Boston Globe, NY Times and various other publications, and Sam Museus, a professor of Higher Education and Asian American studies at UMass Boston. Check out his article, Competitive Disadvantage, where one of the people he interviewed is an Asian woman from Massachusetts who changed her son’s last name to avoid the threat of a lack of consideration by admissions by top-tier universities.
"Even though the Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that universities can continue to consider race in admissions in the interest of diversity, admissions officers deny they’re screening out Asian-Americans. However, in researching their 2009 book No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and researcher Alexandria Walton Radford examined data on students applying to college in 1997 and found what looks like different standards for different racial groups. They calculated that Asian-Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores of 1550 to have the same chance of being accepted at a top private university as whites who scored 1410 and African-Americans who got 1100. Whites were three times, Hispanics six times, and blacks more than 15 times as likely to be accepted at a US university as Asian-Americans.”
The host went even further to mention and play an excerpt of Alexandra Wallace’s infamous YouTube rant about the “hoards of Asians” being accepted into UCLA, “our school."
OUR school? When did it become acceptable for a certain group of people to consider a school theirs? WHO owns? Is this use of the word "our” a reflection of some sort of fear of this “other,” “other-izing” the Asian American student population who might be reflecting not only the possible Asian stereotype of over-achievement, but also the value of the American dream, that no matter who you are, you earn what you worked hard for in the end?
In fact, if I’m correct (as I was typing furiously to record the discussion conversation), Marcus mentioned that in 2006, the National Association for College Admissions Counseling had a panel at a conference directed to this issue, a panel that might have been called “Too Many Asians,” which gained considerable exposure in Canada, with a responding article on Macleans (http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/11/10/too-asian/). Too many Asians? Really?
One optimistic caller from Salem, MA, called into the talk show, saying, “It just bothers me when a group does exactly that - work hard and over-achieve, and then finds it a backlash against that very success. It just seems a little weird there would be this kind of viciousness about it. It’s a motivation for ME to work harder.”
Another caller named Yuchi of Lexington, MA, was a former professor of Harvard originally from China, who claims his life to be an example of the American dream. “Lots of people believe that if you have good academic scores, perfect SATs, you get admitted. That’s not really true. The college admission committee, at least when I served at Harvard, there were 20 something factors” - one of which includes being a Legacy, which statistically showed to provide a 45% greater chance of admission, occurring in private universities (not allowed at public universities, even though University of Illinois was caught doing it sometime ago).
“What would you tell parents then, parents and kids who throw their hands up in the air, asking what else can we do?!”
Yuchi replied, “Get their students to be not just one-dimensional, not just academic. Do sports, volunteer, do public service - those are things that the committee looks at.”
I have a feeling we’ve all heard this before, and perhaps there are those of you out there who tried to jam-pack your high school lives with such activities while STILL even trying to fit any kind of social life…
Even though people often assume there is an equal-level field, really, NOTHING is equal-ized about this process. Schools of all levels provide only so much resources, people come from all different backgrounds, and the university admissions process is a mystery.
So what CAN be done? The last caller, a young woman named Ocean with an Asian accent, strongly suggested, “We should be careful about the future, facing global competition, not just the USA. Let’s not be tiger mothers; let children do what they love and what they are good at, Being creative, solving problems, and [being] useful for the future society is way more important than a GPA!”
“It’s a major disservice that we create these expectations, and then conclude that the students just did TOO well, and that’s what they were being told to do all along,” said Professor Museus.
Thank goodness I got the college application process part of my life over with. For those of you reading who are in the process and are hearing back from colleges now, or are facing the college application process in the future… I’m no wise woman but, coming from my own experience, I suggest you do the best you can and that the decision for you to push yourself above and beyond is ultimately YOUR decision. If your parents are funding your education, I highly suggest you maintain a close relationship with them about your college decisions - and that you respect them. After all, they are paying for your education, and they need to understand what they are investing in. But at the end of the day, it is YOUR future. As for being well-rounded students, of course things like volunteering, sports, leadership, etc. are all important… and why? The way I see it is that college admissions officers want to see that you aren’t simply academic robots, but real people who have faced real-life, valuable, lesson-learning experiences that you can’t learn in the classroom. But, please, balance, and leave room to be able to breathe and eat!
Oh and sleep too.
Time to get back to my own studying.
