Racial bias still alive in college admissions

NEW York City Mayor Bill de Blasio believes that city’s selective high schools have a problem — too many minority students.

He doesn’t phrase it that way, of course, but de Blasio worries the schools have too many Asians. At one selective New York City high school, that ethnic group comprises more than 70 percent of the student body. De Blasio’s proposed solution is to change the admissions process from a purely merit-based model that relies on test results to one that instead blindly accepts the top 7 percent of students from every middle school in the city. This will result in more ethnic diversity in the selective schools, but do so by pushing many more-qualified Asian students out the door to make room for lower-achieving students.

This form of subtle racial discrimination is nothing new, as demonstrated by a recent report from the Center for Equal Opportunity, titled “Too Many Asian Americans: Affirmative Discrimination in Elite College Admissions.”

In it, research fellow Althea Nagai examined Asian-American student enrollment at three highly selective universities: Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and California Institute of Technology. Only Caltech does not consider race during the admissions process.

At Caltech, Nagai says, the number of Asian undergraduates “has increased, quite steeply since 2000,” and they now make up more than 40 percent of students.

But at MIT, where race is an admissions factor (but not legacy connections), the rise in Asian students “halted in the 1990s” and has declined somewhat since 1995 to 26 percent today.

At Harvard, where race and legacy connections are admission factors, Asian-Americans never comprised more than 21 percent of students and then fell to about 17 percent, where their numbers have been stuck for more than 25 years even as the overall number of Asians has increased nationally. (From 1960 to 2010, the U.S. population of Asian-Americans increased more than ten-fold.)

The discrepancies in the schools’ admission rates for Asians are obvious signs of racial discrimination in admissions to ensure the “right” kind of minorities gain entrance.

Nagai references other research that has shown if a typical white applicant is admitted to an elite private school with an SAT score of 1400, then an Asian applicant needs a score of 1540, a black applicant needs a 1090, and a Hispanic candidate needs a 1270 “to have the same probability of admission.”

This discrimination hasn't gone unnoticed. Nagai notes some Asian-American college applicants now “try to hide their identity when applying” to increase their likelihood of success. As far back as 2006, Nagai notes, panelists at the National Association for College Admission Counseling annual meeting conceded admissions consultants were advising Asian clients “to choose extracurricular activities and prospective majors that worked against stereotype.” Basically, students were told to ditch piano and chess club for activities less associated with high academic achievement.

Discrimination based on race remains repugnant to most Americans. Sadly, this doesn't appear to include folks like de Blasio and many college leaders.