A Quota on Excellence? The Asian American Admissions Debate

Tony Tran

Section 2

Week 3

Modern Analysis of Asian American Admittance Rate

(A Quota on Excellence? The Asian American Admissions Debate)

From what I have read in this chapter in Nakanishi’s book, I feel like asian americans were heavily discriminated during the 1980’s and maybe the 1990’s; however, I think otherwise in our current situation. From the many UC admit profiles I have search, WE are the majority that are being admitted. We therefore do not have discrimination in asian americans being admitted, right?

Well I believe now there is a shift in reasoning for holding down the asian american admit rate that could have been higher. I feel that there are more and more asian americans that are getting those good statistical scores and thus more are becoming the perfect candidate for coming into the UC colleges. However, I believe the problem for college admitters now is how they should balance how much high achieving students there are with consideration for ethnicity. Because admit rates are considered high for both white and asian americans, what space is left for other potential ethnicities? We cannot discriminate on them as well unless we fall down the same path as we took in the 1980’s. We have to also acknowledge that we can only have so much in our percentage pie, that we cannot perfectly slice up 25% for one ethnicity and 25% for another and on. We also have to account that of international students that are probably being more selected due to financial backing, there are many international asians that come to the UC colleges. Lastly, I feel like this type of statistical evidence is good for particularly California, where asian americans are a higher in population compared to other states, so I cannot say if there are asian american admit discrimination over there. This is a sort of discussion that I talk over with my roommate and there is very mixed feelings about this topic and that there is a fine line that college admitters must take to appease the crowd.

Q: Is the Asian American acceptance rate going to keep rising or will it stay consistent now? Or will there be fluctuations between whites and asian americans (after viewing all the student profiles)?