Week 3- Rachel Ibrahim

Rachel Ibrahim
Week 3
4/16/17

I think it is very interesting to learn more about the college choice process because like many of the things we have already discussed in this class, it is misunderstood topic. I, like many people, have predisposed notions of how the college process works for the Asian American population, but after reading these articles, I was very surprised how wrong I was. I was most surprised with affirmative action because based on the number of Asian Americans attending California universities, it seems like affirmative action had no impact on their admissions and it almost seemed like affirmative action harm Asian Americans as much as white people. However, based on this article, the 1996 proposition to undo some of the affirmative action laws only helped white people and hurt Asian Americans. This article also brings up the fact that so much of racism and the things implemented to counter discrimination leaves out Asian Americans entirely focusing primarily on African Americans and Hispanics. The Asian American community is too often labeled as a model minority leaving them out of having any type of benefit in either case. I think this also ties in very closely with how Asian Americans are raised and the tiger mom mentality. I had always figured that part of the reason why Asian Americans are so successful in university admissions despite being a minority is because of this extreme value in higher education. The second article researches more into this tiger mom mentality and again I was very surprised about how many misconceptions I had. While, the article did prove that parental opinions had a huge impact on students’ college choices, there are many other factors as well. On top of that, more Asian Americans attended communities colleges than elite universities which is another common misconception. I think both the article on affirmative action and tiger mom anxiety shed a lot of light on the process of admissions of Asian Americans in higher education and how so many people have the wrong idea about the subject. Due to their model minority status, Asian Americans are just unrecognized as a minority that is still treated unfairly, very much relating back to last weeks idea of marginalization.

Question: Is there a way to legally bring Asian Americans more representation in legislation like affirmative action? Like instead of primarily focusing on the affirmative action of races like African Americans, what can be done to include Asian Americans?

Citations:

Nakagawa, S. (2014, April 27). Asian Americans and Affirmative Action. Retrieved April 15, 2017, from https://www.laprogressive.com/asian-americans-and-affirmative-action/

Chung Allred, N. (2007). Asian Americans and Affirmative Action: From Yellow Peril to Model
Minority and Back Again. Asian American Law Journal, 14(3). Available at
http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/aalj/vol14/iss

Poon, O. and Byrd, A. (2013). Beyond Tiger Mom Anxiety: Ethnic, Gender and Generational
Differences in Asian American College Access and Choices. Journal of College of Admission
Retrieved from http://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1077&context=education _facpubs