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ASIAMS.NET |
ASIAN AMERICAN ISSUES
ARE IVY DEGREES WORTH THE SACRIFICES
ending their kids to ivy league universities is the dream of every Asian American parent. Or so it seems. And there is no shortage of young AA willing to oblige. As of 2000, Asian Americans made up 12-19% of the undergrad enrollments of the top-20 ivies.
No one questions the prestige associated with ivy degrees. In fact, sneer critics, that's the only thing bought with the extra money. And even that, they add, is wearing thin in a nation in which he cultural center of gravity has shifted to California.
It's true that investments in high ivy tuitions often don't show up in career earnings when compared with graduates of public universities of comparable student body profiles. But the criticisms run deeper than return on investment. Some Asian Americans who have attended ivy league colleges have come away regretting their decisions for other reasons.
Foremost is the sense that the ivies are structured for the benefit of legatees, the progeny of blueblooded alumni. Comprising upwards of 40% of some ivies, the legatees are often exempted from stringent admissions standards. The result is that AA students with excellent credentials are the workhorses preserving the institutions' high academic reputations, thereby giving a free ride to undeserving legatees.
Another common complaint is that the deck is stacked socially against Asian males in a system designed to preserve the princely status quo of the scions of WASP families. A disproportionate number of attractive AA females are admitted by the ivies, some have observed, while far fewer attractive AA males are admitted. This subtle bias, suspect critics, is implemented in the screening interviews used by most ivies.
Then there's the Eurocentric worldview imposed by the courses. Not to mention the lousy weather, bland food and having to put up with locals hostile toward Asians. Contrast all this against the majority-ease lifestyles enjoyed by the AA in, say, the UC campuses.
The bragging rights an ivy education affords parents, conclude critics, are far outweighed by the psychic and emotional sacrifices exacted from their kids.
Does an ivy education provide rewards commensurate with the sacrifices? Or is it a trap for AA with overzealous parents with old-world views?
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Discussions posted during the past year remain available for browsing.
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WHAT YOU SAY
[This page is closed to new input. --Ed.]
(Updated
Tuesday, Apr 1, 2008, 06:01:11 PM)
ivyprep
You do not seem to have a thorough knowledge of the process involved with private university admissions. We can argue here all day about the bias of the
SAT or the " variability value " of the GPA, but what we cannot deny is the damaging effect of preferences be they alumni or racial. Ivy schools proclaim that that they find value in someone being president of the class, or the school needing a cello player etc.
I personally don't find much merit to these claims. Having a 26 year old
Harvard grad judging applicants on the quality of their character is simply not my cup of tea or cappuccino. Yeet all this subjective criteria among others are part and parcel of Ivy League
admission process.
Ivycreep claims that the average
SAT score of alumni legacies at Harvard
is 1385. I had not seen this figure b4, but being a mean ,it tells us that the SAT score of an alumni legacy at Harvard could be as low as 900 SAT or as high as 1560 SAT.
Perhaps a more revealing idea could be made on what the real range of SAT scores alumni legacies have at Harvard
with the following revelation by William
Bowen in his book " Game of Life ". In
this book Bowen ex- president of Princeton claims that in the ivy or at Princeton specifically (at least for the
feminine gender ) these following data holds true:
If you are a black applicant your chance of getting inside Princeton is 24 % higher than that of an applicant who is not a beneficiary of any kind of
preference at Princeton ( be it alumni,
racial or otherwise ). If you are the child of an alumni your chance is 28% better of getting admitted to Princeton than someone who is not the beneficiary of any of preference. Finally, Bowen states that if you are an athlete, your chance of getting inside Princeton is 48 % better than someone who is not the beneficiary of any kind of prefererence.
Next Bowen reports another set of
similar percentages that mirrors the Princeton situation for all the Ivy colleges.
What does that mean? Since the outcomes or probablity of acceptance
percentages is virtually the same in all of the other Ivy colleges with regards to the black, alumni, athlete and non - beneficiary categories, the following conclusions can be drawn:
It is possible that the mean SAT average of blacks are higher than the mean SAT scores of alumni legacies at Harvard.
It is definitely true that there are
black applicants that were denied admission to Harvard or the Ivy League even if they who got higher SAT scores than white legacy alumni applicants who were admitted.
It is definitely true that the average SAT scores of white athletiic
preferency legacies at Harvard are definitely lower than the mean SAT scores of blacks admitted to Harvard.
AS of fall 2001 at Princeton, white athletic preferences admittees comprise
20 % of the entering class. Bear in mind
that white athletic preferences who are admitted in the Ivy League play tennis,soccer, fencing, lacrosse, swimming ( sports that are not generally played by ghetto kids. )
Bok and Shulman co - authors of the "
Game of Life " based their data on the
longtitudonal CHRP study made by Alexander Astin of UCLA. This study made
was the subject of controversy during the UM - Ann Arbor Gratz and Grutter discrimination cases, because fo the fraudulent claims made by Bowen and
Derek Bok ( ex - prexy of Harvard ) in their infamous book " The Shape of the River ".
Ivyprep further claims that virtually
every high school kid in California apply to Berkeley, 36k applicants at
Berkeley is 2x the 18k applicants at Harvard for the fall 2001 freshamna class is hardly gonna explain why more people apply to Berkeley than Harvard. Berkeley turned away thousands of applicants with 4.0 GPA's . We can aregue endlessly about the value of an SAT score or a GPA, but there is no denying that Berkeley denies many hardworking students admittance.
The reason why I shoued you the
UC Irvine data is that to show you succesful students come from all kinds of schools. Remember, UC medical schools taken as a group aare the most compettetive in the entire country. Even the least competetive of them , UC
Irvine, the mean MCAT score of the entering class is equal to that of the entering class at Stanford Medical School. You can verify this data from the website of Jerry Cook an MIT grad and a statistics professor at the University San Diego.
BTW, IVYcreeper, The NRC (National
Research Council, look up this data at their Oscar webpage ) tells us this fact.
Among the recipients of doctoral degrees in enginerring and natural sciences ( physics, math , chemistry, biolotgical sciences, agricultural sciences) and social sciences ( economics,psychology, political science,
sociology etc. ) from 1989 to 1993, Berkeley ranked first as the origin of their undergraduate degrees. UCLA ranked 8th, and Harvard ranked 9th.
You can even forget about Princeton and Stanford, they ranked 23rd and 25th respectively.
Berkeley and UCLA sends more graduates to medical, law and business
schools than Harvard. Both of them also graduate more engineers and teachers than Harvard. In fact last year, LSAC
(Law School Admissions Council, not that I care about lawyers ) commended
UCLA for sending more graduates to law school than any other university in the entire country. It was followed in positions 2, 3, 4 by Berkeley, UN - Ann Arbor and Texas - Austin where did you think Harvard rank ? Cornell ranked 8th and Harvard ranked 9th. Enuf said.
At the Pace Law School website, previous one that is , not the current one, they proclaim that they had Harvard graudates as students. Whittier
Law School ( here in Southern California
where I live, so I am not a a Northern
Cal liberal as you claim ) there is at least 1 Duke university grad who graduated in the last 3 years. whittier
Law School is not exactly the most difficult law school to get into in Southern California.
It seems to me in your rant IVYPrep, that you are hell bent into getting inside at an IVY school or was an Ivy grad yourself. I suspect your father was an Ivy or private school grad (VP at Oracle ) himself. Then how come Larry Ellison (graduate of UIUC, a public university which happens to be the alma mater of Marc Andriessen of Netscape) is his boss ? Show this e-mail ro your father and Mr. Ellison.
biaknabato
Saturday, January 26, 2002 at 22:52:18 (PST)
ivyprep
This is a contiunuance of my rebuttal of ivyprep's claims that my post are a bunch of lies. Nothing could be further from the truth . I hope that the first part of my rebuttal would be published
in this forum. Ivy prep earlier asserted
that the combined number of Ivy League
freshman who scored below 1100 SAT is greater than the number of Berkeley freshman who possesed the same attribute.
Freshman in the IVy League ( if you
include Penn, Cornell ( the private part), Johns Hopkins ) number about 13000.
The College Board says that 3 % of the Harvard freshman class scored below 1000 SAT. It would be fair to say that
6-8 % of the freshamn classes of the Ivy schools scored below 1100 SAT. The freshman class at Princeton and Darthmouth is about 1100, at Columnbia about 1200 at Yale and Princeton at about 1300 and 1400 respectively, at
Columbia about 1200 at Penn about 2500, at Cornell about 2000 (Ivy school has 6 or 7 percent of its members scoring below 1100 SAT, then obviously the number of freshman in the Ivies who scored below 1100 SAT is greater than the number of freshman who possess the same attribute at Berkeley.
Ivyprep claims " students at prep
schools study harder than public schools" . The best I can say about this remark is that it depends on the individual. Let me recount an news article i read her in LA. Fremont HIgh School is regarded by the LA times as the the high school with the lowest academic achievement in Los Angeles.
It is 100 % black and Latino.It is a
school in an economically depressed area in South -Central LA. One of its
students scored 1260 SAT and is now enrolled at Brwon U in Rhode Island.
Whether she admitted at Brown because whe was poor or because she was a Hispanic is another story.
This is another contrasting data I read from the " Guide to Private Secondary Schools ( the fat red book )"
I forgot whether the school was Philips
Exeter or Phillips Andover.The data says that 25 % of the graduating class scored below 1220 SAT. The graduating class was about 274 students. Now i know that at Exeter of Andover there is a very high propotion of wealthy students. About 25 % of the students are
Asian, many from abroad. And yet inspite
of the review or prep classes for the at either school ( it is obvious that students there receive more SAT prep classes than public students do ).
What can I say about that Fremont
High student compared to the 63 graduating students or so who graduated
at Exeter or Andover or so with SAT scores below 1220?.
IVYprep further claims " GPA's mean
differently at each school and many public high school kids apply to Berkeley even though they don't have good SAT scores".
Everybody knows that GPA's mean differently at different schools.
Whether you disagree or not with the UC admissions process, here it is how basiclly it works.Depending on the school, each UC campus accepts between 50 - 75 % of the entering class based on grades and standardized scores alone.
The other 25 - 50 % are accepted on other factors such as income, life hardships, athletic, extracurricular activities, essays etc. There could be
endless argument of the validity of these factors but that is another story.
Ivycreep further claims " that Berkeley accepts anybody with a score
of 1355 SAT. Not true, it is higher at about 1370 for liberral arts students.
For the the more competetive computer
science and engineering programs, they
generally look at somebody scoring above
1400 SAT, no guarantee of admission however. There are always exceptions to these unspoken guidelines, because Berkeley does look at income and other
"life hardship " factors.
I don't have to mention the case of competetive high schools like Bronx Science, Lowell, Stuyvesant etc. Brooklyn Tech in Fort Green, Brooklyn,
graduates close to 900 students a year. I suspect or I believe that they
graduate more students who scored above
1200 SAT than either Philips Andover or
Philip Exeter.
What about this little tidbit.
Only 9 of the Stanford applicants to
UC Irvine Medical were ACCEPTED OUT OF A POOL OF 135 for the entering class of 2000. There 175 applicants from California state universities (not UC, UC is different from CAl STATE....Cal state campuses are Northridge, san francisco, san jose, hayward etc.)
Those 5 students admitted to
UC Irvine medical school from Cal STATE
universities paid a tuition that 7 0r 8 times lower than that of Stanford acceptees. Who is laughing on the way to the bank now?
biaknabato
Saturday, January 26, 2002 at 12:55:03 (PST)
Ivyprep
Your claim that what I had said in my earlier post are lies is pure rubbishos I must apologize to everybody for not reading my e -mail earlier (at least not all of my e - mail earlier
I only found out about the comments to my commentary the other day.
First ivyprep claims that the number of Berkeley freshnan is 4491 not 3700. That is simply rubbish. I am a very familiar with the HTML posted by OSR (office of student research at the Berkeley website.) I had known about that HTML page for several months.
I had read it well. Usually , student data in public universities are often posted under the Office of institiutonal Research or Department of Planning and Analysis or Office of Budget Research etc.
In this particular case, what the website is telling us is that about 3700 students enrolled in the fall
freshman class at Berkeley in 2001. There are other students who deferred their enrollment until spring. Not only that, there were student transfers from the community colleges who transferred during the fall and spring semesters Berkeley who are classified as freshman.
Furthermore , there are students at Berkeley, who have part - time study workloads who are classified as " freshman ". This particular type of freshman might have been at Berkeley for a year and a half. If you added all the students in these categories, you could conceivably end up up with a figure of 4491.
I do no not rememberthe figure of 4491 offhand , but I do remember the figure of 1675 rom that HTML page. The Collge Board which supplies SAT scores to universities says that 50 % of the fall '01 entering class at Berkeley scored above 700 in the the Math SAT.
The College Boardsays that the freshamn classs for fall'01 at Berkeley is over 3700. These are also the figures I had seen from bollege
guidebooks (Barron's , plan's, Princeton Review etc) .
One would presume that the college guidebooks get their data from the College Board or like Kaplan and US
News & World Report directly contact the schools themselves. You can see that 50 % of 3700 is over 1800. That means, the College Board is claiming
that there are over 1800 freshman in the fall '01 entering class at Berkeley who scored above 700 in the Math SAT.
So to make it " fair ", I wrote in my
earlier post that the the # of Berkeley
2001 fall freshman who scored above 700
in the Math SAT as between 1700 - 1800.
Even if we reduce the nnumber of freshman at Berkeley to equal that of Harvard, we can still say that Berkeley;s achievement is better than
Harvard.
The size of Harvard's freshman class is about 42 % that of Berkeley. 42 % of 1675 would be about 680. 85 % of that ( those coming from California, Nevada, Arizona ) would be about 580. About 40 % of the those who scored above 700 in the Math SAT at Harvard come from the the Northeast. The population of the Northeast is about the size fo the population of California , Nevada and Arizona. So 40 % of 1200 is about 480.
So from 2 equal population bases to choose from, Berkeley trumps Harvard.
My definition of the Northeast comprises the states of New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, nnecticut,Delaware,
Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey and
Massachusetts.
Mr. Ivycreeper,,,, er,,, I mean
Ivyprep has been grautitiously making
statements that does not make sense.
He says for example " more Asians at
Berkeley does not mean better academics ". I am not in the business of saying Asians are better than
blacks or whites are anybody. The point
of my post was that preferences on any kind whether alumni or racial is detrimental to a university. I do not know what " better academics " mean.
" The combined number of Ivy freshman who score below 1100 SAT in the Ivy League is greater than than the number of Berkeley freshman who score below 1100 SAT. That is pure rubbish. Those who score at the the 25 percentile at Berkeley have a SAT score of 1200 or 1190 ( depending on whether you believe the College Board or some other source ). I would liberally estimate that about 500 - 600 of Berkeley freshman have SAT scores below 1100.
There are about 13,000 freshman in the Ivy League ( that is if you include the private part of Cornell, Penn and Johns Hopkins ). According to the College Board, about 3 % of the freshman class at Harvard have SAT scores below 1000 ( about 40 to 50 students, unlikely to be black more likely to be white alumni legacies ).
In the early 1990's , Harvard officials admitted to the New Republic that they admitted a student with an SAT
score of 900 and a high school average of C because his father was the head of the fundraising campaign. I will continue my post later , I have something to do right now,
biaknabato
Saturday, January 26, 2002 at 08:49:57 (PST)
hey ac dropout, i'm not disputing that american colleges or whatever u guys call them, have are ahead in resources, in fact they are miles ahead of us, what i was trying to say was that the calibre of academics and intellect of the students is at par with the students from the top schools in the states, regardless of resources.....it's true we lack behind the states in research only becuase our institiutions are public.... but once they make them private....were gonna be up there...and your comment about our pop not be as high as the sates...it's true we have 30 million and u guys have 2000 million...but so what???/ yes i'll admit we have our native problems whihc we are working on every day...and the frech separtists in quebec(who by the way as the polls show are satisifed and do not want to separate...but that's the beauty of this country...we are a country constantly struggling to find a middle ground between all these cultures...and regions(westerners vs eastereners) yet we have manitained to be voted the top 3 countires to live in according to the u.sm whearas the states...well u're a very homogenous country....u're either a republcian or democrat...u don't have billingualism... yes we do have race relations problems,,,, but u're absoultely inccorect to say that the only reason u guys have such problems is becuase of your pop...umm buddy no get your facts straight...it's called gun control o.k....little screwed up teenagers cannot go and purchase a gun and then use it to shoot down an entire school...it's doesn't matter how big a country is..u need gun control to keep such weapons out of the hands of lunatics... let's say canada had the same pop as u guys...we still wouldn't have near;y as many problems as u do. also our socioeconomic state is much much better, becuase we have universal healthcare, which i will admit has it's own share of probelms but at the same time allows for people regardless of money, recive healthcare whears in the staets people suffer from health problems becuase they simply cannot afford it...our country also has many social prgorams to assist those most in need so therfore u don't see the extreme poverty that exists all over the states... like when i'm walking through n.y city one block is affleunt suburbs but as i walk down another 2 blcoks u will see extreme poverty...we don't have that extreme transition here....oh yeah and finally just think about it, your country was born out of slavery......while canada was the first in all of n.a to ban slavery under john simcoe....all i'm trying to say is that regardless of how how much power and money the u.s has, canada is the more rational of the 2...we provide an outside look of things..we don't make enemies....we never enslaved people and most ofall canada by far is the best country to live in!!!!!!!
canadian chic
Saturday, January 26, 2002 at 08:11:41 (PST)
AC Dropout,
How do Bronx HS kids do in college admissions? Where do most of them go?
Asian Dominatrix
Friday, January 25, 2002 at 15:44:43 (PST)
Miss China,
I'm of Chinese descent too, but I beg to differ on Indians: I've met lots of highly intelligent Indians at Oxford. And Cambridge too. I would assume the ones here in the States to be just as talented.
Asian Dominatrix
Friday, January 25, 2002 at 15:43:27 (PST)
T.H. Lien,
There might have been a "General", but the 4 is what comes to mind. Supposedly, they don't give that out anymore....it's probably for those sots who worked a little harder than Sebastian Flyte in "Brideshead."
A "3" is kinda like a C average. Not many students get this, but still a fairly sizeable proportion (at least in English). The most common ones are probably 2:1 and 2:2, roughly equivalent to a B+ and B- respectively. Most kids hope for a 2:1, but even a 2:2 can still get you a cushy management consultancy training position.
Of course, the really ambitious ones shoot for the 1. It's usually received by boys from the "public schools" (read EXPENSIVE private schools--i.e., Eton, Westminster, Winchester, King's.) They manage to do very well the first year and the tutors pay much more attention to them than anyone else so they get a real head start. Democracy? Nah! Much of how you do depends on whether you were lucky enough to have the right tutors. If you've got lazy or dozy ones, you might be able to get away punting and attending Oxford Union debates every day (go see Kermit the Frog or Michael Jackson)--but you might find yourself very ill-prepared...
Not bad so far, eh? Except for the fact that they post up your results and your friends' on the bulletin boards of the Examination Schools in June/July/August, so EVERYONE knows how you did, whether your subject is physics, chemistry, math, French, etc. (So if you see lots of greasy geeks hanging around the front of Schools on the High Street in July, you'll know why.) Brits and Asians are kinda alike in that they're really into a "shame culture"--or so I've been told. (Altho' individual scores on all of the scores will come from your senior tutor.)It's pretty nerve-wracking.
Hey, anyone out here know how Asian universities work? How do they compare to American ones?
Asian Dominatrix
Friday, January 25, 2002 at 15:37:39 (PST)
Akash,
Having studied in the USA and in Asia. The emphasis in Asia is to make sure everyone has a certain level of education when they level high school.
That is not the case in the USA. In general our public school system is 'sink or swim'. You either leave the system being the genius that skips grades or graduate as an illiterate.
Perhaps the reason you see less asian Nobel Prize winners is because the committe is white. But in all honesty, the are plenty of asian who have recieved the Nobel prize. Didn't that crazy starving pacifist in India, who help win the independence for your country get one?
AC dropout
Friday, January 25, 2002 at 13:21:50 (PST)
Miss China,
That was a brilliantly racist comment of yours. Unfortunately, it really isn't true. If Chinese excel at everything, how come CHINA is such a shithole of a country?
I think what you meant to say is, all the smartest Chinese come to America, and the children of smart people tend to do better than others.
Just a guy
Friday, January 25, 2002 at 11:30:46 (PST)
Now that this discussion has forced me to look back at high school in NYC and chances for acceptance into an ivy league school. I've come to the realization that it basically might not have anything to do with intellegence, but perhaps economic standing and school ranking.
In the NYC public school system, academically talented children are weeded out of the normal school system at Junior High (Hunter JHS) and High School Level (Styvestant, Bx of Science, and Brooklyn Tech).
Keeping in touch with all my friends in the system. I became to realise that even an average kid could gain acceptance into an ivy league school by becoming vale victorian in a normal zoned highschool. While the academically talented kids in the city would have to compete among themselves for those position. Granted % wise there are more kids being sent to ivy from the magnet system, as oppose to normal HS.
But in the end for majority of the kids, the economics of attending an ivy was not possible even after acceptance.
But even aside from all that analysis, the system for college admission is not favorable for asians in America. Asians are not treated as that academic majority. But are instead treated as over-advantage minority.
AC dropout
Friday, January 25, 2002 at 10:06:54 (PST)
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