Asian Americans and Higher Education

By By James Kumpel
October 20, 2011

In the most recent Pacific Citizen, it was interesting to see two articles that highlight troubling issues that face the Asian American community: affirmative action and skyrocketing tuition. In the first article, “Protesting Pastries for Affirmative Action,” multicultural student groups protested a UC Berkeley bake sale that featured various discounts depending on race, ethnicity and gender. Protesters who were offended by the event seem to have missed the point that California Senate Bill 185 is an attempt to overturn the state’s “color-blind” college admissions policy by injecting greater subjectivity in considering race, gender, ethnicity, national origin, and other factors toward some “optimal” racial and ethnic mix.

Most colleges do not consider socioeconomic, ideological viewpoints, religious, military or rural backgrounds as relevant factors in achieving diversity. Rather, according to Princeton University lecturer Russell Nieli, diversity is generally characterized by a black and Hispanic student mix, since AAs are viewed as “over-represented” in university settings. Indeed, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford reviewed admissions data from eight highly competitive public and private universities and found that AA students were held to far higher standards than even the white majority. Specifically, to have equivalent probability of admission as a black student with an 1100 SAT score, Hispanic students would need a 1230, white students would require a 1410, and AAs would need a 1550 (fully 10% higher than whites and 40% higher than blacks).

This disparity in standards should be unacceptable to AAs, many of whom are either immigrants themselves or children of immigrants who did not speak English as a primary language. How could it possibly be fair to hold such students — who often had to overcome cultural hurdles — to a higher academic standard than other groups, whose families were more likely in this country for many generations? The 1996 referendum that banned government entities from discriminating on the basis of race helped to raise the AA student mix to 40% in California public universities. Clearly a reversal of this ban would threaten meritorious AAs, undermining the very premise of Dr. Martin Luther King's dream that our nation be one that judges people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

The second article, “Students Struggle With Rising Tuition”, highlights the difficulties many AA students face in coping with escalating tuition during this extended jobless economic recovery. Indeed, when we evaluate Bureau of Labor Statistics data since 1978 (i.e. the middle of the Carter-era stagflationary economy), consumer prices have tripled, housing values have quadrupled, and college tuitions have grown a staggering ten-fold. That’s right, the housing bubble that helped take down this economy in 2008 is nothing compared to the tuition increases that represent a monstrous overhang to parents and future students alike.