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Mitchell J. Chang Headshot

Is Harvard Worth All the Fuss?

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A recent article by Jon Marcus in the Boston Globe reported that Harvard rejected almost
94 percent of those who applied for undergraduate admissions in fall
2011. Even though the acceptance rate of 6.2 percent is a record low,
some suspect that the rate for Asian Americans is even lower.
According to Marcus, Asian American applicants must have stronger
high school records and test scores than applicants from other groups
in order to gain admissions to Harvard and other elite colleges.
Critics charge that through the admissions process, those
institutions discriminate against Asian Americans.

Perhaps history is repeating itself. Similar charges were made
against Harvard in the late 1980s, but the Office of Civil Rights
(OCR) cleared the university of discrimination. OCR concluded that
the lower admission rate for Asian applicants was due to plus
factors, such as legacy and athletics, that tipped in favor of
whites. These plus factors are not considered discriminatory because
they are widely practiced in higher education and support legitimate
institutional goals.

Given that the college admissions process is a moving target, shaped
more by sociopolitical forces than by meritocratic principles, is it
once again time to fuss over admissions into Harvard?

If we were to do the math, we'd realize that unless Harvard doubles
or triples the number of students admitted, the actual number of
Asian American applicants who would gain admissions even under
farfetched proportional increases is relatively small. After all,
this year Harvard admitted only slightly over 2,000 of its more than
34,000 applicants. Even if half of the admitted students were Asian
American, thousands more outstanding Asian American applicants would
still be rejected.

Also, consider the forces that contribute to why admission into
Harvard is so sought after. In an April 17th Chronicle of Higher
article, Kevin Carey, policy director of the Washington
think tank Education Sector, argued that the admissions process at
elite institutions "is recursive and self-sustaining: Everybody wants
to go where everybody else wants to go. It thrives in a vacuum of
consumer information that might give everybody an irrefutable reason
to go somewhere else."

There are over 2,300 four-year institutions of higher education in
the U.S. and with so many to choose from, experts know that there is
no shortage of "excellent" colleges. Unfortunately, the public has a
very narrow view of what counts as an "excellent" college, often
dictated by various national rankings, which artificially inflates
the reputation of and rejection rates for a small set of
institutions. By being among the most enthusiastic contributors to
such market driven demands, as Asian Americans are already
overrepresented at elite institutions, we help sustain an educational
industry that thrives on exclusion.

Given the relatively small gains and the dynamics behind selective
admissions, how might Asian Americans collectively respond to this
admissions problem? I would recommend challenging what those elite
institutions care most about -- resources and reputation. Consider
staging a national boycott of those institutions by refusing either
to apply to them or to further enhance their prestige.

Most likely, such a boycott is improbable because the lure of
prestige is too seductive and applicants tend to overestimate their
chances of being admitted. I know this well because in my eleven
years of study in higher education at four different institutions, one
stands out: my year at Harvard. Now, however, that year stands out
not because it was the best educationally -- far from it -- but because
I paid more for my one year of education there than I did for the
other ten years combined.

So what are the alternatives to boycotting if doing nothing is not a
viable option? Should Asian Americans expend valuable time and
resources to challenge volatile and suspect admissions practices so
that a few more can obtain degrees from elite colleges by displacing
a few other extraordinary applicants? It seems to me that unless we
do something different than what was done in the 1980s, we will
continue to find ourselves in a race to nowhere, as the title of an
educational documentary suggests. For me, it was also a race to the
bottom of my bank account.

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