MYTHS VS REALITY: ASIAN COLLEGE APPLICANTS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Tim Brunold, University of Southern California, CA Terry Kung, Immaculate Heart High School, CA Jennifer Lee, Cheongna Dalton School, South Korea Matt McGann, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA Nat Smitobol, IvyWise, NY

GOALS:

• Raise awareness on the topic of who “Asians/Asian Pacific Islanders” are.

• Help one another gain better understanding of and get more educated on the topic.

• Keep the dialogue going in the work that we do with the hope of changing related policies.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Source: Pew Social & Demographic Trends Reports-The Rise of Asian Americans, June 19th, 2012

History: • Asian immigrants first came to the U.S. in significant numbers more

than a century and a half ago—mainly as low-skilled male laborers who mined, farmed and built the railroads. They endured generations of officially sanctioned racial prejudice—including regulations that prohibited the immigration of Asian women; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred all new immigration from China; the Immigration Act of 1917 and the National Origins Act of 1924, which extended the immigration ban to include virtually all of Asia; and the forced relocation and internment of about 120,000 Japanese Americans after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Large-scale immigration from Asia did not take off until the passage of the landmark Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

• “Asians” may not be under represented on many college campuses, but they only make up 5.8% of the U.S. population based on the last census.

• Asians recently passed Hispanics as the largest group of new immigrants to the U.S.

• Americans with Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese and “other U.S. Asian” origins have higher shares in poverty than does the U.S. general public.

• Majority of Asians were not born in the U.S. The median age of all second-generation Asians is just 17—in other words, half are still children.

• Asian women are twice as likely as Asian men to marry out. From 2008-2010, 29% of all Asian newlyweds married someone of a different race (compared with 26% of Hispanics, 17% of blacks and 9% of whites).

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Source: Pew Social & Demographic Trends Reports-The Rise of Asian Americans, June 19th, 2012

• Confucian Culture

• Asian American identity – bicultural world

• Emotional & mental health

• Pressure to perform

IQ VS EQ & THE BAMBOO CEILING

IQ vs. EQ What is the bamboo ceiling & how does it inform many Asian American students? (Wesley Yang’s “Paper Tigers” article in NY magazine) The Census Bureau reports that Asian-Americans have the highest education levels of any racial category in the United States. Of Asian-Americans, 52.4% are college graduates, while the national average is 29.9%. The Asian-American population accounts for about 4.8% of the U.S. population, but only 0.3% of corporate office populations.

ASIAN STEREOTYPES IN THE MEDIA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opBfHXePM2Y (CNN report, “Are Asians Smarter?”

“ ‘Any time we make broad statements about Asian Americans being uniformly successful, it misleads the public.’ Dr. Alvin Alvarez [Asian American

Psychological Association] says statistics don’t tell the whole story, and perpetuate the myth of a model minority. Keep in mind the Asian American

classification covers people from well over a dozen countries. Not all nationalities achieve the same levels of success here in the United States…

“The path of a college-educated immigrant from India or China is very different from that of an asylum-seeking refugee who fled Cambodia or Laos or

Vietnam. The model minority myth renders all those distinctions moot. [Dr. Alvarez continues,] ‘One, it basically fails to capture the diversity within the

Asian American community. Two, it also begins to penalize those Asian American groups and individuals who don’t fit that particular stereotype.’”

ASIAN STEREOTYPES IN POPULAR CULTURE

AAPIS IN THE COLLEGE LANDSCAPE

Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade, who reviewed data from 10 elite colleges, writes in “No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal’’ that Asian applicants typically need an extra 140 points to compete with white students

Source: Do colleges redline Asian-Americans? - The Boston Globe

A CLOSER LOOK AT THE NUMBERS

24 different ethnicities in “Asian”

24 different ethnicities in “Pacific Islander”

A CLOSER LOOK AT THE NUMBERS

27 Ethnicities in 2000 30 Ethnicities in 2010

A CLOSER LOOK AT THE NUMBERS

A CLOSER LOOK AT THE NUMBERS

A CLOSER LOOK AT THE NUMBERS

A CLOSER LOOK AT THE NUMBERS

MARTIN: What about Asian-Americans, though? What's the situation there? CARNEVALE: There is a supposition, often, that Asian-Americans strive more, relative to their social class, but social class is not just about earnings. It's about family and family history. And when you look at Asian-Americans, what you discover almost immediately is if they're not middle-class, they're very close to it, and they have very much lived through the generations as successful families, perhaps not here, but elsewhere. The new Asians are not doing quite so well, as we start looking towards India, Pakistan and some other places. And one of the things we did find is that fully 50 percent of Asians end up in much the same places as African-Americans, Latinos and low-income kids in America, in this bottom tier of nonselective, underfunded, overcrowded, two-year and four-year colleges. 'Separate And Unequal': Racial Divides In Higher Ed, July 31, 2013 (NPR)

PRACTICAL SUGGESTION FOR COUNSELORS & ADMISSIONS PROFESSIONALS

• M A K E A C O N N E C T I O N E A R L Y & P R O V I D E

E M O T I O N A L S U P P O R T • H E L P T H E M F I N D T H E I R V O I C E • W I T H H O L D S T E R E O T Y P I N G & U N D E R S T A N D T H E

C U L T U R A L N U A N C E S • E N C O U R A G E T H E M T O A P P L Y B R O A D L Y &

R E A S S U R E S T U D E N T S O F T H E V A R I E T Y O F O P P O R T U N I T I E S

• E N C O U R A G E T H E M T O V I S I T C O L L E G E C A M P U S E S • D I S A G G R E G A T E A A P I D A T A