Panel Examines Admissions Preferences

A three-member panel of academics and about 35 students gathered in Boylston Hall on Friday to discuss the relationship between Asian Americans and affirmative action.

This issue has attracted attention since Tufts University reported that the proportion of Asian students in its freshman class was about four percent lower than its sophomore class, according to the Tufts Daily.

“We have felt that Asians have been the forgotten minority in college admissions and in the business world,” said Benjamin D. Wei ’08 at the panel. Wei is the educational-political co-chair of the Asian American Association (AAA), which sponsored the panel.

In the realm of college admissions, Asian Americans usually are not given any special considerations, Wei said. He added that common explanations include references to the group’s high academic achievement and its overrepresentation. Asians are just 3.5 percent of the U.S. population, according to the U.S. 2000 census.

Panelist Ronald F. Ferguson, a lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government, said that the assumptions of academic success are mostly grounded in fact.

If an admissions process was race-blind and based solely on grades and test scores, Ferguson said at the panel, “The class would be almost entirely white and Asian.”

At the panel, he spoke about his surveys of secondary school children, which revealed that among classmates, there is practically no difference in the amount of time spent on homework by blacks, Latinos, and whites. However, Asian-American students devoted 30 minutes more to homework in regular classes and 45 minutes more in Advanced Placement and honors courses.

Asian Americans are often held up as a model for black and Latino students, Ferguson said.

However, panel member Vivian S.M. Louie, a lecturer at the Graduate School of Education, said at the panel that not every Asian ethnic group performed better compared to the other races.

“There is less attention paid to Asian-American students who aren’t achieving,” Louie said during the panel.

“The term ‘Asian American’ encompasses so many different ethnic groups that you can’t just blanket all the groups and assume everyone is equal,” said Sarah L. Paiji ’06, co-president of the AAA. “Southeast Asians generally tend to be more socioeconomically disadvantaged.”

When an audience member asked about the fairness of overlooking Asian Americans with high academic marks, Ferguson said that universities are often concerned about “fairness in a longer-term historical sense.”

“There is a much greater sense of debt to African Americans and Native Americans than to Latino Americans and Asian Americans,” he said.

Panelist Andrew Leong, an associate professor at the College of Public and Community Service at the University of Massachusetts Boston, said he feels the invisible caps on Asian Americans that existed while he was a law student in the early 1980s are gone.

Universities “increase the number of Asian Americans so the administration can say ‘we do have a diverse student body,’” he said at the panel.

Ferguson said political advocacy is important if ethnic groups want their interests represented and protected.

The Asian Americans who disagree with the current affirmative action policy “have to persuade everyone it is unfair,” he said at the panel.

The students in the audience had differing views on the issue.

“Personally I support affirmative action,” said Christopher R. Suen ’08, “but there is a disadvantage being Asian American compared to being Mexican American or African American.”

However, William A. Pastor ’05 disagreed.

“The idea of affirmative action for Asian Americans struck me as being pretty weird,” he said. “It should exist for groups that are very underrepresented.”

—Staff writer David Zhou can be reached at dzhou@fas.harvard.edu.