Michael Chang studied hard for the SAT. He went through 30 weeks of tutoring and took dozens of practice tests. It paid off: Mr. Chang, a senior at Thomas S. Wootton High School here, got a 1430. But he had read that Asian-American applicants had to score 140 points more than their white peers to have the same chance of getting into an elite college. That hard-earned 1430 would look no better than a white student’s 1290.
The idea that Asian-American applicants are held to a higher standard in college admissions has received a wave of attention lately. The U.S. Department of Education is now investigating whether Princeton University discriminates against Asian-American applicants. A recent book, No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life, reported the discrepancy that preoccupied Mr. Chang: Asian and Asian-American applicants have a lower chance than their similarly qualified white peers of getting into selective private colleges, a “penalty” equivalent to 140 points on the 1600-point SAT, the authors said. The Associated Press has published accounts of Asian-American students who decided not to indicate their race on applications.
For prospective students, all of this can add uncertainty and stress to the college-admissions process. They may imagine getting compared with—or going up against—other high-performing Asian students rather than being evaluated in a college’s whole pool. For some, that might exacerbate longstanding feelings of outsized expectations.
Here at Wootton, students tend to see higher standards as a fact of life—unfair but outside their control. Even when counselors and admissions representatives tell a different story, students don’t necessarily believe them.
Explanations of holistic admissions aside, the idea that Asian-American applicants are treated differently by selective colleges—and perhaps actively discriminated against—persists. Decades ago the Education Department looked into claims that Harvard was discriminating against Asian-American applicants, finding that while practices like favoring athletes and the children of alumni might work against them, their lower acceptance rate was not caused by bias or quotas. Still, applicants today aren’t sure.
‘A High Bar’
The concept of quotas, or at least different treatment, is on the radar of Mr. Chang and his peers at Wootton. Theirs is a competitive school, in a wealthy suburb of Washington. Nearly everyone graduates, and 98 percent of those who do go on to college or the military. Wootton is ranked as one of America’s best public high schools by Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report.
A third of its 2,313 students are Asian. Among a dozen seniors who agreed to speak with a reporter about college admissions, the consensus was that they must really stand out to get into selective institutions. They simply feel that, as with parents and peers, more is expected of them.
“Definitely Asians are being held to a higher standard by admissions offices,” says Serena Zheng, a senior at Wootton. Colleges don’t say that, she says, but in conversations with her parents and high-school counselor, the message is there. They tell her: “You’re a girl, and you’re from Maryland, and you’re Asian.” In other words, in gender, geography, and race, she looks like many other high-achieving students.
Ms. Zheng doesn’t expect her demographic profile to completely define how colleges see her, but she thinks it will come into play. “I know,” she says, “what I am up against.”
Responding to that can be a challenge for students. It’s hard for anybody to get into an Ivy League college, says Jennifer Wang, another senior here. But it might be even harder for Asian-American students.
“Because Asians are set at such a high bar, and we all have this criteria that we have to meet,” Ms. Wang says, “once we do meet this criteria, then how are we supposed to differentiate even further?”
Stereotypes are also at play, says her classmate Emily Miao. “I feel like if you’re an Asian,” she says, colleges “kind of want to see more activities. They want you to prove that you’re not just studying all the time, and you’re not just doing homework all the time, and they want to see that you do have a life.”
While Wootton’s Asian-American students have discussed the perceived double standard with family and friends, few of them have brought it up with their counselors, and nobody did with any of the nearly 200 college representatives who visited their school this fall.
And despite concerns, the idea of a higher standard based on race does not seem to define students’ college search. It is just another mysterious element of an opaque and stressful process.
Among students who think admissions is unfair to them, several say they understand why. Selective institutions seek diversity—something many Asian-American seniors say was very important to them as they considered where to apply. Shaping a diverse class, some say, means not taking every well-qualified Asian American.
“I don’t blame the colleges. I can see it from their point of view,” says Lakshmi Subramanian, a senior at Wootton. “They want to have a diverse college.”
While a couple of students say they hesitated to indicate their race on applications, none decided not to. Anyway, Mr. Chang jokes, his last name would give him away.
More Than a Test Score
The staff shepherding students through the admissions process here see things rather differently. In fact, Lynda Hitchcock, Wootton’s college career information counselor, was surprised to hear students’ sense that they are held to a higher standard. “It’s interesting that they believe that,” she says. “I don’t.”
Colleges evaluate applicants not among other Asians, Ms. Hitchcock says, but in the context of their high schools.
Concerns about fairness are a matter of perspective, says Jihong Wang, the mother of a junior at Wootton. Ms. Wang, a scientist, went to college in China and graduate school in the United States. Now she is visiting colleges with her son, and sharing information on admissions with a network for Asian parents she recently started at Wootton.
Asian parents are often familiar with a different system, says Ms. Wang. In China, for instance, students are evaluated by colleges based on their performance on a single test. As a result, immigrant parents may define fairness, she says, as: “People with higher scores go to a better university.” Parents can overlook that American colleges, she says, “are looking for all these other things.”
The process is about a good fit, “like a date,” Ms. Wang says. Leadership experience is important, she has learned. That can be harder for students from Asian backgrounds to gain, she says, as their cultures tend to frown on standing out, and don’t have the same history of activities that provide other American kids with leadership opportunities.
In evaluating applicants, admissions officers consider more information and variables than the research that uncovered the SAT discrepancy could take into account. That means it’s possible that something besides race could explain the gap, says Thomas J. Espenshade, one of the authors of No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal and a professor of sociology at Princeton. The 140-point figure was calculated with data from five unnamed private colleges in a study controlling for academic variables like GPA and test scores, as well as whether students were athletes or the children of alumni. But it couldn’t control for everything, Mr. Espenshade says.
Because highly selective colleges can’t take every qualified applicant, students are skeptical of the process, says Lee H. Melvin, associate vice provost for enrollment at Cornell University. “Every question on the application, they think that’s the one that will keep them from getting in.”
Holistic admissions is hard to understand from the outside, says Gregory W. Roberts, dean of admission at the University of Virginia. And students are bound to wonder if and how different attributes, racial or not, help or hurt them. Applicants in Northern Virginia, for example, think they have a geographic disadvantage getting into UVa, he says—as do students from the southern part of the state.
It’s unusual for Asian-American applicants to raise concerns about different treatment with admissions officers, Mr. Roberts says. But he knows concerns are out there—he reads them online. Such perspectives, he says, are one more example of the “heightened level of stress and anxiety facing students applying to college.”
None of the three selective colleges that Mr. Roberts has worked for hold Asian-American students to a higher standard, he says. When the question comes up, he tries to start a broader conversation about how the admissions process works.
In the end, he says, he’d counsel prospective students to focus on the parts of their application they can control, not the ones they can’t. At a competitive high school, that might require tuning out some of the hallway chatter.
