For Asians, Affirmative Action Cuts Both Ways

There is considerable debate over whether Americans of Asian or Pacific Island descent stand to gain, or lose, if the U.S. Supreme Court rejects or significantly curtails race-conscious college admissions.

Few selective undergraduate colleges give Asian students -- or Pacific Islanders, who tend to be lumped in with them, statistically and otherwise -- an edge in admissions. Colleges’ race-conscious admissions policies tend to hurt the chances of Asian students by holding them to the same standards as white students while giving an edge to other minority groups.

At professional schools, the picture is more mixed. A 1989 survey by the political scientists Susan Welch of Pennsylvania State University at University Park and John Gruhl of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln found that about one in six medical schools and four of five law schools granted some sort of preference to Asian applicants. But another analysis of admissions data by the Center for Equal Opportunity, a group that opposes race-conscious admissions policies, has concluded that affirmative action generally hurts Asians’ chances of gaining entry to professional schools.

Of the two admissions policies from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor

being challenged before the Supreme Court, the one at the university’s undergraduate College of Literature, Science, and the Arts denies Asian applicants the significant boost it gives to members of some other minority groups.

The law school’s admissions policy, which gives applicants much more individual consideration, explicitly cites “the experience of having been a Vietnamese boat person” as the sort of characteristic that can give an applicant an edge for the sake of campus diversity. Nevertheless, black, Hispanic, and American Indian applicants are the only ones to whom the law school systematically gives extra consideration based on ethnicity or race. When the law school’s administrators talk about the need to maintain a “critical mass” of minority students, they do not have Asians in mind.

It’s not like Asian-American students are underrepresented at Michigan. In recent years, they have accounted for well over 10 percent of the university’s undergraduate enrollment, compared with less than 2 percent of the population of the state. But Asian students nonetheless stand less chance of getting into the university than members of other minority groups with comparable grades and test scores. For the most part, they are treated like they are white.

Interests Outside Education

Opponents of affirmative action say no other group stands to gain more from the elimination of race-conscious policies. Among the evidence they cite: In 1997, the year after a federal appeals court precluded the University of Texas at Austin from using race-conscious admissions, the university accepted 81 percent of its Asian applicants, up from 68 percent the year before. Supporters of affirmative action challenge such figures, and contend that Asian enrollments have risen little at selective public colleges in other states, such as California, which no longer considers race and ethnicity in admissions.

Keeping such statistics in mind, it is easy to see why Americans of Asian descent are ambivalent about affirmative action in college admissions. In a recent national poll conducted by The Chronicle, 45 percent of Asian-American respondents agreed with the assertion that colleges should admit students from racial minority groups even if they have lower grade-point averages and standardized-test scores than other students. Those who check “Asian” on a survey form or college application may come from a wide variety of ethnic, political, and economic backgrounds, with differing views and interests. The experiences of a recent Hmong refugee from Southeast Asia may different significantly from those of a Japanese-American whose family has been here since the mid-1800s.

A San Francisco-based organization, the Asian American Legal Foundation, has submitted a supporting brief to the Supreme Court in support of the white plaintiffs challenging Michigan’s policies. The group, which in the 1990s waged a successful legal fight against a San Francisco Unified School District policy limiting Chinese enrollment in certain schools to promote desegregation, argues in its brief that “diversity-based admissions schemes are almost always used to exclude Asian-Americans from educational institutions.”

Many other advocacy groups representing Asian-Americans remain strong supporters of affirmative action. Twenty-eight signed on to a brief that the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium submitted in support of Michigan. Their ranks included the Japanese American Citizens League, the National Federation of Filipino American Associations, the Organization of Chinese Americans, and other organizations representing people from Cambodia, Korea, Laos, and Vietnam.

“We felt it was important to make a statement in support of affirmative action because Asian-Pacific Americans are too often used as a pawn in the affirmative-action debate,” Stewart Kwoh, the executive director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, said in announcing that the brief had been filed.

Still Facing Discrimination

The brief cites the diverse educational needs of the populations represented by its signers as a key reason for supporting affirmative action. Taking umbrage with the stereotype of Asians as an academically overachieving “model minority,” it argues that Americans from Asia and the Pacific Islands still face serious discrimination, and should be the beneficiaries of affirmative action in some cases.

Karen N. Narasaki, the president and executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, says that Asian-Americans clearly benefit from affirmative action in employment and contracting, and that members of her group fear that the Supreme Court ruling against Michigan will bring affirmative action in these other arenas to an end.

“The stake in the Michigan cases is actually beyond education,” she says. “Asian-Americans feel that there is a glass ceiling that is holding them back.”

http://chronicle.com Section: Government & Politics Volume 49, Issue 39, Page A24