Billy Huang

Opinion | College admissions scandal highlights the vulnerability of unfairly treated Asian-Americans

College admissions scandal raises ire over wealth and privilege, but the unfair treatment of Asian-Americans seeking entry is now part of the conversation

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Students on campus at Harvard University. Photo: Xinhua

Billy Huang

Published: 7:15pm, 23 Mar 2019Updated: 10:52am, 3 May 2019

Federal prosecutors in the United States on March 12 charged 50 people – including Hollywood celebrities and business big names – over an admissions scandal to get their children into prestigious schools. The breadth and audacity of the scandal has aroused public ire about the fairness of college admissions. However, the discourse has exacerbated the vulnerability of Asian-Americans, the most unfairly treated ethnic group so far in college admission.

The Asian-American Coalition for Education, a community organisation dedicated to equal rights of education, denounced the scam in a statement on March 14, saying “the college admissions process is deformed in such a way that fair consideration gave way to dishonesty”.

“Many Asian-American children, suffering from both economic and racial disadvantages, could hardly secure any chances matching their credentials in this rigged system of college admissions and fall victims to scandalous practices that only helped the rich and powerful to cheat the system.”

Now, the fight for Asian-Americans over education equality has taken on a new dimension lately. Andrew Yang, the only Asian presidential candidate for the 2020 presidential election, openly supports affirmative action in college admissions, in which race is still used as a factor against Asian applicants.

In September 2018, he tweeted that: “We have to broaden our notion of merit – if we were to go strictly on test scores Asians might be 42-73% of elite students as they are at Berkeley and Stuyvesant. That doesn’t serve the school, society, or even Asians optimally. Test scores and grades aren’t character or worth.”

In another tweet, Yang claimed that the Student for Fair Admissions’ lawsuit against Harvard for discrimination against Asian-American applicants was “misplaced”.

Misplaced? The court filing of Student for Fair Admissions suggested otherwise. Expert witness and professor Peter Arcidiacono of Duke University showed a model that an Asian-American applicant with a 25 per cent chance of admission would see his odds rising to 35 per cent if he were white, 75 per cent if he were Hispanic, and 95 per cent if he were African American.