EDUCATION: NYT on Asians at Berkeley

Today's New York Times Education Life supplement has a cover story on Asian Americans in big colleges and the debate over affirmative action: "The Asian Campus." The tag line on the print cover says: "At 41 percent Asian, Berkeley could be the new face of merit-based admissions. The problem for everybody else: Lots less room at elite colleges."

That 41 percent compares to 24 at Stanford; 18 at Harvard; 13 at Princeton; 27 at MIT; 13 at Columbia and 22 at Rutgers. The overall percentage of Asians in this country is just 5 percent.

Below you will find excerpts from the story and links to some of the charts and graphics from it.

Meanwhile, take a look at this photo montage of Berkeley students. It's what ran with the online story, a cropped version of a bigger montage on the supplement's cover. Not a single South Asian in this version, though there's a small photo of a South Asian-looking young woman on the cover. The text of the story is filled with references to East Asia, the Pacific and East Asian immigrants. None of the examples and interviews are of South Asian students or parents. It strikes me as classic American blindness to the diversity within diversity stories and the presumption that Asia means East Asia. I am not saying that every mention of Asians needs to be broken down into subgroups. I just think this race story comes up short for not being truly representative.

The only two desi mentions themselves are problematic:

A little more than half of Asian freshmen at Berkeley are Chinese, the largest group, followed by Koreans, East-Indian/Pakistani, Filipino and Japanese.

[ Note the use of "East Indian," a term the SAJA Stylebook warns not to use.]

Dr. Birgeneau [Berkeley's Chancellor] agrees on at least one point: “I think we’re now at the point where the category of Asian is not very useful. Koreans are different from people from Sri Lanka and they’re different than Japanese. And many Chinese-Americans are a lot like Caucasians in some of their values and areas of interest.”

[ So if a (the?) major source in the story points out that Asians are diverse, why doesn't the reporter pay attention? ]

Anyone know the percentage of Berkeley students who are South Asian? Please post in the comments section below, along with other reactions to the story - which I found informative and interesting; my objection is to how it went about illustrating the story and picking sources. I complain regularly about South Asians being lost in Asian stories; see this essay I wrote in 1998, "South Asians: The Forgotten Minority," I don't think much has changed since then. Would love to hear your thoughts.

More from this NYT story below.

Some facts from the story by Timothy Egan, a Times West Coast reporter:

But 10 years after California passed Proposition 209, voting to eliminate racial preferences in the public sector, university administrators find such balance harder to attain. At the same time, affirmative action is being challenged on a number of new fronts, in court and at state ballot boxes. And elite colleges have recently come under attack for practicing it — specifically, for bypassing highly credentialed Asian applicants in favor of students of color with less stellar test scores and grades.

In California, the rise of the Asian campus, of the strict meritocracy, has come at the expense of historically underrepresented blacks and Hispanics. This year, in a class of 4809, there are only 100 black freshmen at the University of California at Los Angeles — the lowest number in 33 years. At Berkeley, 3.6 percent of freshmen are black, barely half the statewide proportion. (In 1997, just before the full force of Proposition 209 went into effect, the proportion of black freshmen matched the state population, 7 percent.) The percentage of Hispanic freshmen at Berkeley (11 percent) is not even a third of the state proportion (35 percent). White freshmen (29 percent) are also below the state average (44 percent).

<snip>

 

ACROSS the United States, at elite private and public universities, Asian enrollment is near an all-time high. Asian-Americans make up less than 5 percent of the population but typically make up 10 to 30 percent of students at the nation’s best colleges:in 2005, the last year with across-the-board numbers, Asians made up 24 percent of the undergraduate population at Carnegie Mellon and at Stanford, 27 percent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 14 percent at Yale and 13 percent at Princeton.

 

And according to advocates of race-neutral admissions policies, those numbers should be even higher.

 

Asians have become the “new Jews,” in the phrase of Daniel Golden, whose recent book, “The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates,” is a polemic against university admissions policies. Mr. Golden, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, is referring to evidence that, in the first half of the 20th century, Ivy League schools limited the number of Jewish students despite their outstanding academic records to maintain the primacy of upper-class Protestants. Today, he writes, “Asian-Americans are the odd group out, lacking racial preferences enjoyed by other minorities and the advantages of wealth and lineage mostly accrued by upper-class whites. Asians are typecast in college admissions offices as quasi-robots programmed by their parents to ace math and science.”

Read the entire piece. See a long, horizontal graphic listing the percentage of Asians at some other major colleges.

Comments

[Manish]

Good observations. In '94 the wild guess was 800 desis (incl. grad students) out of 30K total students, and the number kept rising every year.

[Jaya Kamlani]

Sree, in the article you've mentioned
QUOTE: "None of the examples and interviews are of South Asian students or parents. It strikes me as classic American blindness to the diversity within diversity stories and the presumption that Asia means East Asia."
UNQUOTE

Sree, in real life the mountain does not come to Muhammad. Muhammad has to seek the mountain and then climb it and then he will be recognized. No doubt many Indians in America have climbed some hills. But you have to make sure that there are Americans cheering you too to be recognized. We as a community have to mingle more in the mainstream. Some of us tend to be clanish and feel secure among our own Indians. We have to get out of our comfort zone and get more involved in our communities where we live, where we work. We need to participate more as members of American organizations. I am sure quite a few Indians are doing it. But more of us need to do so as we tend to be shy and are afraid of being rejected. We have to overcome those tendencies, even if our heart is thumping as we put ourselves out there. After a few stumbles we will overcome these fears.

Case in point. Last night I went to an all-American private party. I was the only Indian/Asian there. I met a retired colonel, also someone else from the army, and the person of honor was a General and his wife. The General had just seen 20,000 troops off for Iraq. A friend of mine, a retired Air Force officer, had invited me to her house party. She is still an adviser to the army, navy and air force. and was in the air force during the Vietnam War. It was a very interesting party indeed. They had even put on a play of "General Patton", written by none other than my retired air force officer friend.

So it helps to mingle with Americans in the mainstream to be recognized by them. Since I have been in America for almost four decades it is almost second nature to me. But our Indians must try harder even though it feels a bit uncomfortable at first.

-- Jaya Kamlani

[Sonia]

It looks as though "East Indians/Pakistanis" made up 3.8 percent of Berkeley's undergrads this past spring (the most recent semester for which data was available).

see data: https://osr2.berkeley.edu/Public/STUDENT.DATA/PUBLICATIONS/
UG/ugsp06.html#table%202 (copy/paste URL and remove spaces)

[Jaya Kamlani]

Sree, you stated in your article:
QUOTE: "I complain regularly about South Asians being lost in Asian stories; see this essay I wrote in 1998, "South Asians: The Forgotten Minority," I don't think much has changed since then. Would love to hear your thoughts." UNQUOTE

Above and beyond what I mentioned in my previous comment on this subject, I believe why we South Asians are lost in Asian stories is because most of us are not well rounded. You hear Indians talk of Bollywood movies and their favorite stars and the latest techno gadgets... shopping and more shopping. But how often do you hear them discuss sports, or the current events of the world, or talk with passion about changing the world? Instead, we talk about weekend parties, our next trip to India and what our property is worth. I could be wrong, but this is what I have observed. Perhaps that's why we don't get much attention in the media.

We have to show we care for our neighbors and for our community, that we are not here temporarily just to make dollars for a few years. Some Americans might even resent the fact that their jobs were outsourced to India and not look upon us kindly for that reason. Also, media talks often of a booming economy in India, but not much about the Indians who have contributed to American society. We should bring more awareness to our contributions, so we are not the forgotten South Asians in America. And for that we need to mingle more with other than just Indians. If they don't know us, how can they sing our praises?

Americans are great marketers. And we Indians tend to go for science and math, but we forget to market ourselves. Perhaps we need to revamp our PR technique.

-- Jaya Kamlani

[Jaya Kamlani]

Sree, this is my third comment. As you can see, I have been dwelling on this subject quite a bit.

Chinese have been living in California since the early twentieth century. If you have been to Chinatown in California, you will find it comprises of many street blocks. It is much bigger than New York’s Chinatown and also very clean.

Indians migrated to California much later, from the 1970s, although there were many students on the U.C. Berkeley campus in the fifties and sixties. When I lived and worked in Silicon Valley, California in the 80s and 90s there were several Taiwanese start-up companies and many young Chinese/Taiwanese/Filipinos working in the technology field. They seem to mingle with the Americans with much more ease than the Indians. Their women were also quite assertive at work. So I am not surprised that they dominated the New York Times magazine cover page on education.

Also with India’s college education system gaining worldwide recognition, perhaps many Indian parents are enrolling their children at colleges in India, which is a lot cheaper than sending them to U.C. Berkeley or any other American university. Foreign education may not as alluring for the Indians as it was in the past. Perhaps that is why their enrollment numbers at U.C. Berkeley are not as high as compared to other Asian students these days.

-- Jaya Kamlani