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.
