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发帖数: 1312 | 1 一个白人有娃同事发来给我看，沮丧无语。谨此献给各位聪明过头的华人民主党们，末
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Asians: Too Smart for Their Own Good?
AT the end of this month, high school seniors will submit their college
applications and begin waiting to hear where they will spend the next four
years of their lives. More than they might realize, the outcome will depend
on race. If you are Asian, your chances of getting into the most selective
colleges and universities will almost certainly be lower than if you are
white.
Asian-Americans constitute 5.6 percent of the nation’s population but 12 to
18 percent of the student body at Ivy League schools. But if judged on
their merits — grades, test scores, academic honors and extracurricular
activities — Asian-Americans are underrepresented at these schools.
Consider that Asians make up anywhere from 40 to 70 percent of the student
population at top public high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science in
New York City, Lowell in San Francisco and Thomas Jefferson in Alexandria,
Va., where admissions are largely based on exams and grades.
In a 2009 study of more than 9,000 students who applied to selective
universities, the sociologists Thomas J. Espenshade and Alexandria Walton
Radford found that white students were three times more likely to be
admitted than Asians with the same academic record.
Sound familiar? In the 1920s, as high-achieving Jews began to compete with
WASP prep schoolers, Ivy League schools started asking about family
background and sought vague qualities like “character,” “vigor,” “
manliness” and “leadership” to cap Jewish enrollment. These unofficial
Jewish quotas weren’t lifted until the early 1960s, as the sociologist
Jerome Karabel found in his 2005 history of admissions practices at Harvard,
Yale and Princeton.
In the 1920s, people asked: will Harvard still be Harvard with so many Jews?
Today we ask: will Harvard still be Harvard with so many Asians? Yale’s
student population is 58 percent white and 18 percent Asian. Would it be
such a calamity if those numbers were reversed?
As the journalist Daniel Golden revealed in his 2006 book “The Price of
Admission,” far more attention has been devoted to race-conscious
affirmative action at public universities (which the Supreme Court has
scaled back and might soon eliminate altogether) than to the special
preferences elite universities afford to the children of (overwhelmingly
white) donors and alumni.
For middle-class and affluent whites, overachieving Asian-Americans pose
thorny questions about privilege and power, merit and opportunity. Some
white parents have reportedly shied away from selective public schools that
have become “too Asian,” fearing that their children will be outmatched.
Many whites who can afford it flock to private schools that promote “
progressive” educational philosophies, don’t “teach to the test” and
offer programs in art and music (but not “Asian instruments,” like piano
and violin). At some of these top-tier private schools, too, Asian kids find
it hard to get in.
At highly selective colleges, the quotas are implicit, but very real. So are
the psychological consequences. At Northwestern, Asian-American students
tell me that they feel ashamed of their identity — that they feel viewed as
a faceless bunch of geeks and virtuosos. When they succeed, their peers
chalk it up to “being Asian.” They are too smart and hard-working for
their own good.
Since the 1965 overhaul of immigration law, the United States has lured
millions of highly educated, ambitious immigrants from places like Taiwan,
South Korea and India. We welcomed these immigrants precisely because they
outperformed and overachieved. Yet now we are stigmatizing their children
for inheriting their parents’ work ethic and faith in a good education. How
self-defeating.
To be clear, I do not seek to perpetuate the “model minority” myth —
Asian-Americans are a diverse group, including undocumented restaurant
workers and resettled refugees as well as the more familiar doctors and
engineers. Nor do I endorse the law professor Amy Chua’s pernicious “Tiger
Mother” stereotype, which has set back Asian kids by attributing their
successes to overzealous (and even pathological) parenting rather than
individual effort.
Some educators, parents and students worry that if admissions are based
purely on academic merit, selective universities will be dominated by whites
and Asians and admit few blacks and Latinos, as a result of socioeconomic
factors and an enduring test-score gap. We still need affirmative action for
underrepresented groups, including blacks, Latinos, American Indians and
Southeast Asian Americans and low-income students of all backgrounds.
But for white and Asian middle- and upper-income kids, the playing field
should be equal. It is noteworthy that many high-achieving kids at selective
public magnet schools are children of working-class immigrants, not well-
educated professionals. Surnames like Kim, Singh and Wong should not trigger
special scrutiny.
We want to fill our top universities with students of exceptional and wide-
ranging talent, not just stellar test takers. But what worries me is the
application of criteria like “individuality” and “uniqueness,”
subjectively and unfairly, to the detriment of Asians, as happened to Jewish
applicants in the past. I suspect that in too many college admissions
offices, a white Intel Science Talent Search finalist who is a valedictorian
and the concertmaster of her high school orchestra would stand out as
exceptional, while an Asian-American with the same résumé (and
socioeconomic background) would not.
The way we treat these children will influence the America we become. If our
most renowned schools set implicit quotas for high-achieving Asian-
Americans, we are sending a message to all students that hard work and good
grades may be a fool’s errand.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/20/opinion/asians-too-smart-for- | y******i
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