For Asian Students, the Hard Part Is Getting In

By most measures, Harrison Kim is a successful high school student. Not only does he have stellar grades, the 18-year-old senior from Sammamish, WA, also plays guitar in a high school rock band and regularly performs volunteer work. Now, he faces one of the most daunting rites of passage into young adulthood: getting into a college of his dreams.

Kim's application contains several characteristics that will catch the eye of admissions officers: 3.81 GPA, six AP classes, a score of 2270 out of 2400 on the SAT, recent recipient of an Eagle Scout badge, the highest Boy Scout honor. (To earn the badge, he played a central role in revitalizing a local stormwater retention pond. Kim, along with a team of volunteers he assembled, spent two sweaty summer weeks pulling shrubs and trees that had rendered the pond completely useless.)

But one attribute is out of his control. Kim is Korean American. Coupled with the fact that he wants to matriculate to such prestigious universities as Columbia, Harvard, Yale and Stanford, Kim fits the profile of a student who could very well be disadvantaged by the admissions process.

The existence of obstacles to Asian Americans gaining admission to elite universities stems from the perception that, as a group, they have performed relatively well in higher education. From 1976 to 2007, the percentage of Asian American college students increased from 1.8 to 6.7 percent, according to the US Department of Education. Most Ivy League schools now have undergraduate Asian-American student populations between 15 and 20 percent; Caltech and the University of California, Berkeley, regularly top 40 percent. Considering that Asian Americans make up only 4.5 percent of the US population, many elite universities see an overrepresented pool of Asian-American applicants when they pick their freshman class.

More @ New American Media