The enrollment controversy*
Worries that efforts in the U.S. to limit enrollment of Asian students in top universities may migrate to Canada
“My dad said if you don’t go into engineering, I won’t pay your tuition,” says Jason Yin, a Taiwanese software engineering student at Waterloo. “They are very traditional. They believe school is about work, studying, go home and studying some more.” Hard-studying Waterloo lends itself particularly to those goals. “We had a problem getting students out of their bedrooms,” says Nikki Best, a former residence don who sits on Waterloo’s student government, who explains they “didn’t want to get behind in their grades because of coming out to social events.”
That’s not to say Asian students form any sort of monolithic presence on Canadian campuses. “The mainland China group tends to stick together,” says Anthony Wong, 19, a Waterloo software engineering student. “We can talk to them,” says Jonathan Ing, also 19 and in Waterloo’s software engineering program, “but we don’t mingle.” Complains Waterloo student Simon Wang, a Chinese national who is frustrated by the segregation at Waterloo: “Why bother to come to Canada and pay five times as much to speak Chinese?” Meanwhile, Calgarian Joyce Chau identifies as “completely whitewashed,” a “banana”: “I look Asian but I’m white in all other respects.” Chau, a 19-year-old UBC business student, lived in residence her first year, where she met the majority of her (white) friends. “It’s harder to integrate into a group with Asians—you may or may not get introduced,” says Chau, who accepts the segregation as just “part of the university experience.”
Such balkanization is reflected in official student organizations: there is little Asian representation on student government, campus newspapers or college radio stations. At UBC, where the student body is roughly 40 per cent Asian, not one Asian sits on the student executive. Same goes for Waterloo. Asian students do, however, participate in organizations beyond the university mainstream, and long-standing cultural clubs function as a sort of ad hoc government. “After you graduate you won’t care about student government, but you’ll care about your club,” says Stan He, president of the Dragon Seed Connection, an on-campus Chinese club with over 300 members. (His business cards feature both dragon and robot motifs.) The Dragon Seed offers its members social functions, tutoring help, volunteer opportunities, poker and mah-jong tournaments, and special holiday parties—including at Halloween and Christmas. It even has an exclusive partnership with Solid Entertainment, a promotions and events-planning company that sponsors massive fundraising events and gives Dragon Seed exclusive selling rights on campus. He says that the dozen or so Asian clubs at UBC serve well over 4,000 students and cater to the whole spectrum of cultural identification—from “whitewashed” to “Honger,” a once-pejorative term now adopted by students with Hong Kong backgrounds. The Dragon Seed lies somewhere in between—“We’re the middle ground,” He says. “We have international students, but we all speak English.”
Or take the Chinese Varsity Club. With upwards of 500 members, it’s the largest student social club at UBC. The executives say they’ve captured a niche market: Chinese commuter students from the outlying Richmond, Burnaby and North Vancouver communities who hope to find a social network at the big school. “Students from high school already hear about us from older brothers and sisters,” says Peter Yang, the 21-year-old accounting student who is the club’s VP external. “You want to break out of the cycle of studying and being lonely,” says Brian Cheung, its president.
The impact of high admissions rates for Asian students has been an issue for years in the U.S., where high school guidance counsellors have come to accept that it’s just more difficult to sell their Asian applicants to elite colleges. In 2006, at its annual meeting, the National Association for College Admission Counseling explored the issue in an expert panel discussion called “Too Asian?” One panellist, Rachel Cederberg—an Asian-American then working as an admissions official at Colorado College—described fellow admissions officers complaining of “yet another Asian student who wants to major in math and science and who plays the violin.” A Boston Globe article early this year asked, “Do colleges redline Asian-Americans?” and concluded there’s likely an “Asian ceiling” at elite U.S. universities. After California passed Proposition 209 in 1996 forbidding affirmative action in the state’s public dealings, Asians soared to 40 per cent of the population at public universities, even though they make up just 13 per cent of state residents. And U.S. studies suggest Ivy League schools have taken the issue of Asian academic prowess so seriously that they’ve operated with secret quotas for decades to maintain their WASP credentials.
In his 2009 book No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, Princeton University sociologist Thomas Espenshade surveyed 10 elite U.S. universities and found that Asian applicants needed an extra 140 points on their SAT scores to be on equal footing with white applicants. Scandals over such unfair admissions practices have surfaced in recent years at Stanford, Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley and elsewhere. Hsu, the Oregon physicist, draws a comparison between Asian-Americans and Jewish students who began arriving at the Ivy League in the first half of the last century. “You can find well-documented internal discussions at places like Harvard and Yale and Princeton about why we shouldn’t admit these people, they’re working so hard and they’re so obviously ambitious, but we want to keep our WASP pedigree here.”
To quell the influx of Jewish students, Ivy League schools abandoned their meritocratic admissions processes in favour of one that focused on the details of an applicant’s private life—questions about race, religion, even about the maiden name of an applicant’s mother. Schools also began looking at such intangibles as character, personality and leadership potential. Canadian universities, apart from highly competitive professional programs and faculties, don’t quiz applicants the same way, and rely entirely on transcripts. Likely that is a good thing. And yet, that meritocratic process results, especially in Canada’s elite university programs, in a concentration of Asian students.
Maybe the one that wrote this article is one of those failures that went to university for sex and beer. Failed out of school and couldn’t help but blame those who work hard.
Am I not reading it right or this artical is just full of confusion? White students go to other universities but U of T is because of there are way too many Asian students there. And yet you tell another story about Asian students tend to hangout with their own ethic group and not wanting to participate in other activities.
Unless you’re telling me that White kids are eager to make friends with Asian kids and they can’t do so because they only hangout with other Asian kids so they chose other universities but U of T otherwise I don’t understand you.
People just don’t like to see Asians everywhere, period. I bet you won’t find a article named “Too White?” about majority kids in a university are white and people don’t want to go there just because of it.
I definitely believe this article is making a mountain out of a molehill. If we have skilled academics immigrating to from Asia to Canada that is a GOOD thing. Who can complain about getting more skilled workers? Especially with the aging baby-boomers increasingly relying on social services.
This article I think is kinda missing the larger issue here. The larger issue is that we have too many people going to universities in Canada. There are many people that go to university who, quite frankly, do not belong in that environment and end up dropping out and losing a fortune in tuition fees. This is because in the last few decades universities have shifted from becoming the standard of education for theoretical, abstract and clinical professions to the standard for ALL professions. Right now virtually all mid to high income jobs want applicants to have a Bachelor degree at least. The problem is that universities are theoretical institutions and their primary purpose IS NOT teaching you applied that directly translates into a job. They are not meant to prepare you for working life, unless you plan on working in academics or going on to graduate programs like med school or law school that lead to a single well defined career (even then you will have to spend several years after school working as a resident at a hospital or a law clerk.) Look back in time 30 or 40 years and you can see that this was not the case. I am not saying that back then a university education was not useful when applying for certain jobs, but as many of the older people reading this will know, a university degree was not the be all and end all for all jobs that were not in the skilled trades the way they are now, and a college diploma went a lot further and in some cases was even preferred to a degree. (by the way people in the skilled trades can make huge amounts of money, so if you are reading this and in high school don’t over look them, I know a plumber who drives an Audi.) The more applied areas of the workforce are suffering as a result of this, because they are getting university students who have all sorts of theoretical knowledge which is useless in their profession, but none of the necessary practical knowledge. Case in point my mother just had to fire an employee in the IT sales sector who was fresh from getting his Phd, because he had no idea what he was doing, and had no prcatical knowledge of how to sell his product to other companies.
As too the Asian enrollment trend, I do not know why everyone is making such a big deal about it. I am a white, male who is in 2nd year life sciences at uoft I personally find that uoft (at least the downtown campus) is one of the most culturally and racially diverse schools I have ever seen, and I personally have seen absolutely no racial tension, I have white friend, black friends asian friends, it really makes no difference. I am not saying that there is or is not a disproportionate amount of asian students, but there are plenty of other university enrollment trends out there that no one seems to be panicking about (eg. 66% of university students are female) and I am not saying anyone should be panicking about them (I personally like the high proportion of women on campus-for obvious reasons.) but I do find it odd that this one has created such a stir.
Also you do not have to spend every waking hour studying to get into a top tier university like uoft. Many of their average acceptance grades range from a mid to high seventy to a low eighty and frankly if the work required to get that kind of grade is too stressful on your social life, perhaps university is not right for you. Remember top tier universities are referred to as top tier for a reason, and it is not because they admit people who just want to party.
By the way if you have any more detailed info on the above issues, particularly the changing role of universities please post it, because all the information I have posted is from my own experiences and I know of little hard data on the issue.
I have had the experience of observing an interesting phenomenon during my undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Engineering. What I noticed is that, while the Asians and Indians remained in the program after the “difficult” courses, the Caucasians had to switch to a much easier curriculum (Business, etc..). And thus …. I am calling this interesting phenomenon “white-out”!!
Example:
Alexandra: “Hey Rachel, how did you do in the engineering course?”
Rachel: “Oh I dropped out. Don’t you know, it’s a “white-out” class!
** And if you think generalizing a group to the drop-outs is racist, this is no different than generalizing all asians as being competent students.
University entrance is purely based on academic merit, and perhaps this can be tweaked. For the hard sciences (especially math, computers, engineering, physics, and chemistry)you do want to foster academic excellence to produce the next unidimensional brainiac like Bill Gates or Stephen Hawking. Who cares that these guys didn’t party all the time when they were in undergrad; they produced good work subsequently and broke new ground.
On the other hand, we have to produce the more generalized productive university grad. To me, this is the person who finished university, made friends, partied, played intramural sports, joined clubs or got involved in a non-academic aspect. To do this, perhaps a series of short 200 word responses to questions will give the university the ability to parse through their applicants. The obvious downside to this is the mountain of work it’ll create.
Medical schools have moved away from the heavily academic weighting of their entrance requirements, and have shifted to a more global requirement. What good is a technically smart physician who can’t communicate and connect with patients?
Doing well only academically doesn’t really help a graduate in the real world of interpersonal interaction, problem solving, etc.
So perhaps the crux of the problem is: What kind of graduate do universities want? A bunch of lab rats with no social skills? Or a more well rounded global citizen with a broad perspective of the social landscape of work life and everyday life?
Nice, Macleans, you’ve attempted to undo the past by changing the article’s title not once but twice. Stalin would have been proud.