Fascinasians

National Asian and Pacific Islander American Movement:

Who: Everyone and Anyone!

What: In the first two weeks of April, join your campus in creating a banner asking the military to change their attitude towards discrimination and hazing amongst their members, pushing for these issues to be acknowledged, recognized and taken seriously in court trials. Have your members of your campus sign it with your own creative ways to express your beliefs, culture and ideas!

More details will come, but for now plan on wearing RED on APRIL 11. Take a picture of your campus representation wearing red and send it here.

benjaminfang:

Fascinasians: How Ivy Leagues Avoid Diversity

fascinasians:

Back in March, as colleges began to herald their newly admitted classes for PR purposes, the Ivy League schools got to patting themselves on the back.

The Harvard Gazette bragged that Harvard’s newest batch of accepted students included record numbers of blacks and Latinos. Brown said its…

Finally being on a college campus and seeing “college diversity” for the first time, I realized how disappointed I felt about this. I always expected college to be a place where diversity and acceptance were prevalent, but I haven’t seen much of that yet. Instead, what I see is judgement, stereotyping, and condescension.

But maybe that’s my fault. I thought that college was a place where the old high school drama and semantics would be replaced by an honest eagerness to learn about other cultures, search for identity, and challenge preconceived notions about how the world works. I was and probably am still naive, and somehow dreamed up a hyper-romanticized idea about college. Now that the reality of it isn’t matching up with my vision, I am becoming increasingly uneasy about my next four years here.

Asians and Asian Americans make up the largest minority group here in my school, less than 10% of the entire student body. The school is largely white demographically, but it has the right intentions when it comes to diversity, or at least that’s what I think.

The public communications program I am a part of in my school is 35% male, and 21% people of color. 21%. In most of my classes, I see mostly white females occupying the seats in the classroom or lecture hall. Sometimes I think that I benefited from affirmative action because of the lack of people like me here in the program. And I think 21% is a rather pathetic number when talking about diversity in a college school. This needs to change.

(Source: GOOD)

How Ivy Leagues Avoid Diversity

Back in March, as colleges began to herald their newly admitted classes for PR purposes, the Ivy League schools got to patting themselves on the back.

The Harvard Gazette bragged that Harvard’s newest batch of accepted students included record numbers of blacks and Latinos. Brown said its admitted class was “the most racially … diverse“ in the school’s centuries-long history.  Dartmouth shared actual percentages, declaring that a full 44 percent of its newest class was composed of students of color. Coincidentally, that was the same percentage of minorities in Penn’s freshman class.

Numbers like these might lead someone to believe that diversity is no longer an issue at America’s most elite colleges. Like everyone else, students of color have long strived to make it to the Ivy League, where the education and connections can set a person up for life. Now, evidently, huge numbers of minorities are getting their chance. When nearly half of an Ivy League school’s accepted class is made up of people of color—America as a whole is only 47 percent non-white (PDF)—aren’t we nearing perfect equality? If only.

It turns out the Ivy League’s racial diversity stats are only half the story. People in search of egalitarianism at places like Harvard and Columbia shouldn’t just be asking what color students are, but where they’re from, too.

Call it the Ivy League’s dirty little secret: While America’s most elite colleges do in fact make it a point to promote ethnic diversity on their campuses, a lot of them do so by admitting hugely disproportionate numbers of wealthy immigrants and their children rather than black students with deep roots—and troubled histories—in the United States.

The problem, of course, isn’t that black immigrants are going to Ivy League schools in large numbers; educational success should be applauded no matter where the student is from. But the large numbers of African immigrants on American college campuses, coupled with the remarkably small numbers of native blacks on those same campuses, calls into question the effectiveness of America’s affirmative action programs. While affirmative action started as a system to right the wrongs of slavery and institutional anti-black racism, helping wealthy immigrants who weren’t here for those struggles doesn’t serve any of the program’s original intentions.

“Very few black students [at Harvard] were able to be categorized under the term ‘just black,’” says Joy Alison Cooper. Cooper graduated from Harvard in 2006 and is now a Fogarty Scholar doing clinical research in Nairobi, Kenya. “There was an overrepresentation of Africans,” she says, “and specifically Nigerians. Nigerians were so numerous that in my senior year, my best friend helped start the Nigerian Students Association.”

The statistics are striking: Though African immigrants, many of them from Nigeria and Ghana, make up less than 1 percent of America’s total population, first- and second-generation black immigrants comprise 41 percent of all black students at Ivy League schools, according to 2007 research from teams at Princeton and Penn. Another study, this one published in Sociology of Education in 2009, found that immigrant blacks attended select colleges at almost four times the rate of native-born African Americans. Outside of the Ivy League, almost 44 percent of African immigrants graduated from a four-year college, compared to just 18 percent of native blacks.

None of this would matter if black Americans and their immigrant counterparts were gunning for the Ivies from a level playing field. But they’re not. Data shows that African immigrants, Nigerians in particular, are far wealthier and more highly educated than many Americans of any race. In 2000, when the median household income for African Americans was about $30,000, the median income for Nigerian immigrant families was more than $45,000 (PDF). Where education is concerned, in 2007,African immigrants were likelier to have obtained a college or graduate degree than any other immigrant population, and 20 percent likelier than the U.S. population as a whole.

It’s easy to chalk these numbers up to the myth that immigrants work harder than native blacks, but studies say that’s wrong. According to the aforementioned sociological research from 2009, immigrant students don’t value education more than native blacks or perform significantly better academically. Rather, they have the financial resources required to get a leg-up into the highest echelons of academia.

“When we compare immigrant blacks to African Americans from similar family socioeconomic backgrounds, we find no significant differences between them in their chances of attending college,” says Pamela Bennett, one of the study’s authors and an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins. “Our findings indicate that [African immigrants] have greater resources, in the form of family structure and private school attendance, that are universally helpful in providing opportunities to go to college.” (“Family structure” means that African immigrants are less likely to live in single-parent households than native blacks.)

Teresa Wiltz, senior editor of black politics and culture website The Root, graduated from Dartmouth in the 1980s. She says that a lot of her black peers did benefit from programs helping low-income minorities, but the African immigrants with whom she went to school were very affluent. “There was a group of Ethiopian students there, two of whom were the relatives of [Ethiopian Emperor] Haile Selassie,” she tells me. “Yes, they came from highly privileged backgrounds, but they were also exiles thanks to the revolution there. There was also a group of Ghanaian students—all men.”

Emails and phone calls to Brown, Yale, and Princeton requesting interviews about their admissions processes went unanswered. Emails to members and former members of Harvard’s Nigerian Student’s Association also went unanswered. Harvard senior communications officer Jeff Neal wrote in an email, “Harvard College seeks to admit the most interesting, able, and diverse class possible, regardless of individual background. … There are no quotas of any kind. We rely on teachers, counselors, headmasters, and alumni to share information with us about applicants’ strength of character, their ability to overcome adversity, and other personal qualities—all of which play a part in admissions decisions.”

In his book The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, University of Illinois at Chicago English professor Walter Benn Michaels laments that colleges have abandoned real affirmative action programs in order to promote a more general sense of diversity, which presumes that all black people are alike regardless of income or place of birth. “The trouble with diversity … is not just that it won’t solve the problem of economic inequality,” he writes, “it’s that it makes it hard for us to even see the problem.”

For her part, Cooper, the Harvard graduate, says what she observed in black immigrant students wasn’t more smarts or a lot more money, but a will to succeed that hadn’t been quashed by decades of oppression. “Descendants of slaves came here on a ship as chattel, not on a plane or inner tube with hopes of an American dream,” she says. “Honestly, I believe it’s difficult to strive for better when you already live in what people name the American dream, but what you have lived is a nightmare.”

photo via (cc) Flickr user Patricia Drury

(Source: GOOD)

Asian-Americans and Getting Into College: Harder than it looks!

As the newest generation of Asian Americans like Kim seek college admission, the landscape they face shifts continuously. Some schools have historically held Asian Americans to a higher standard, whereas others have opened their doors and held out enticing offers to attract more Asian American applicants. Then there’s the University of California, whose new rules could sway its admissions toward more inclusion of historically underrepresented Asian ethnic groups — at the expense of some Asian American groups that have traditionally been admitted in high numbers. 

Caught in the middle are students focusing on the balancing act of matching their own attributes and career interests with the academic programs and student preferences of colleges. But Asian Americans also deal with the added challenges of meeting higher academic standards, disproportionately applying to the most competitive majors, and picking a school that welcomes them and values diversity.

Often, several factors limit admissions for Asian Americans at elite universities, making it harder for seemingly qualified applicants to get in. Dan Golden, the author of The Price of Admission, which documents the advantages given to white applicants at elite universities, believes subtle quotas for Asian Americans come from three primary factors.

First, many seats at these schools are simply not available for Asian Americans because few are children of large donors, are athletes or are relatives of alumni, otherwise known as legacies. These groups receive preference in the admissions process and typically comprise about one-third of an entering class. Moreover, Asian Americans are not typically considered for affirmative action, unless the applicant hails from traditionally underrepresented groups, such as Southeast Asians. 

“For most elite schools, close to half the seats on average go to somebody with an admissions preference,” Golden said. This means that most Asian Americans, as well as working- and middle-class whites, compete on only their merit for about half the seats available in any freshman class.

Read more here. 

China offering FULL scholarships for Americans studying abroad

China’s Ministry of Education is ready to offer full scholarships to American students who wish to pursue their university degrees in China.

The program officially kicked off in April when Chinese State Councilor Liu Yandong and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signed the China-US Consultation on People to People Exchange agreement, even though the actual offering of scholarships started last year.

From 2010 and 2013, the program provides tuition and living allowance to up to 10,000 American students who enroll in universities in China for undergraduate or postgraduate degrees, said Zhang Jin, a secondary secretary in charge of the education exchange program. Students enrolled in joint-degree programs between Chinese and American universities also may be eligible.

“We hope the scholarships will encourage American students to delve into China studies and other subjects in China in earnest,” Zhang said.

The scholarships will also give some support to US President Barack Obama’s call to send more than 100,000 Americans to China to learn the Chinese language and culture, she said.

The Chinese government will also pay miscellaneous fees to cover books, internships, registration, on-campus accommodations and medical insurance, she said.

The scholarships constitute part of China’s plan to attract some 500,000 foreign students to study in China by 2020. The number of US students in China is expected to become one of the largest.

China’s central government provided 800 million yuan ($123.9 million) in scholarships to international students last year and local governments offered about 110 million yuan in scholarships, according to Zhang Xiuqin, director of the Education Ministry’s department of international cooperation and exchange.

The scholarships benefited 22,390 international students last year, 22.7 percent more than in 2009.

The number of foreign students in China has risen dramatically, from 110,844 in 2004 to a record 265,090-plus last year, according to the latest statistics released by the ministry.

International students can find more information at www.studyinchina.edu.cn.

Li Xing reported from Washington and Chen Jia from Beijing.

(Source: )