Admissions moves to ease AASA concerns

By Molly Ball

LIZ OLINER/YH Director of Minority Recruitment Rob Jackson fielded questions at the Asian-American Cultural Center on Mon., Mar. 30.

The Asian-American Student Association (AASA) highlighted the statistics of the current freshman class. The Class of 2001 is 102 students fewer than the Class of 2000. It is also 52 Asian-Americans fewer. Many students worry that the two numbers are correlated, and that Asian-Americans are being discriminated against in the admissions process.

"I've researched the significant drop in the number of Asian-American students in the Class of 2001, and I'm concerned about what the reasons are for that drop. I would speculate that there's a double standard," Andy Song, BK '00, said. "Asian-Americans aren't considered part of affirmative action because they're generally not as disadvantaged socioeconomically as other minorities."

Jimmy Ho, BR '99, worried that the downward trend will continue. "My concern is that there might be a steamrolling effect, that applying students will look at the numbers and see them going down," he said.

In response to concerns like these, Jackson emphasized the imprecision of an admissions process which has neither stated quotas nor empirical formulas for admission. "These are very difficult questions to answer," he said. "Admissions is not an exact science."

Jackson also pointed out that the number of Asian- Americans in the class depends not only on how many students are accepted but also on how many choose to come to Yale. "No matter how many [Asian-Americans] we admit, we can't predict the matriculation rate," he said. Yale stopped releasing statistics for admitted students by race four years ago.

"Statistics don't ever tell the whole story, and they're so easily misconstrued, " Mary Li Hsu, SY '80, Assistant Dean of Yale College and director of AACC, added.

But AASA moderator Shilpi Mehta, MC '99, believes that the numbers in this case look suspicious. "Even if [the drop] is not because of deliberate discrimination on the part of the admissions office, the real concern is what it's symptomatic of," she said. "Students may not be choosing Yale because of a bigger problem with the whole University and its commitment to Asian-Americans and to diversity."

To explain the drop, Jackson suggested, "Maybe students aren't comfortable with Yale for some reason. Maybe they're getting scholarships from less selective schools."

While these reasons help to account for the overall drop of four percent in applications from 1996 to 1997, they do not address why Asian-Americans, more than several other minority groups, would be less represented in the '01 class. In fact, all other categories of minorities--Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans--saw their numbers go up in this year's class, despite the decreased class size. Therefore, not only did the percentage of Asian-Americans in the class drop from 17.2 to 14.5, but their portion of the minority pie went down even more dramatically, from 57.1 percent in the class of '00 to 47.5 percent in the class of '01.

Jackson's only explanation for why Asian-Americans might pass up Yale was that prospective students may "look at Yale as not [being] as strong in the science and engineering departments--I don't think that's true, but it may be a perception," he said.

Ho was bothered by the implication that Asian-Americans are only interested in engineering and the sciences. "There's a perception that Asians are always going to study science," he said. "We need to address those stereotypes."

Song noted that a weakness in Asian-American studies might be more relevant to the drop in numbers. "The lack of Asian-American studies is more important than science and engineering," he said. Mehta echoed this sentiment. "The Yale Administration has shown little support for attempts to get ethnic majors and tenured faculty in Asian studies," she said. "The Ethnicity, Race, and Migration major was a band-aid for something that didn't exist. It didn't create any new positions."

Richard Brodhead, BR '68, GRD '72, disagreed with Mehta's point of view. "Yale has an excellent department for East Asian studies, focusing on both Japan and China," he noted. "Our East Asian literature department is the envy of the world, and many history and anthropology courses focus on Japan and China."

However, the view that Japan and China adequately represent Asia as a whole concerns such ethnic subgroups as Koreans, Vietnamese, Indians, and Filipinos.

"This year, various sub-ethnic groups, particularly within the southeast Asian community, saw almost no representation in the class. Asian-Americans are an incredibly diverse group, ethnically and classwise," Hsu said.

In addition to Yale's perceived deficiency in the academic realm, students are concerned that Yale does not provide enough support for Asian-American cultural groups. "In the last few years, there's been a debate about moving [AACC]," Mehta noted. AACC currently shares a building on Crown Street with the Latin-American Cultural Center. "This says to us that we seem movable, but this is not just some building, it's our history. We'd love to have a Slifka Center, but until we have rich alums, we can't hope for that," she said.

Jackson hopes that students will build the Asian -American community at Yale. He ended his presentation by suggesting that students get involved with recruitment through phone-a-thons and repeatedly emphasized his support for AASA's position.

"You have an advocate in me," he said. "We are very committed to achieving a diverse class."

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