Asians at Cornell University

There was a piece recently on Asian American discrimination in Ivy League admissions in “The Cornell Daily Sun.”

There was a piece recently in “The Cornell Daily Sun,” the newspaper of Cornell University, that focused on Asian American discrimination in Ivy League admissions. The piece, by Drew Musto, is entitled “Does the Ivy League Discriminate Against Asian American Applicants?” and our answer to this question is an unequivocal yes. Hey, we’ve been saying it for, well, decades. But this is a good piece that offers both anecdotal evidence as well as data to suggest that there is cause for concern among Asian Americans navigating the highly selective college admissions process.

We pride ourselves on our attention to data, though, rather than anecdotal evidence. So here’s some data offered up by Musto in his piece for “The Cornell Daily Sun” about how Cornell’s Asian population stacks up against similar populations at the other seven Ivy League schools: “Cornell is 18.09 percent Asian — defined as ‘having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent’ — according to the University’s 2015-2016 Common Data Set. This figure puts the University just above the median Asian enrollment in the Ivy League, but well above Dartmouth (15.21 percent) and Brown (13.32 percent) and fairly below Princeton (21.50 percent) and the University of Pennsylvania (20.14 percent).”

But the percentage of the class at each Ivy League school that is made up of Asian students of course doesn’t point towards or away from allegations of discrimination by these very institutions. We’ve outlined very clearly over the years how Asians (among them Asian Americans) face discrimination in this process and how they deserve better. And we’ve also outlined how the groups fighting for change, fighting for an end to this discrimination, have been going about trying to end this discrimination in so many wrong ways.