Does being Asian affect your child’s chances of acceptance to their top-choice colleges? Learn how to stand out despite the pervasiveness of the model minority myth

Introduction

If you’re the parent of an Asian American high school student, you’ve probably heard a lot about how your child’s ethnicity will affect their chances of being accepted to a top college, like Harvard, Stanford, or Yale. You might be wondering: does being Asian hurt your child’s college admissions odds? Is there Asian American discrimination at top colleges? And how can you position your child to succeed?

We’ve been advising Asian American students for over fifteen years, and many of our admissions consultants are successful Asian American graduates of top universities themselves. We understand how frightening it can be to hear that despite your child’s hard work and sacrifices, despite the financial and emotional investment you’ve made in their future, and despite their passionate desire to attend a great school, it all might not pan out simply because there are a lot of other high-achieving Asians.

We’re here to tell you that no matter what you might have heard about the bleak outlook for Asians in college admissions, and despite all the discussion about the recent Harvard lawsuit that alleged discriminatory admissions practices, you need not lose hope.

In this guide, we’ll break down a series of myths about what it means to apply to college as an Asian American, and offer advice about how to successfully navigate the college admissions process.

What you need to know about Asian college admissions

Let’s cover some basics, first.

Asians are less than six percent of the overall U.S. population. Often, top college campuses are over 20 percent Asian.
Many top colleges, including Ivy League universities, deny having an Asian quota. Race is one element of what admissions officers call “holistic” admissions, meaning your child will be evaluated not just on the basis of their demographics or test scores, but rather as the sum of their experiences.
Implicit bias is a problem. Even the judge who ultimately ruled in 2019 that Harvard had not discriminated against Asian Americans has acknowledged that admissions officers probably need some help overcoming their own biases. Sometimes, those implicit biases get pretty explicit, and troubling, for all minority groups, as we saw in the case of some leaked Princeton admissions files in 2017.
The conversation about Asians in college admissions has been ongoing since at least the 1980s—which means it’s probably not going to get resolved, legally or culturally, between the time you read this and the time your child applies to college.

So that’s a glimpse of the wider landscape that this all fits into. But now it’s time to leave those facts behind and think more specifically about your child, and how they can find their way to their dream school. The answer will lie in no small part in the quality and specificity of your child’s Common App Essay and supplemental essays.

Need inspiration for your Common App personal statement? Click below for instant access to 25 full-length example essays including advanced breakdowns of why they resonate with admissions committees.

Common App Personal Statement Premium Example Library

$49.00

Every week

Gain instant access to 25 exclusive full-length examples covering all seven prompts, plus comprehensive analyses for each to help you craft stellar essays.

Debunking myths about Asian college admissions

The question of whether or not top colleges discriminate against Asian Americans often leads students to make a lot of frantic assumptions about the college process. We’ve decided to rebut a few of the top myths here. You might hear your child say any of the following as they assemble their college applications senior year.

Myth #1: I’m just another Asian STEM applicant. I don’t stand a chance.

If your child does happen to be a young Asian American interested in science, technology, engineering, or math, they might have imbibed the harmful and hurtful message that they’re not unique.

This is an incredibly unfair story for your child to be telling themselves.

Let’s pause for a moment, first, to consider how big both those categories are: Asian and STEM. The first refers to billions of human beings on planet earth, and millions in America. The second refers to four massive fields that include concepts as abstract as black holes and applications as immediate as building cars. There is infinite diversity within the “Asian STEM applicant” category.

Try your best to get your child to walk away from the stereotypes surrounding that label, and ask them to think, instead, about what they love. Nobody really sits around thinking, I sure love STEM! No way! That’s a label that gets applied to people later, by external forces. So try to move the conversation toward the internal. Ask your child to reflect on when they first came to enjoy the subjects they have a knack for.

Can they trace their interest in their AP Environmental Science class to the first time they went on a nature walk at day camp and wondered about the many insects croaking in the woods? Where did they come by their habit of tricking out skateboards to make them high tech? Or what about the ASCII art they doodle up on weekends, long after they’ve finished their math homework?

Myth #2: There are certain “Asian things,” like medicine, math, or music, to avoid emphasizing or writing about in my personal statement.

There are almost no “Bad Topics” when it comes to your child’s personal statement. There are trite or cliché personal statements, but those often come about because the execution of the essay is flawed, generic, or lacking specificity.

In general, if your child tells a story that is specific to them, they can make even the most seemingly overdone topics new. That means that writing about medicine, math, music, or something else you might fear is “too Asian” is probably not the wrong choice in itself.

That said, it’s all about how well your child—or any applicant—pulls off the essay. Remember that a personal statement isn’t meant to show off the accomplishments of the applicant. It’s designed to give admissions officers a truly personal window into your child’s mind and interests. So your child shouldn’t write about, say, medicine, math, or music because they want to make sure the reader knows they’re talented at medicine, math, or music.

But if they have a wonderful, unique story to tell—say, beginning with the first time they tried and failed to sight read at a classical piano audition and ending with their love of jazz piano—you should definitely not discourage them from writing about something just because it falls into a category you fear is “too Asian.”

Myth #3: I shouldn’t write a personal statement about identity, my attempt to balance my hyphenated identity, my or my parents’ immigration stories, or anything that draws attention to my Asian-ness, because tons of applicants could tell those same stories.

Some students worry that by calling attention to their own ethnicity, they’re doing themselves a disservice. Maybe your daughter has a complex relationship to her own name, which sounds musical and welcome at home but gets mangled in every dentist’s office and on every first day of school. Should she write about that, knowing that many other applicants—Asian and otherwise—might have a similar experience?

Or maybe your son wants to write about feeling split every summer between trips back to Bangladesh to see his grandparents and the summer soccer camp he’d rather be attending.

Either of those topics could work, but one of them—the second—has a story in it, with the possibility for scenes, characters, conflict, and growth. The first is just an idea: I want to write about my name. The second includes inherent tension: I want to write about a summer in Bangladesh, when I wished I was at soccer camp.

The hard part about judging whether or not an essay is an interesting versus a trite take on identity is that often parents are tempted to push their children to come to a neat and triumphant ending.

But writing good stories about identity may mean settling into an uncomfortable middle terrain where not everything ties up well. An easy way to write a bad identity essay is to make it too neat.

So, if your child is pursuing a topic like this, we suggest letting them work on it apart from you. Let your child seek advice from a trusted English teacher or admissions advisor. You might just be too close to it.

Myth #4: My personal statement should be all about my identity.

On the flip side, some applicants fear they have to address their ethnicity directly. This is not the case at all. Some of our favorite essays by Asian American applicants had nothing to do with their race or heritage. We’ve had successful students write about being amateur filmmakers, rabid sports fans, devotees of John Keats, aspiring farmers, and obsessive Googlers.

Myth #5: Colleges see all Asian Americans the same way.

The Asian American category is enormous, encompassing people with Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, Sri Lankan, Bhutanese, Korean, Indonesian, Filipino, Pakistani, Japanese, and Laotian heritage—and many more. That’s not even to mention Hapa folks, for whom “Asianness” might feel extremely important or entirely unimportant.

Within this demographic category, there’s huge socioeconomic and religious diversity. Different groups of Asian immigrants came in different waves, and under wildly varying circumstances. Some diasporas were formed by H1B visas, and others by war.

This nuance might seem lost as soon as your child checks Asian on their college application. But remember that holistic admissions are meant to account for the limitations of the little check box. If there’s something about your family’s experience that you fear will be lost to the reductive nature of the demographic questions on the college application, encourage your child to make space to tell that part of the story in their application.

Final Thoughts

We know it’s disempowering to worry that your child will be discriminated against. Just remember that the college admissions process rewards not only hard work, good grades, and meaningful extracurricular activities but also personality and particularity. Rather than worry that your child faces an impossible task, focus instead on giving your child a chance to tell the best possible story of themselves.