How Affirmative Action is Racist Towards Asian American Students

Many 2023 seniors are filling out college applications and they’re all faced with the same question: “Race/Ethnicity?” Unfortunately, a student’s answer to this question may change their chances of getting into a university. 

It’s commonly believed that minority groups have a better chance at admission. However, studies display this misconception to be false. Asian American students have a significantly lower chance of admission than other races regardless of their stronger academic record. 

College admissions are broken up into quotas by race, so each race/ethnicity is essentially competing with the others. This system makes it difficult for Asian American students. Statistically, Asians have higher test scores and GPAs, but since they are competing against each other and only so many spots are available, Asian students often have a harder time getting into universities as opposed to students of different races. Colleges place high expectations on Asian American students and expect them to have higher grades than others.

Affirmative action, which is currently employed in almost every university in America, has contradicting goals. It aims to help marginalized groups, but by neglecting to help Asians in the same way, the purpose is defeated.

Consider this chart, which shows a breakdown of “Admit Rates by Race/Ethnicity” from Harvard University. Evidently, Asian students have a much harder time with admission as an Asian student in the 4th academic decile is the only group with less than a 1% chance of acceptance. 

Race-based admissions are necessary as they promote diversity in a college setting, but Asian students are being held back by this system. Affirmative action moves our country closer to the objective of providing everyone an equal opportunity to succeed by aiming to offer everyone equal access to opportunities. Affirmative action would function more efficiently if Asian students were included in this endeavor!