(08-16-2017 04:50 PM)illiniowl Wrote:  I have not paid attention to our admissions demographics for a long time and was surprised - but, let me emphasize, *not* dismayed! - to see our Asian-American percentage at 29%.

My initial thought is that it would look like Rice has nothing to fear from the recently-announced federal investigation into racial discrimination against Asian-Americans in selective college admissions. I recall reading recently that the Ivies and other peer schools have routinely been having incoming classes with the percentages of Asian-Americans in the 13%-16% range. That is significantly lower than one would expect given the applicant demographics, results in Asian-Americans having to clear a higher (the highest) bar for admission than other groups, and strongly indicates that racial quotas/caps are being used (everything old is new again; the Ivies have a similar history of anti-Semitic discrimination in admissions). I am heartened, then, to see Rice not joining in the racially biased admissions practices that are alive and well amongst other elite schools.

As a corollary, I wondered if Rice's significantly higher percentage of Asian-Americans may have "artificially" led to our recent #1 ranking in Princeton Review for race/class interaction. Such a ranking, given the prevailing notions of political correctness, was clearly intended to speak to interaction with underrepresented minorities (i.e., you're not supposed to "get points" for providing interaction opportunities between, e.g., whites and Asian-Americans), but I wondered if the survey question haphazardly defined "race" neutrally. But according to the methodology page, that ranking was "based on how strongly students agree or disagree with the statement, 'Different types of students (black/white, rich/poor) interact frequently and easily.'" So is not the upshot that when it comes to black/white racial interaction, institutions that discriminate against Asian-Americans for the avowed purpose of increasing black/white interaction actually are being outscored by Rice on this metric?

Re: the inflammatory issue of whether "Asian" students are less likely to support athletics . . . Newsflash: *all* the kids Rice admits are largely indifferent to athletics. Thank heaven for the exceptions, but IMO that is a widespread trait that knows no racial and ethnic correlation once you get up into the academic level that Rice draws its student body from. Even so, nerds will come out to games . . . if they're worth going to. But most games on our campus are against schools we have nothing in common with and I don't blame the students one bit for voting with their feet.

In a *very* qualified defense of the indelicately expressed "too many Asians" argument, I do think it might be possible for a school to go too far in admitting international students, which in the present moment has in fact come to essentially mean students from Asia (mostly China). I am open to correction with data (not anecdotes, thank you) but I suspect international students are the cohort least likely to support athletics and least likely to donate as alumni, especially those that return to their home countries. A too-high percentage becomes penny-wise and pound-foolish: They pay full price for 4 years now but give very little back over the remaining 50-60-70+ years of their lives. Rice's 11% number strikes me as maybe double (?) from my time (late '80s-early '90s), but I could be wrong on that and in any event having 50 more international kids in a class of 1,000 is obviously not what's holding us back from P5 status. It's certainly nowhere near the 25% that has been the case for several years now at the University of Illinois, which (as a law school alum) I fear is mortgaging its future to pay its present bills. And one wonders if it is not just a coincidence that Illinois is now going on 4 years with no bowl games and no men's basketball tournament appearances, which I'm not sure has ever happened before.

I don't think our ranking for race/class interaction was artificially inflated by the number of Asians at Rice.

I think we rank high in that category primarily because of the college system. This allows us to avoid the potentially significant race/class division that frats/sororities can lead to, and it creates an artificial community out of thin air that anyone and everyone is welcomed into. Since the colleges do not center around shared interests, you do not have different races/classes segregating themselves through extracurriculars as you may at larger universities. While some of that still happens through participation in various groups (BSA, SAS, club sports, political clubs, etc), there is always the college system acting as an anchor that students come back to.

Speaking from a personal experience, the main group of friends I hung out with for the first few years at Rice were fellow Will Ricers, and that group included two Jewish people, a Colombian, a Chinese person, a half-Asian person, a Nigerian, an Indian, a Turkish person, and two white people. All of us had very different interests and likely never would have crossed paths if we didn't have the college system to basically force us into being friends.