谁控制大学使顶级亚裔美国人陷入困境？有特权的白人 [美国媒体]

The Trump administration is preparing to investigate whether Asian Americans are treated unfairly as a result of admissions policies intended to boost the chances of other racial minorities. That inquiry should also look at colleges other major affirmative action effort — lower admission standards for applicants whose parents are alumni or major donors.

特朗普政府正在准备着手调查为了提高其它少数名族入学几率的新招生政策是否会对美籍华人造成不公平待遇。这项调查应该同样着重于大学其它平权政策的成效——对父母是校友或主要捐赠人的申请者降低申请要求。



This story was co-published with Bloomberg View.

这一文章与彭博新闻社共同出版。

More than a decade ago, I chatted with Asian-American seniors at Hunter College High School in New York City about their college admission prospects. One young woman told me she had scored 1530 out of a maximum 1600 on the SAT. When I congratulated her, she said that her score was what she and her friends called “an Asian fail.” She predicted it wouldn’t be enough to get into her dream school, Yale. She was right. The next day, she learned that Yale had rejected her.

十多年以前，我曾与一个亨特学院美籍亚裔中学生在纽约谈论他们学校的招生政策。其中一个女孩告诉我1600分满分的SAT考试，她考了1530分。当我恭喜她拿到如此不错的成绩时，她告诉我这个分数就是在她与她朋友口中的“作为亚洲人无法通过的分数”。她估计以她的分数可能无法申请上她的理想学校——耶鲁。她的预估很正确，因为第二天耶鲁拒绝了她的申请。

I remembered our conversation when I read last week that the Justice Department plans to investigate a complaint by Asian-American organizations that Harvard discriminates against them by giving an edge to other racial minorities. My immediate response was: right victim, wrong culprit.

上周我读到一篇新闻让我想起十多年前的这段对话：司法部门正在着手调查一起由美籍亚裔组织对哈佛大学的诉状，其内容为哈佛大学通过给其他少数种族特别优势来排挤美籍亚裔学生。我的瞬间想到：货真价实的受害者，但罪魁祸首并非如此。

Asian Americans are indeed treated unfairly in admissions, but affirmative action is a convenient scapegoat for those who seek to pit minority groups against each other. A more logical target would be “the preferences of privilege,” as I called them in my 2006 book, “The Price of Admission.”

美籍亚裔学生在申请时确实受到不公平对待，但平权政策却是那些设法使少数群体互相攻击的替死鬼。更加合理的批判目标或许是“特权偏向”，就像我在我2006年出版的书中提到的“录取的代价”。

These policies elevate predominantly white, affluent applicants: children of alumni, big non-alumni donors, politicians and celebrities, as well as recruited athletes in upper-crust sports like golf, sailing, horseback riding, crew and even, at some colleges, polo. The number of whites enjoying the preferences of privilege, I concluded, outweighed the number of minorities aided by affirmative action.

这一政策主要是给为白人富豪的申请者带来优势：校友、主要捐赠人、政客以及名人的孩子；同样还有上流社会运动项目的退役运动员，列如高尔夫、骑术、赛艇，甚至对于一些学校而言还有马球。我计算了一下，那些受到特殊优待的白人数量比因平权政策得到政策帮助的少数群体还多。

By giving more slots to already advantaged students, these preferences displace more deserving candidates from other backgrounds, including Asian Americans and middle-class whites, without achieving the goals of affirmative action, such as diversity and redressing historical discrimination.

相比给已经有优势的学生更多学位，这些特权偏向排挤掉更多有其它背景的候选人，列如美籍亚裔和中产阶级白人。平权政策目标完全落空，列如使大学入学者背景多样化以及消除历史歧视。

Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, has become the poster boy for this practice. As I reported in my book, Harvard accepted Kushner soon after receiving a $2.5 million pledge from his father, a real-estate developer and New York University graduate. While sources at Jared’s high school told me that he wasn’t near the top of his class, and didn’t always take the most challenging courses, a spokeswoman for Kushner Companies has described him as “an excellent student” and denied that his father’s gift was intended to improve his chances of admission.

特朗普总统的女婿与高级顾问贾娜德·库什纳，已经成为这种特权偏向的典型代表。哈佛从他父亲手里受到两百五十万美元的捐款后立即录取了他，而他父亲是一个房地产开发商与纽约大学毕业生。库什纳集团的女发言人将他描述为“一个极其优异的学生”，并且否认他的父亲曾通过礼金来提高他的申请通过率。而与此同时，我通过贾娜德的高中了解到他并不是班里顶尖的学生，而且并不是总是选择具有挑战性的课程。（译者注：一般而言牛逼的美国高中会用AP或IB课程，这种课程是可以自己选课的，而有些科目相对挑战性比较高，比如AP统计和AP物理，相比之下什么美国历史、世界历史就比较容易了。）

In my book, I described Asian Americans as “the new Jews.” Like Jews before the 1960s, whose Ivy League enrollment was restricted by quotas, Asian Americans are overrepresented at selective colleges compared with their U.S. population, but are shortchanged relative to their academic performance.

在我的书中，我将美籍亚裔人称作“新犹太人”。就像1960年之前的犹太人，他们的常青藤联盟申请被比例限制。或许相对美国人口，美籍亚裔学生在高校比例过高；但是就他们的学术表现而言，这样的比例依旧很低。

Much as Ivy League administrators once justified anti-Jewish policies with ethnic stereotypes, so Asian Americans, I found, were typecast in college admissions offices. Asked why the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had turned down one high-achieving Korean-American youth, the then dean of admissions told me it was possible that he “looked like a thousand other Korean kids with the exact same profile of grades and activities and temperament. My guess is that he just wasn’t involved or interesting enough to surface to the top.”

我发现，就像常青藤联盟招生官用种族刻板印象评判反犹太政策一样，美籍亚裔学生已在招生办眼中被定型。当我问及麻省理工学院为何拒绝一个有很高学术成就的美籍韩裔学生时，招生办主任告诉我他可能“他的成绩、活动和个人气质就像其他的1000个韩国孩子一样。我觉得他没有参与到（活动或申请）之中，或者没有兴趣让自己浮出水面（与众不同）。”

My research indicated that college admissions officers tended to compare stellar Asian-American candidates to each other, rather than to the rest of the applicant pool. The result at some universities amounted to an informal quota system, with the percentage of Asian Americans admitted as freshman changing little from year to year. The proportion at Harvard, which long hovered below 20 percent, reached 22.2 percent for the class of 2021. Who takes the places of the spurned Asians? As far back as 1990, an investigation of Harvard by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights pointed to recipients of so-called “white affirmative action.”

据我调查发现，美国大学招生官更倾向于将美籍亚裔学生相互之间作比较，而不是将他们和申请池里的其它学生作对比。一些大学对录取结果有非官方的占比系统，美籍亚裔新生比例每年有微小的变化。哈佛学院的比例常年低于百分之20，2021界会达到百分之22.2.那是谁取代了被嫌弃的亚洲学生？追溯到1990年，美国教育局民权办公室关于哈佛大学的一项调查显示，这一切都指向所谓“白人平权政策”的受益者。

Harvard admitted Asian-American applicants “at a significantly lower rate than white applicants” despite their “slightly stronger” SAT scores and grades, it found. Accounting for most of the admissions gap was “preference given to legacies and recruited athletes — groups that are predominantly white.” In that era, Asian Americans composed 15.7 percent of all Harvard applicants but only 3.5 percent of alumni children and 4.1 percent of recruited athletes.

据称，哈佛承认美籍亚裔申请者“和白人申请者相比确实比例要低一些”虽然他们的SAT分数“稍微高一些”。大多数的招生差距是“给予捐赠者以及运动员优惠政策——其中大多数是白人”。那时，美籍亚裔学生在哈佛录取者中占比15.7%，但是只有3.5%的校友孩子和4.1%的退役运动员。

Unlike affirmative action, the preferences of privilege aren’t inherently race-based, which makes it tougher to challenge them legally.
与平权政策不同，优待偏向并不是以内在的种族差距为基础，这也使这种偏向的合法性受到质疑。

When I was researching my book in the early 2000s, several admissions deans assured me that the ranks of alumni children would become more diverse in future as the children of minorities who gained access to elite universities with the advent of affirmative action attained college age. But that doesn’t seem to have happened.

21世纪初，当我在为我的书做研究时，几个招生班主任告诉我随着平权政策的出现，进入精英大学的少数种族学生将会变得越来越多元化。但是这似乎并没有发生。

Based on a Harvard Crimson survey of freshmen entering Harvard in 2016, legacies remain a largely homogeneous group. They made up 15 percent of the student body, but 26.6 percent of those whose parents had a combined annual income of $500,000 or more. Of freshmen who identified themselves as white, 35 percent said that a family member had gone to Harvard as an undergraduate. Two-thirds of students whose parents had a combined annual income of more than $500,000 said that family members had attended Harvard.

基于哈佛大学对2016哈佛新生调查，因捐赠而入学的新生依旧占了入学比例中与早期相当的一部分，大约在15%左右，其中26.6%的父母年收入高于五十万美元。35%的白人新生表示他们的家族成员中曾有人从哈佛毕业。父母年收入超过五十万美元的学生中，三分之二的学生表示他们的家族成员曾毕业于哈佛。

Meanwhile, the practice of giving admissions breaks to children of current or prospective donors has only intensified. With other sources of revenue failing to keep pace with costs — the pace of tuition increases is declining, as is the percentage of alumni who donate to the country’s top 20 schools — universities are more dependent than ever on major givers, and thus under more pressure to accept their children. In 2015 alone, seven individuals made gifts of more than $100 million apiece to higher education, including one bequest.

与此同时，这种给现在或潜在捐赠者的孩子入学优待的现象只会越来越严重。因为校方从其它渠道获得的资金根本无法满足其开销——学费增长率正在下降。而考虑到国家前二十的学校校友捐款的比例，校方更加依赖于那些主要捐款者以，在此压力下，学校不得不接受他们的孩子的入学申请。2015年，有七个人向高校提供了超过1亿美元的捐款，其中包括一项遗产。

“Recognizing that the market is more competitive and that we’re constrained in our ability to raise prices, we are going to be more dependent on philanthropy,” Donald Heller, provost and vice president of academic affairs at the University of San Francisco, told me last fall. “That means there’s probably more pressure on admissions offices around legacies and development admits” — applicants recommended by the development (i.e., fundraising) office.

“鉴于现在的市场竞争越来越激烈，我们不得不限制学费的增长，这就意味着我们将越来越依赖于慈善事业。”旧金山大学学术事务副院长唐纳德·海勒，去年秋天告诉我，“这意味着可能学术办公室将面临来自发展办公室（列如，筹款）更大的压力，并接受其所推荐的遗产或捐赠申请者。”

In an era of widening economic and social inequity, and of backlash against minority groups, the way to open more slots for outstanding Asian-American applicants is not to ban affirmative action. A better approach for eliminating the “Asian fail” is to curtail preferences for rich whites.

在经济与社会不平等与日俱增并且反少数群体愈演愈烈的时代，平权政策并不会切断为杰出的美籍亚裔学生开放更多学位的方法。消除“亚洲式失败”的更好的好方法是切断对有权势的白人优势偏向。


James Igoe • 13 hours ago 
From what I know, although alumni's children have lower qualifications, athletes are the worst, with a 50% greater likelihood of being admitted over their class, as opposed to 17% for alumni's children.

据我所知，校友的孩子录取优势并不是很高。运动员优势超大，基本比同等学生高出50%的录取率，而校友的孩子只高出了17%。

BreakingDeadMen  @James Igoe • 8 hours ago
But at least the athletes are being recruited for something they are uniquely qualified to bring to the university, rather than for nepotism.

至少退役运动员有很牛逼的特长，而不是走关系。

Sam • 14 hours ago 
STANDARDS should be just that.....STANDARDS. And those standards should be the SAME for all applicants...PERIOD.....

标准就应该只是```标准。而且对所有申请者标准都应该一致。

heartprivacy  @sam • 14 hours ago 
What does that mean, exactly? Is a star quarterback more or less qualified that a virtuoso violin player? Is a brilliant physicist more or less qualified than a successful entrepreneur? If two students have identical test scores, but one was a war refugee and studied by candlelight during bombing raids with no electricity and the constant threat of death, are they both equally qualified? If two students have identical GPAs and test scores, but one excelled at multiple extracurricular sports while the other worked full-time at McDonalds to support his widowed mom and five siblings, which one is more qualified?
（译者注：这孩子怕不是没看懂文章233）

这玩意儿到底想说明什么？一个明星橄榄球手是否比一个殿堂级小提琴家更有资格被录取？一个杰出的物理学家是否比一个成功的企业家更有资格被录取？如果两个学生有差不多的应试分数，但是其中一个是战争中的难民，在烛光中、炮火中甚至死亡的威胁中学习，这两个学生的录取资格相同么？如果两个学生有相同的GPA和应试成绩，但是一个学生有丰富的课外活动与运动经历而另一个整日在麦当劳打工以此补贴这个有五个兄弟姐妹的单亲母亲家庭，哪个学生更有录取资格？

simonpeggroundhole  @Sam • 11 hours ago
Why

为什么

Michael Dorfman  @Sam • 13 hours ago
standard must be determined by social ecoinomic status, not by race theory

应该由社会经济地位制定条件，而不是种族理论。

Veda Dalsette • 15 hours ago 
What does Harvard do with all their money?

哈佛拿这些钱干嘛去了？

Rob Stafford • 7 hours ago 
Universities like Harvard are self-sustaining communities and, as such, have no obligation to select the “best” high school students for admission. I don’t have any direct evidence from inside the admissions committee, but it appears from the outside that Harvard focuses more on identifying individuals who will contribute the most to that community over their entire lives, rather than who presents the best set of credentials as a 17-year old. While those contributions to the community include money, they also include achievements that enhance the reputation of the community by, for example, winning Nobel prizes, or getting elected president. I believe that Harvard claims that serious, successful athletes achieve more as adult than do non-athletes with similar grades and SAT scores, which would justify favoring them in the admissions process. I make no claim that Asian-Americans are less attractive as potential members of the community, only that universities like Harvard have the right to judge applicants by criteria other than their accomplishments through the age of 17, and that applying this criteria may produce admissions decisions that favor some candidates, like athletes from rich families, over other candidates who appear to be more accomplished as 17-year olds.

像哈佛大学这样的学校是自营体，而且它们也没有明确招生标准说只录取“最好的”高中生。我无法在招生办内部找到任何像这样的条例，而从外部看来哈佛更着重与录取 “能在他们一生中对学院做出最大贡献”的学生，而不是有最好证书的17岁孩子。虽然这些对贡献包括钱，但同样包括能提升学院声望的成就，比如获得诺贝尔奖或竞选总统。我相信哈佛认为那些严肃且成功的运动员比有同样成绩和SAT分数的非运动员有更高的成就，并有程序与原因的评判与录取他们。我并不是说美籍亚裔学生对于学院而言缺乏潜在的吸引力，毕竟只有想哈佛这样的学校才有权在除了他们17岁时的成就之外评判他们的资格，就像富有家庭的运动员，在哈佛眼里比其他更有造诣的17岁学生更优秀。