And so there is an additional concern accompanying the rise of the Tiger Children, one focused more on the narrowness of the educational experience a non-Asian child might receive in the company of fanatically pre-professional Asian students. Jenny Tsai, a student who was elected president of her class at the equally competitive New York public school Hunter College High School, remembers frequently hearing that "the school was becoming too Asian, that they would be the downfall of our school." A couple of years ago, she revisited this issue in her senior thesis at Harvard, where she interviewed graduates of elite public schools and found that the white students regarded the Asian students with wariness. In 2005, The Wall Street Journal reported on "white flight" from a high school in Cupertino, California, that began soon after the children of Asian software engineers had niade the place so brutally competitive that a B average could place you in the bottom third of the class.
因此伴隨著虎子們呈現上升的趨勢,人們也在擔心,和這些狂熱的早早便抱有專業意向的亞裔孩子在一起,非亞裔孩子的教育經歷會變得更加狹隘。詹尼·蔡是一所同樣競爭激烈的紐約公立學校亨特學院附屬中學的學生,曾被選為班長。她清楚地記得,時常會聽到有人說“學校里的亞裔太多了,他們會搞垮學校”。幾年前,她在哈佛的畢業論文中再次探討了這個問題,她采訪了公立精英學校的畢業生,發現白人學生會以戒備的心態來看亞裔學生。2005年,《華爾街日報》報道了加州庫珀蒂諾的一所高中的白人學生逃離的現象,事情起因于亞裔軟件工程師的子女使得這所學校里的競爭變得異常殘酷,即使平均成績為B,也只能排在班級后三名。
Colleges have a way of correcting for this imbalance: The Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade has calculated that an Asian applicant must, in practice, score 140 points higher on the SAT than a comparable white applicant to have the same chance of admission. This is obviously unfair to the many qualified Asian individuals who are punished for the success of others with similar faces.
大學自有它的辦法來調整這種失衡:據普林斯頓大學社會學家托馬斯·埃斯彭沙德的計算,在實際情況中,一個並裔申請者,他的SAT成績必須比同他實力相當的白人申請者高出140分,才會獲得同樣的錄取機會。僅僅因為自己和這些成功人士有著同樣的亞裔面孔而受到懲罰,這對于眾多符合資格的亞裔學生來說,顯然是不公平的。
You could frame it as a simple issue of equality and press for race-blind quantitative admissions standards. In 2006, a decade after California passed a voter initiative outlawing any racial engineering at the public universities, Asians composed 46 percent of UC Berkeley's entering class; one could imagine a similar demographic reshuffling in the Ivy League, where Asian Americans currently make up about 17 percent of undergraduates. But the Ivies, as we all know, have their own private institutional interests at stake in their admissions choices, including some that are arguably defensible. Who can seriously claim that a Harvard University that was 72 percent Asian would deliver the same grooming for elite status its students had gone there to receive?
你可以認為問題僅僅是因為不平等產生的,并迫切要求推行不分種族的量化招生標準。20061年,即加州通過選民提議的廢除公立大學中任何關于種族工程的規定。10年后,加州大學伯克利分校的新生班中,亞洲學生占了46%。可見,聯盟中的學生構成比例很可能會發生類似的變化,而目前這個群體在聯盟本科生中的占比只有17%。然而眾所周知,常春藤聯盟在招生時會考慮自身的利益需求,而它們的一些政策也無可厚非。畢竟誰敢保證說,擁有72%亞裔學生的哈佛大學仍然能夠為那些想來哈佛鍍金的學子提供含金量不變的精英桂冠。