This is why Asian Americans are anxious about checking boxes in college admissions | Chao

After carefully perfecting her college essay and retesting to raise her standardized score, my daughter had to face her most difficult decision: whether to admit she was Asian when she filled out the common application for college and university admission.

To check the box or to not check the box? Admit to being Asian — and face the penalty. Or — simply check the white box as a biracial applicant and receive fair consideration.

The Asian penalty in applying to elite colleges is well known in Chinese American, Korean American and Indian American circles. For years, I contemplated whether my daughter should have had to check the Asian box when it came time to apply to college. After all, with her auburn hair and her father's surname, she could pass for white.

According to research from Princeton University, students who identify as Asian must score 140 points higher on the SAT than whites and 450 points higher than Blacks to have the same chance of admission to private colleges.

My daughter worked hard as a young student. She stayed up late to tweak projects and she passed up social events to study. Can you imagine if it was your child who worked tirelessly toward a goal and admitting that the child is Italian, Irish, Ghanian or Jewish meant that the goal post would be moved farther? Would that even fly with any other racial group?

Is affirmative action discriminatory?:As SCOTUS weighs that, NJ Asians are divided

On full view at SCOTUS

This week, as the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a pair of cases brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina to test affirmative action and diversity-driven admissions standards, the issue of race-based elite college admissions took center stage.

The organization named as plaintiff in both cases, Students for Fair Admissions, was created by conservative legal strategist Edward Blum. He claims Harvard's race-conscious admissions policy unlawfully discriminates against Asian American applicants in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The cases could affect how colleges and universities can use race in admissions, possibly lowering Black and Hispanic student populations at selective colleges.

Students for Fair Admissions' lawsuit against Harvard contends that the nation's oldest institution of higher learning's admissions standards dash the promise of a colorblind society and discriminate against Asian Americans.

During Monday's hearing on both cases, an attorney representing Harvard, Seth Waxman, dodged questions from Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito about why Harvard's scoring system to rate applicants consistently delivered low scores to Asian applicants.

"You refer to the personal score. And that's a score that Harvard gives based on character traits such as integrity, courage, kindness and empathy. But the record shows that Asian student applicants get the lowest personal scores of any other group," Alito said. "What accounts for that?

"It has to be that they really do lack integrity, courage, kindness and empathy to the same degree as students of other races. Or there has to be something wrong with this personal score," Alito said.

You have to understand Asian values

You could support Affirmative Action and see that the low personal score levied against Asians is racist. It plays to the harmful stereotype that Asians are meek and docile — one-dimensional people who are nerdy, test-taking machines.

To understand why Asian immigrant parents are obsessed with elite colleges is to trace back to their shared culture. Historically, education is the vehicle Asian families have used to exercise social mobility. The civil service examination — which system originated in China in the Sui dynasty between 581-618 CE — continues to play a large role in education and government in most Asian societies. In East Asian countries, college admissions are competitive and solely based on test scores. East Asian immigrants find it hard to understand how the American academy's generally holistic review system — which accounts for personality traits, extra-curricular activities and event athletic prowess — are accounted for in college admissions.

For Asians to fight affirmative action — instead of stereotyping completely — misses the mark, said Ying Lu, a Chinese immigrant and New York University professor, who lives in Princeton.

"It's about racism and Asian phobia," she said. "With or without affirmative action, the low ratings on character will still exist. The bias starts way earlier in school and goes way beyond college admissions."

Due to the stereotypes that Asians face in America, many families feel insecure, Lu said.

"Many see education, especially the social prestige tied to Ivy institutions, as their way of moving up socially," Lu said.

Lu supports affirmative action in college admissions. The Supreme Court, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, argued in 1978, upheld the use of race as one factor in choosing among qualified applicants for admission. That is now being tested in today's much more conservative Supreme Court.

A 2019 Pew Research report shows that 73% of Americans say colleges should not consider race or ethnicity when making decisions about student admissions. Just 7% say race should be a major factor in college admissions, while 19% say it should be a minor factor.

My daughter did check the Asian box in her college application and still got into her dream school. She was proud to be Asian — even if it meant rejection.

As a parent now funding tuition, room and board, I want my daughter to meet different types of people from different backgrounds. But I also believe that meritocracy and diversity can co-exist. I went to an entrance-exam high school in New York City that admitted students solely based on test scores and my graduating class in 1985 was racially diverse, with just as many Blacks and Latinos as whites and Asians. Most of us came from urban working families — many of them poor or in poverty. I believe all races can be high achievers.

There's a left-leaning ideology that Asians are white adjacent — meaning we generally come from privilege. They live in a limousine liberal bubble and haven't visited Chinatown tenements where entire families crowd into one-room apartment as adults work at factory and restaurant jobs.

There's also the silencing of critics. A North Jersey Korean American mom didn't want to go on the record on affirmative action, fearing that she would face the wrath of the cancel-culture mob.

Asians are being pitted against Black and brown people by conservative and liberal activists. Instead of forcing minority groups to fight for scraps, policy makers and educators alike should focus on the bigger problems in college admissions — too many mediocre students, themselves adjacent of privilege, are regularly admitted at America's elite colleges. They are the children of alumni, the children of faculty and recruited athletes.

In a 2013 study conducted internally, Harvard admitted that, if it were judging applicants on the sole basis of academic merit, its share of Asian American students would go from 19% to 43%. I can't imagine any other minority group being denied on the basis of subjective personal measures where liberals wouldn't call for the heads of the organization to be fired. Yet using the "model minority" trope, it's somehow acceptable when it comes to Asians.

Understanding that there are more Asian American applicants than other racial groups to elite colleges, I'd prefer that schools be upfront about admissions standards — rather than using nebulous metrics like personality scores to demean and devalue Asian Americans.

Mary Chao is a columnist focused on Asian communities for the USA TODAY Network's Atlantic Group. Email mchao@northjersey.com.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Race-based college admissions and its impact on Asian Americans