South Asian American applicants to prestigious U.S. schools 50% less likely to attend than white peers, study finds

South Asian American students applying to Ivy League and other prestigious schools may face worse odds than their white peers, according to a recent study published in Nature.

South Asian American students applying to the most prestigious universities in the country may face worse odds than their white peers, a new study finds. 

The report, published last week in the science journal Nature, compared Asian American and white applicants for admission to Ivy League and other prestigious schools who had comparable grades, test scores and extracurricular activities. It found that Asian Americans who applied had 28% lower odds of attending the schools than their white counterparts. 

But the disparity for South Asian students was even more pronounced, with their odds of attending being 49% lower than white applicants’. East and South East Asian applicants both had a 17% lower chance of attending than white applicants with similar merits.

A significant factor could be legacy admissions, said Josh Grossman, a Stanford University Ph.D. candidate in computational science, who was one of the authors of the report.

“We see these really absurd gaps between legacy students and nonlegacy,” he said. “South Asian students, of the four groups we consider in the paper, are the least likely to have a parent who attended an Ivy-11 school.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/south-asians-ivy-league-schools-rcna141200

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