Cody's and The Price of Admission

I was in Berkeley over the weekend and saddened to learn that the Telegraph Ave location of Cody's Books has closed after 41 years. I spent countless hours there as a grad student, broadening my intellectual horizons thanks to the impeccable and wide-ranging tastes of their staff.

At their 4th street location (still in business, and right next to a Peet's Coffee), I had a chance to look at Daniel Golden's The Price of Admission, which I mentioned in an earlier post. Although most of the attention has gone to his expose of celebrity and super-rich admits, he devotes an entire chapter to the discrimination against Asians (the chapter is entitled something like Asians: the new Jews, recalling the Ivy League Jewish quotas in place as recently as 50 years ago). He recounts numerous cases of accomplished immigrant kids of humble origins (particularly a lot of Chinese or Korean strivers), inexplicably denied admission to top schools. He even collects crypto-racist quotes from anonymous admissions officers, to the effect of "these Asian kids are all alike -- strong scores and grades, science and music, but I can't really tell them apart." When will Asian-Americans wake up and defend their rights? There is enough evidence for a strong class action lawsuit.

Golden, a Harvard man, also devotes an entire chapter to extolling Caltech as a paragon of merit-based admisisons :-) The only problem is, he refers to it at the beginning of the chapter as just a small engineering school :-/