I'm married into a first generation Asian family and this is a constant topic of conversation on that side, especially now that their kids are getting ready for college.

The problem ultimately stems from a huge wave of mostly Korean and Chinese immigrants (but by extension other East Asian and Pacific Island nations get penalized as well), who grew up in poor countries (or when their countries were poor), suddenly finding themselves with enough money to immigrate to the U.S. and "escape". They put down roots, work their tails off and start having families.

They don't want their kids to have to struggle like they did (and they want to ensure they set themselves up well in retirement), but they have incredibly unsophisticated views of what 'success' means in America (often as a result of working so much they never really had a chance to integrate well into their adopted country).

However, they understand passing tests, having deep cultural histories around test taking to get ahead in life. So they look for the most prestigious work you can test into.

And bam, at the intersection of hard work, prestige signaling and test taking you get a fairly limited set of occupations, which these parents instinctively laser beam their kids at.

Good schools want extracurriculars? No problem! Let's use the prestige button on that, prestigious schools must want the most prestigious extracurriculars, and those are obviously piano and violin (and sometimes opera). Let's toss in some prestige sports as well, and now these kids and splitting time studying endlessly for tests to become a doctor or lawyer, practicing piano/violin and playing tennis/golf/figure skating.

Repeat until the parents think they're maximizing the fitting function for university acceptance and you end up with entire social networks and minor industries around SAT test taking, piano and violin teachers and tennis/golf/figure skating coaches.

And you know what? For a very long time this worked. Asian Americans have been extraordinarily and consistently "successful", far over-represented in university admissions and in select professions.

But there was no secret, it was literally hard screaming, crying, kicking work. There's no cheating. While their other raced peers studied for an hour every night before turning on the XBox. They studied till midnight, every night, and then spent all day Saturday at private school, then studied till midnight again, then spent most of the day on Sundays doing prestige extracurriculars. Their parents were often poor, working crap triple-D jobs, or triple shifts at convenience stores. They lived frugally and invested every single drop of blood in their kids. Even if they were often wrong headed about how they did it, it worked and anybody can do it.

But on the university side, as parents start to find the optimal mix to acceptance, application packets start to look not just virtually identical, but absolutely identical.

Imagine you're tasked with figuring out which 10 of 1000 applications all with the last names Kim, Chin, Hu, Lee, Park, Wang or Choi should be accepted:

- All have 4.0 GPAs

- All have AP degrees from High School

- All have extracurriculars that are selected from the set of {violin, piano, opera, tennis, golf}

- All went to the best High Schools in their respective areas

- All submit essays with some story about their parent's difficult immigration, usually involving stories of poverty and unbelievable work hours in menial jobs. Maybe with some kind of "escape from the communists" or "swimming to safety across Hong Kong Harbor" or something. I know 3 Chinese Americans who's parents have almost identical "swimming escape from China and lived in Kowloon Walled City for 3 years before making it to America" stories.

- All have perfect or near perfect SAT scores

What the universities are of course realizing is that it becomes a random sample at this point. There's no criteria they can use to discern one 'Kim' from another 'Lee'...every applicant literally looks exactly the same. There's no "fair" way to select from this applicant pool, and this pool has quite literally self-grouped.

So, clumsily, the universities are trying to throw big rocks in the pool. These are starting to no longer accept the products of this application optimum, especially if they have Asian-American last names.

It's getting heard, and in the parts of the Asian American community I'm privy to, mothers are stressed out that all those years of forcing their kids to master Bach aren't going to count for much. They're in a mad scramble to figure out the next optimized path, but the universities are smart to it now.

They also don't come from cultures where the notion of cultivating meaningful hobbies is well understood. My niece loves waterpainting and flower arranging. Gifts of art supplies and arrangement books are met with skepticism and sometimes scorn. She won't have time to be forced to practice piano if she's dilly-dallying around with another painting! Yet, a portfolio of prints and some awards from local flower shows would be exactly what the universities are now looking for. The idea that maybe she should be encouraged to develop her own innate interests is lost while he parents look for the next magical prestige signalling instrument for her to be forced to study. My other family back in the home country are trying to understand it better, but they still haven't gotten over the idea that being "a hobby photographer" doesn't have to mean spending $25,000 on pro-level camera equipment.

Coincidentally, the second generation of Asian Americans are having kids and those kids are often growing up without all this mess, but still affected by the continued wave of new first generations. Now Rebecca Choi, who's parents didn't push her through the Harvard funnel is getting impacted by Hee Soo who did. But Rebecca is interested in becoming a writer, has a 3.2 GPA, stinks at math, dyes her hair pink, listens to rock music, is trying to learn to play guitar, volunteers as a drill coach for her local girl's basketball league. Had a pregnancy scare her junior year. Has experimented with drugs a little. Her SATs were above average, but not spectacular.

If she was another minority she might make it into a tier-1 school. If she was white she probably wouldn't. But now because Hee Soo's parents tiger mom'd her through the perceived application optimum, Rebecca, for no other reason than being a Choi, gets a 50 point application deduction. Does this mean the system worked? Rebecca would just be an average white kid if she was Rebecca Smith.