Interviewing Asian kids for college

I've been assigned two young men of Asian -- seemingly Chinese -- descent to interview for Yale. With the lawsuits alleging cultural bias against the elite colleges in admissions, a cultural bias specifically against very high-achieving Asian kids, this is obviously slippery territory for me. I am ground zero for this conflict, as an older, white alum with a very strong cultural identification with the traditional liberal arts model of which I view Yale as an exemplar. Although I work with numbers and finance, I am not in favor of the kind of quantified reductivism that values anything strictly in terms of metrics and numbers, in this case grades and SAT scores.

So I have to be very cognizant of these biases I bring to the table and remember that these are young people I'm talking to, unformed, with their whole lives ahead of them, that I'm sure they've worked their asses off to have gotten through the fat stacks of applicants just to get interviews. It's fun talking to young people and hearing where they are at, what they are up to, and where they want to go. As the uncle of a couple of kids with a Chinese father, each of whom is very individual, I know all these kids have something distinct and vital within them. It's my job to find it, if it's not really obvious.