There are two predominate meanings: the Census Bureau definition includes the Indian subcontinent along with East and Southeast Asia. The vernacular excludes the Indian subcontinent, though perhaps less so among the Indian community.

Afghanistan would not be included in either definition. Someone of Afghanistan ancestry (I'm purposefully avoiding distinguishing the various ethnicities in Afghanistan) would be classified as either Middle Eastern or Caucasian under the census definition as well as in the vernacular.

Census 2020 actually has Asian Indian as a distinct race choice but you're right for the past.

Right but what I'm getting at is that when people talk about "Asian Americans" in the context of college admissions, it seems like a coded way of talking about people of Chinese descent and not e.g. Filipinos.

Probably because majority of the applicants would be Chinese not Filipino.

What about people from India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh? They are distinctly Asian, yet also curiously absent from the public conception of Asian races. I think this shows how race has more to do with the viewer’s reading of race into the subject and especially physical characteristics of the subject perceived as racial traits by the viewer, and less to do with nationality or geography or citizenship. People call it like they see it, quickly and dimly in some cases.

It depends on whether you mean the American public or British public. In the UK Asian usually means the Indian subcontinent, but in the US it's East Asia. Has to do with where each region historically had most of their Asian immigration from.

I'm pretty confident that nobody in the world, no matter how they perceive race, would consider Jerry Yang and Sundar Pichai to be the same race.

But they're a lot easier to group together than any other races. Like most other races, they have similar cultural values (parents/family is the most important thing, education is a close second), they have some shared experience (India was under British control for a period of time, China and Southeast Asia were both at least under European influence, if not control (See: Vietnam)).

So how would you group them? People from the Middle East at least share a common religion, even with many North Africans, and are arguably a significant subgroup of "Asians" overall, but the average Indian is a lot closer to the average East Asian individual in general. Buddhist ideas are stemmed from Indian religious ideas, and plenty of shared cultural beliefs exist.

Why do we need to group them? It would be a very different society if group membership were opt-in similar to Circles in Google+. Reminds me of the society in Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Not that this would be a better society. But definitely would have different failure modes and novel solutions. You can get the whole book DRM free direct from the author below.

https://locusmag.com/2016/03/cory-doctorow-wealth-inequality...

https://craphound.com/category/down/

For purposes of college admissions, it includes everyone whose ethnicity is from an Asian country - East, Southeast and South Asians. Afghanistan is in a bit of a gray zone between the Middle East and Asia.

The middle east excluding Africa is still Asia in fact the Middle East was Asia before China was Asia.

70+% of humanity lives in Asia.

It's as far from a small homogeneous group you can get.