The buckets are defined by the US federal government [1], and then get used by educational institutions and employers as checkboxes on forms whose answers are used to compute diversity statistics. And the US federal government's "Asian" bucket is defined as "A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam". So that definition does explicitly include Thais and Filipinos
[1] https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html
You think, if Yale publishes these statistics on their website, that Yale’s admissions officers aren’t thinking about them during the admissions process?
Harvard
Tap on SAT by Ethnicity
Look at Pacific Islander vs Asian. That is as close as I have found so far.
Prior to 1997, the US government had a single bucket, "Asian or Pacific Islander". Since 1997, they've been split into two separate buckets (although it took some time for the bureaucracy to fully adopt the new grouping – the 2000 census still used the old classification, but the 2010 census adopted the new one.)
[1] https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html
The Asian bucket was better performing even before the latest wave of immigration. However, supposedly that declines with each generation such that by the 3rd generation, there isn’t much of a difference. Perhaps regression to mean?