From the Pope Center (emphasis added):
“In November 2006 Jian Li filed a discrimination complaint against Princeton University. He graduated in the top 1 percent of his high-school class and received a perfect score of 2400 on the SAT, as well as perfect or near-perfect scores on the SAT subject-matter tests in math, physics, and chemistry. But those achievements were not good enough for Princeton, which turned down his application, as did Harvard, MIT, Penn, and Stanford.
“Mr. Li was aware that his race worked against him, since most selective universities give preference to African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans over Asian, Arab, and European Americans. So he filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, arguing that students of Asian ancestry were judged by different criteria than some other groups were.
“Whatever the Obama administration decides to do with Mr. Li’s complaint (it is still ‘investigating’) there is no doubt that Asian Americans are discriminated against in university admissions. The studies published by my organization, the Center for Equal Opportunity, over the past 15 years have analyzed the admissions data obtained from the schools themselves through freedom-of-information requests, and have concluded that African Americans and, frequently, Latinos are given significant preferences over both whites and Asians.
Our study of the University of Michigan, for example, found that in 2005 an in-state male with no parent ties to the school, a 1240 cumulative SAT, and 3.2 high-school grade-point average had a 92 percent chance of admission if black and an 88 percent chance if Latino – but only a 14 percent chance if white and a mere 10 percent chance if Asian. Our study of six North Carolina schools – North Carolina State and the University of North Carolina campuses at Asheville, Chapel Hill, Charlotte, Greensboro, and Wilmington – found the same pattern.
“Students of Asian ancestry appear to face the same kind of treatment that Jewish students did decades ago. They’re held to higher standards than applicants from other groups in order to keep their numbers down and ensure more room for less academically gifted students from ‘underrepresented’ groups.”
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