In 2006, Chinese American student, Jian Li, filed a complaint against Princeton University for discriminating on the basis of race or national origin. Li scored a 2400 on the SAT and was 10 points shy from perfect scores on the physics, chemistry and calculus subject tests. However, he was denied admission by Princeton, Harvard, Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The probe shook the college admissions world, bringing to light the weaknesses of the admissions system.
Nearly five years later, the discussion reignited in the academia world as the U.S. Education Department probes complaints that Harvard University and Princeton University discriminated against Asian Pacific Americans in undergraduate admissions, once again bolstering common beliefs that APA children are held to higher academic standards than other ethnic groups, Bloomberg reported.
The complaints, filed by a top-performing Indian American candidate who was rejected for Harvard’s current freshman class and declined to reveal his name, are part of the Office for Civil Rights’ comprehensive review of top universities’ handling of APA candidates. Although the case was dropped and the probe ended in late February, the debate is far from over.
The issue of discrimination against APAs is hardly a new one. The practice was openly acknowledged after investigations against universities like Berkeley and Stanford in the 1980s and 1990s and has been embedded common assumptions by many students.
“This issue is not a surprise at all,” Sze Wing Yu, a freshman neurology and physiology major said. “So many Asians do well — you’ve got to pick and choose.” Yu was denied admission to University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University despite earning above average standardized test scores.
According to sociologist Thomas Espenshade’s “No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal (2009),” APAs must score 140 points more than whites, 270 points more than Hispanics, and 450 points more than African Americans out of the 1600 points allotted for the SAT math and reading sections.
These statistical differences highlight an ongoing and common issue in college admissions, especially among elite universities.
The percentage of APA undergraduates at Harvard is down from 18 percent in 2005–2006 to 16 percent in 2010–2011, the Ivy league’s website details.APAs comprise 15 percent of Yale undergraduates.
This University of Maryland falls in line with these numbers. Of the 27,000 students on campus, 14.85 percent are Asian, 12.15 percent Black, and over 56.6 percent White, U.S. News reports.
Its undergraduate admissions department maintains its nondiscrimination policy. “The university does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin,” its website details.
While APA students express outrage over such unfairness and call for color-blind admissions decisions, others believe such discrimination is an inevitable part of a college application process where diversity is valued and where policies like affirmative action exist.
Alan Xie, student member of Montgomery County’s Board of Education, thinks APAs may not be victims. “There isn’t a quota, but rather an understanding that a student body composed of 50 percent Asians will not be diverse or representative of America as a whole,” the top-performing high school senior said. Xie will be attending Harvard University in the fall.
Yu believes that such diversity lends dynamism to campus settings, but fails to fairly account for an individual’s academic and extracurricular success. “It seems superficial to be ‘diverse’ on purpose,” she said.
Analysts, however, cite that the reemergence of this issue reaffirms the need for transparency in the college decisions system, without which all of this is mere speculation.
Transparency or not, the issue of possible discrimination against APAs will make many applicants think twice while selecting their ethnicity on applications.
For Pakistani Adam Hussain, one of many high school seniors anxiously checking their mailboxes for college decisions, this thought of possible race-based discrimination opens the doors for wonder: did selecting Asian instead of Caucasian reduce his chances of admittance on his applications?
Despite the end of the investigation on Harvard and Princeton, the answer to this question, it seems, is still sealed.
