November 11, 2006

PAGE ONE

Is Admissions Bar

Higher for Asians

At Elite Schools?

School Standards Are Probed

Even as Enrollment Increases;

A Bias Claim at Princeton

By DANIEL GOLDEN

November 11, 2006; Page A1

Though Asian-Americans constitute only about 4.5% of the U.S. population, they typically account for anywhere from 10% to 30% of students at many of the nation's elite colleges.

Even so, based on their outstanding grades and test scores, Asian-Americans increasingly say their enrollment should be much higher -- a contention backed by a growing body of evidence.

Whether elite colleges give Asian-American students a fair shake is becoming a big concern in college-admissions offices. Federal civil-rights officials are investigating charges by a top Chinese-American student that he was rejected by Princeton University last spring because of his race and national origin.

Meanwhile, voter attacks on admissions preferences for other minority groups -- as well as research indicating colleges give less weight to high test scores of Asian-American applicants -- may push schools to boost Asian enrollment. Tuesday, Michigan voters approved a ballot measure striking down admissions preferences for African-Americans and Hispanics. The move is expected to benefit Asian applicants to state universities there -- as similar initiatives have done in California and Washington.

If the same measure is passed in coming years in Illinois, Missouri and Oregon -- where opponents of such preferences say they plan to introduce it -- Asian-American enrollment likely would climb at selective public universities in those states as well.

During the Michigan campaign, a group that opposes affirmative action released a study bolstering claims that Asian students are held to a higher standard. The study, by the Center for Equal Opportunity, in Virginia, found that Asian applicants admitted to the University of Michigan in 2005 had a median SAT score of 1400 on the 400-1600 scale then in use. That was 50 points higher than the median score of white students who were accepted, 140 points higher than that of Hispanics and 240 points higher than that of blacks.

Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, said universities are "legally vulnerable" to challenges from rejected Asian-American applicants.

Princeton, where Asian-Americans constitute about 13% of the student body, faces such a challenge. A spokesman for the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights said it is investigating a complaint filed by Jian Li, now a 17-year-old freshman at Yale University. Despite racking up the maximum 2400 score on the SAT and 2390 -- 10 points below the ceiling -- on SAT2 subject tests in physics, chemistry and calculus, Mr. Li was spurned by three Ivy League universities, Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Office for Civil Rights initially rejected Mr. Li's complaint due to "insufficient" evidence. Mr. Li appealed, citing a white high-school classmate admitted to Princeton despite lower test scores and grades. The office notified him late last month that it would look into the case.

His complaint seeks to suspend federal financial assistance to Princeton until the university "discontinues discrimination against Asian-Americans in all forms by eliminating race preferences, legacy preferences, and athlete preferences." Legacy preference is the edge most elite colleges, including Princeton, give to alumni children. The Office for Civil Rights has the power to terminate such financial aid but usually works with colleges to resolve cases rather than taking enforcement action.

Mr. Li, who emigrated to the U.S. from China as a 4-year-old and graduated from a public high school in Livingston, N.J., said he hopes his action will set a precedent for other Asian-American students. He wants to "send a message to the admissions committee to be more cognizant of possible bias, and that the way they're conducting admissions is not really equitable," he said.

Princeton spokeswoman Cass Cliatt said the university is aware of the complaint and will provide the Office for Civil Rights with information it has requested. Princeton has said in the past that it considers applicants as individuals and doesn't discriminate against Asian-Americans.

When elite colleges began practicing affirmative action in the late 1960s and 1970s, they gave an admissions boost to Asian-American applicants as well as blacks and Hispanics. As the percentage of Asian-Americans in elite schools quickly overtook their slice of the U.S. population, many colleges stopped giving them preference -- and in some cases may have leaned the other way.

In 1990, a federal investigation concluded that Harvard University admitted Asian-American applicants at a lower rate than white students despite the Asians' slightly stronger test scores and grades. Federal investigators also found that Harvard admissions staff had stereotyped Asian-American candidates as quiet, shy and oriented toward math and science. The government didn't bring charges because it concluded it was Harvard's preferences for athletes and alumni children -- few of whom were Asian -- that accounted for the admissions gap.

The University of California came under similar scrutiny at about the same time. In 1989, as the federal government was investigating alleged Asian-American quotas at UC's Berkeley campus, Berkeley's chancellor apologized for a drop in Asian enrollment. The next year, federal investigators found that the mathematics department at UCLA had discriminated against Asian-American graduate school applicants. In 1992, Berkeley's law school agreed under federal pressure to drop a policy that limited Asian enrollment by comparing Asian applicants against each other rather than the entire applicant pool.

Asian-American enrollment at Berkeley has increased since California voters banned affirmative action in college admissions. Berkeley accepted 4,122 Asian-American applicants for this fall's freshman class -- nearly 42% of the total admitted. That is up from 2,925 in 1997, or 34.6%, the last year before the ban took effect. Similarly, Asian-American undergraduate enrollment at the University of Washington rose to 25.4% in 2004 from 22.1% in 1998, when voters in that state prohibited affirmative action in college admissions.

The University of Michigan may be poised for a similar leap in Asian-American enrollment, now that voters in that state have banned affirmative action. The Center for Equal Opportunity study found that, among applicants with a 1240 SAT score and 3.2 grade point average in 2005, the university admitted 10% of Asian-Americans, 14% of whites, 88% of Hispanics and 92% of blacks. Asian applicants to the university's medical school also faced a higher admissions bar than any other group.

Julie Peterson, spokeswoman for the University of Michigan, said the study was flawed because many applicants take the ACT test instead of the SAT, and standardized test scores are only one of various tools used to evaluate candidates. "I utterly reject the conclusion" that the university discriminates against Asian-Americans, she said. Asian-Americans constitute 12.6% of the university's undergraduates.

Jonathan Reider, director of college counseling at San Francisco University High School, said most elite colleges' handling of Asian applicants has become fairer in recent years. Mr. Reider, a former Stanford admissions official, said Stanford staffers were dismayed 20 years ago when an internal study showed they were less likely to admit Asian applicants than comparable whites. As a result, he said, Stanford strived to eliminate unconscious bias and repeated the study every year until Asians no longer faced a disadvantage.

Last month, Mr. Reider participated in a panel discussion at a college-admissions conference. It was titled, "Too Asian?" and explored whether colleges treat Asian applicants differently.

Precise figures of Asian-American representation at the nation's top schools are hard to come by. Don Joe, an attorney and activist who runs Asian-American Politics, an Internet site that tracks enrollment, puts the average proportion of Asian-Americans at 25 top colleges at 15.9% in 2005, up from 10% in 1992.

Still, he said, he is hearing more complaints "from Asian-American parents about how their children have excellent grades and scores but are being rejected by the most selective colleges. It appears to be an open secret."

Mr. Li, who said he was in the top 1% of his high-school class and took five advanced placement courses in his senior year, left blank the questions on college applications about his ethnicity and place of birth. "It seemed very irrelevant to me, if not offensive," he said. Mr. Li, who has permanent resident status in the U.S., did note that his citizenship, first language and language spoken at home were Chinese.

Along with Yale, he won admission to the California Institute of Technology, Rutgers University and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. He said four schools -- Princeton, Harvard, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania -- placed him on their waiting lists before rejecting him. "I was very close to being accepted at these schools," he said. "I was thinking, had my ethnicity been different, it would have put me over the top. Even if race had just a marginal effect, it may have disadvantaged me."

He ultimately focused his complaint against Princeton after reading a 2004 study by three Princeton researchers concluding that an Asian-American applicant needed to score 50 points higher on the SAT than other applicants to have the same change of admission to an elite university.

"As an Asian-American and a native of China, my chances of admission were drastically reduced," Mr. Li claims in his complaint.

Write to Daniel Golden at dan.golden@wsj.com1

URL for this article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116321461412620634.html

Hyperlinks in this Article:

(1) mailto:dan.golden@wsj.com

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=524845&forum_id=2#6975154)

There is pretty much no excuse for requiring Asian applicants to score 50 points higher than whites or TWO-HUNDRED FORTY points higher than blacks in order to get into a school. Asians faced most of the historical biases that blacks and hispanics did (e.g. internment during WW2). They should not be punished for valuing hard work and academic achievement as a culture.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=524845&forum_id=2#6983103)

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2006/11/13/news/16544.shtml

ADMISSIONS

Rejected applicant alleges bias against Asians

By Kate Carroll

Princetonian Staff Writer

Yale freshman Jian Li has filed a federal civil rights complaint against Princeton for rejecting his application for admission, claiming the University discriminated against him because he is Asian.

The complaint, which was filed with the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights on Oct. 25, alleges that the University's admissions procedures are biased because they advantage other minority groups, namely African-Americans and Hispanics, legacy applicants and athletes at the expense of Asian-American applicants.

"We've been notified of the complaint and asked to provide information to the Office of Civil Rights, and the University will provide the Office of Civil Rights with the information that it has requested," University spokeswoman Cass Cliatt '96 said yesterday. "But I will say that we do not believe that the case has merit."

The case, first reported this weekend by The Wall Street Journal, injects new life into a longstanding debate surrounding affirmative action and whether race can or should be a factor in college admissions. Li's minority status adds a new twist to the story, however, since previous complaints about universities' racial preference policies have been filed by white students alleging bias.

Li cites a recent study conducted by two Princeton professors as evidence for his case. The study, published in June 2005, concluded that removing consideration of race would have little effect on white students, but that Asian students would fill nearly four out of every five places in admitted classes that are currently taken by African-American or Hispanic students.

Current legal precedent on the question of racial preference grew out of two lawsuits filed in 2003 against the University of Michigan. In those cases, the Supreme Court ruled that colleges could use racial preferences benefiting underrepresented groups like African-Americans and Hispanics, but that quotas, points and other "mechanistic" policies are unconstitutional.

In Li's case, however, "you have a minority candidate, but a minority candidate from a category that is not regarded by the [court] as an underrepresented category," University politics professor and noted constitutional scholar Robert George said. "This is a minority candidate who is saying, 'I don't want my race to be counted for me or against me, but for my race not to be counted against me, it is important that no race be counted in any way that reduces my chances of admission.' "

"So you have two different categories of minority whose interests are allegedly in conflict."

The question now is whether a newly configured court — which now includes conservative justice Samuel Alito'72 — could reverse its earlier decision and deem all racial preferences in the college admissions process unconstitutional.

Li said in a phone interview yesterday that people have misconstrued his motives for filing the complaint. "I'm fine here," he said of being at Yale. "I'm just doing this because I want to do something about the situation. I want to bring attention to it."

Currently, Li said, colleges discriminate against Asian-Americans on the basis of their ethnicity or race. "I'm not saying that people with the highest SAT scores should be admitted to universities," he said. "Lots of things should be considered beyond that, but I don't think race should be one of them."

Li, who has a perfect 2400 SAT score and near-perfect SAT II scores, was rejected this past year from five of the nine universities he applied to — Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania — and accepted to four: CalTech, Rutgers, Cooper Union and Yale.

Princeton maintains that its admission policies do not discriminate against Asian-American or members of any other race. "We treat each application individually and we do not discriminate on the base of race or national origin," Cliatt said. "To the contrary, we seek to enroll and do enroll classes that are diverse by a multitude of measures."

With thousands of excellent applicants competing for a little over 1,000 spots, the process of selecting a freshman class involves difficult decisions, Cliatt said. Only about half of the applicants with perfect SAT scores, for instance, were admitted last year, she said.

A study published in October by the Center for Equal Opportunity, a group which advocates colorblind admission and says colleges are "legally vulnerable" to challenges from Asian students, found significant differences in the median SAT score of admitted students from various racial groups at the University of Michigan.

In 2005, the median SAT score for Asian students was 1400 points, out of a possible 1600 under the test's old scoring regimen. The score for white students was 50 points lower, while the scores for African-American and Hispanic students were 240 and 140 points lower, respectively.

The University of Michigan has publicly dismissed that study's methodology and dismissed any claim that it discriminates against minority students. It remains unclear whether there is a difference in the median SAT scores of various ethnic groups at Princeton.

George, a former presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, said that the complaint deserves attention because of the new questions it raises about racial preference in higher education.

He noted that the complaint comes at a time of change at the nation's highest court, with Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's recent retirement and the appointment of the more conservative Alito. O'Connor's votes, siding with the liberal justices in one case, were crucial in maintaining the constitutionality of informal racial preference policies while rejecting formal systems.

One of the "things to keep your eye on," George said, is "how would the courts interpret the Michigan Law School decision, beginning with the lower courts, but then going all the way to the Supreme Court, where the complaining student is himself a member of a minority group, only an allegedly non-underrepresented minority group."

"Will the Supreme Court, with Justice O'Connor leaving and Justice Alito coming on, uphold or reaffirm the Michigan Law School decision or overturn it?" he asked, referring to the case in which the court upheld an informal racial preference system.

Reaction at Princeton

Princeton students from Li's high school, Livingston High School, in Livingston, N.J., argued that the complaint was unnecessary.

"I think it's absolutely ludicrous, considering that in the past few years the people that my high school has sent to Princeton are 50 percent Asian," Chen Zhang '08 said. "I think it's ridiculous."

Angela Wu '10, one of Li's high school classmates who read the Journal story over the weekend, agreed. "I think it's completely unwarranted," she said.

Li and Wu both emigrated from China to the United States when they were four and attended the same high school. While Wu was admitted to the University, however, Li was not.

"You could basically replace my name in the sentence, and I did come to Princeton," Wu said. "That's what really struck me when I read it."

Carra Glatt '09, who also attended high school with Li, said he contacted her over the summer as he was collecting GPA and SAT scores from fellow high school students. Li told her that he intended to use the information to show discrimination had taken place, but Glatt refused to provide the data.

"I felt like it just played into the idea that all that mattered in the process was SAT scores and GPAs, and I felt that that wasn't accurate in my case," Glatt said. "I didn't want to perpetuate that idea."

Glatt said that while she understands Li's concerns, she disagrees with his reasoning. "I think the approach he is taking to assume that he is entitled to admission to a particular school is inherently flawed. I don't think on an individual level he was discriminated against."

Lead-up to the complaint

Li's decision to file a complaint against Princeton instead of the five other universities that rejected him was "kind of arbitrary," he said.

"I think that this kind of discrimination pervades all elite universities so I just chose one as a test case thinking if something comes of it, it will send a message for all the universities," he said.

He also came closer to admittance to Princeton than some of the other universities he was rejected from. "Princeton was one of the ones who waitlisted me so I was pretty close — I was on the cusp. Even if race played a marginal effect in my decision it would have done something," he said.

Also influencing his decision was the 2004 Princeton study conducted by sociology professor Thomas Espenshade and statistical programmer and data archivist Chang Chung.

The article, published in the journal Social Science Quarterly and based on applications over three years to "three highly selective private research universities," concluded that Asian-Americans suffer the most from affirmative action.

Abolishing the system would decrease the percentage of admitted Hispanics and African-Americans, have relatively little effect on the percentage of white students admitted and would increase the number of Asian-American students admitted by a third, making it to 23 percent from 18 percent.

Espenshade was unavailable for an interview yesterday but said in an email that "academic merit is only one kind of merit that elite college admission officers consider when deciding whom to accept."

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is currently reviewing the information provided by Princeton. If the parties decide not to resolve their differences and the government finds that there is sufficient evidence that the law has been violated, "OCR will negotiate with the institution to reach a voluntary agreement that settles the complaint," according to the group's website.

If the office rules in Li's favor, he can request monetary damages, George said. "But I suspect that the more likely remedy in a case like this would be an injunction requiring the admission of the student who had successfully sued."

The University can also be required to revise its policy to prevent this type of discrimination, George added.

"Theoretically, affirmative action is supposed to take spots away from white applicants and redistribute them to underrepresented minorities," Li said. "What's happening is one segment of the minority population is losing places to another segment of minorities, namely Asians to underrepresented minorities."

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=524845&forum_id=2#6982939)