This is a ‘part 1′ because this is a very big very thorny issue which concerns affirmative action and much more. As such I will in the near future be writing a ‘part 2′ which directly addresses any AA-related concerns I’m having about this topic here… but for now, my understanding of the issue:

Pulitzer prize winner Daniel Golden wrote a piece about “whether elite colleges give Asian-American students a fair shake” in last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. It focused specifically on the case of one Jian Li, a Chinese permanent legal resident who went to a NJ public school having emigrated at age 4. Mr. Li recently filed a complaint against Princeton University for rejecting him through the Dept. Education’s Office for Civil Rights; he is currently a freshman at Yale. (n.b., this is not a tort case, it is a complaint about what Li feels was discrimination.)

This is an issue that throws a lot of people off sometimes, because some people confuse a) Affirmative action with b) race-based discrimination. Private universities in the United States are not required to have the same ‘objective’ qualifications that businesses or real estate have; race discrimination is only happening if there a pattern (in this case acceptance / rejection) unique to one race or ethnicity on the basis of unfair (nonstandard) comparisons–hence the problem with Berkeley’s law program back in the early 90s, which took Asians out of the general pool and compared them against each other.


A quote from the article to start us off here:

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.

That more or less sets the stage, but doesn’t answer my biggest question about Mr. Li’s claims: Jian Li had a 2400 SAT I and excellent SAT IIs, but what else was there? He had good grades, so he was clearly academically qualified. Yet how else does he compare to this white applicant from his school that was accepted? Reading about this story, I just want more facts, and I can’t seem to find them anywhere. While considering the subjective criteria that Princeton and other elite U.S. schools use to gauge applicants, numbers alone are not enough to form a complete comparison.

Next question: Why did Li sue Princeton, rather than Penn, Stanford, MIT, or Harvard, all of which rejected him (unfairly, he felt) after wait listing him?

“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 chance of admission to an elite university.”

I’ve read that study; it’s a perfectly good study, but it doesn’t negate the fact that at the ‘top-tier’ American schools stats are not the only thing being considered. This is why when affirmative action is banned in some public institutions, notably the University of California (which we have data for) the Asian-American enrollment goes up–these schools rely on stats alone much more than do these top schools.

So, here is what it looks like to me, at first glance: Li has a 2400 SAT and great stats overall, and is waitlisted at then rejected by lots of good schools before two also very great schools accept him (Yale and Caltech). What happens next I don’t understand. HYPSM are known to reject plenty of perfect scorers–where exactly the basis for discrimination comes in I don’t understand, because these schools do not operate on the basis of stats alone. They care about extracurricular and leadership and all these things. I can see a plausible concern in general, but not one stemming from his case alone.

“Ah,” you say, “they do care about those things, but perhaps they just use them as an excuse or subjective ‘reason’ to reject those applicants they feel are undesirable in too great a quantity–perhaps Asians are now in the same position that Jews once were!” See again Malcomb Gladwell’s old piece in the New Yorker on modern elite college admissions which alludes back to Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen (I keep plugging that book because it keeps being good!). We had an assembly speaker who brought this up when discussing bias in objective hiring–people find “excuses” to hire one candidate (towards the bias, i.e. Caucasian) regardless of whether that particular ‘excuse’ was being sought after in the applicant process (i.e., experience, or skill, or whatever difference can be found between the two candidates). But…

Not necessarily. Show me proof–show me the memos and letters we have from old college presidents and admissions folks saying that there were too many Jews enrolling–show me that for Asian-Americans. I don’t have the evidence of a technical, legal discrimination–though I am happy to see there are sort of inquiries being made about it.

However, this really only scratches the surface, because this is only looking at the purest facts I could find about the issue. There is a bigger issue–the social ramifications of this question, and how Mr. Li’s complaint jives with other proposals, initiatives, lobbying groups and so forth. The internet is buzzing about this article, actually. I’ll be writing more about it, but I was just trying to skirt the ‘AA good / bad’ question in this post and just talk about whether or not I thought Li necessarily had a case here. As an African American Jew, I think I have a slightly different perspective on this matter than Mr. Li or some of my peers. You’ll just have to wait a little bit to hear it…