the Sam Jackson College Experience

I got an e-mail from Jian Li last week who found my site and was happy to see I hadn’t randomly trashed him after reading his story. I was careful about how I interpreted what I read about his case because it did seem like we weren’t getting a lot of the important facts, and lo and behold the subject of those stories writes in and confirms my suspicions there. It was an interesting note which I have here reproduced.

Be sure to have a look at the two stories I wrote about him and his complaint back in November 2006:

WSJ asks: ‘Is Admissions Bar Higher for Asians At Elite Schools?’ [part 1]

WSJ asks: ‘Is Admissions Bar Higher for Asians At Elite Schools?’ [part 2]

E-mail pasting begins here.

Jian Li, xyz@Yale.edu: 1/25/2007 11:12 PM

Hey Sam. I read your first blog entry about me. It raises the issue of subjective admissions criteria, and you’ve written, “I can see a plausible concern in general, but not one stemming from his case alone.”

I actually wholeheartedly agree with you on that point!

A reader might be under the unfortunate and incorrect impression that I had deduced admissions discrimination as a result of my case alone. Such a deduction would not only be egotistical but misinformed – colleges regularly reject non-Asian applicants with perfect SATs. Rather, I came to the conclusion of discrimination before I even applied to college, while I was reading the Espenshade study (link). I filed this complaint not because I thought I deserved to be admitted to Princeton (I actually think they may very well have rejected to me had I applied as a white student), but because I felt that applicants deserve to be evaluated without regard to race.

Because Dan Golden only wrote about my SATs, a reader such as yourself may also be under the unfortunate and incorrect impression that I think scores should be the sole basis for admission and that I had nothing beyond my scores. On the contrary, I think that it is very important for colleges to look at things
beyond SATs such as leadership (though, as the history of Jewish admissions suggests, we must not let fuzzy criteria be an occasion for discrimination). I
think my extracurriculars were pretty good – my complaint listed state-wide rankings in math and physics competitions, 168 hours of community service
during a trip to Costa Rica paid for by a merit scholarship, captaining my high school’s high-ranking academic team, etc. – but again, the rejection of
someone of my personal qualifications would not prove discrimination, since colleges regularly reject highly-qualified non-Asian applicants. However, the
Espenshade study does prove discrimination, as does the increased enrollment of Asian-Americans at UC Berkeley after the passage of Proposition 209.

Thanks for reading this
-Jian Li

* * *

Thanks again for writing in to help clarify that confusion surrounding the complaint, and for letting me publish the e-mail on the blog. Hopefully some of my visitors will read through and get a better sense of things, maybe spread the word a bit… the media didn’t do very much worthwhile digging the first time around, I don’t think, which is too bad.

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.

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