If you break into admission statistics to elite colleges and universities you discover a pattern of “disparate impact” (as the civil rights term of art goes) against Asians. It appears Asians are being actively discriminated against just as Jews were for decades.

The New York Times reported in November:

To get into the top schools, they need SAT scores that are about 140 points higher than those of their white peers. In 2008, over half of all applicants to Harvard with exceptionally high SAT scores were Asian, yet they made up only 17 percent of the entering class (now 20 percent). Asians are the fastest-growing racial group in America, but their proportion of Harvard undergraduates has been flat for two decades.

Yesterday the Los Angeles Times made the ugliness of this discrimination even more vivid:

Lee’s next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant’s race is worth. She points to the first column. African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says. She points to the second column. “Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.” The last column draws gasps. Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission. “Do Asians need higher test scores? Is it harder for Asians to get into college? The answer is yes,” Lee says. “Zenme keyi,” one mother hisses in Chinese. How can this be possible?

It’s possible because today’s racial liberalism isn’t about equality, merit, and “diversity” at all, but has become a straight out racial spoils system. When more Asians start to figure this out, I suspect they’ll change their voting habits.