Michael Wang had stellar grades but was rejected while non-Asian classmates got in. Are top universities unfairly excluding Asian Americans?

Why are so many Asian Americans missing out on Ivy League schools?

Michael Wang was ranked second at James Logan high school in California, on GPA. He had a perfect score on his ACT, and a near-perfect score on his SAT. He was a national districts qualifier on the debate team. At the AMC 12 – a nationwide mathematics competition – he placed first in the state.

He performed with the San Francisco opera company, and sang in a choir that performed at Barack Obama’s first inauguration. He volunteered his free time to tutor underprivileged children.

So when all the Ivy League schools to which he applied rejected him out of hand, he was, understandably, upset.

“I felt I was unfairly treated,” he told the Guardian. “Of course receiving rejection letters was very sad, but at the same time I felt anger.”



Wang’s parents emigrated from China. So when he saw friends who were not Asian American but who did not have either his near-perfect grades nor his wide range of extracurricular activities being accepted to the same schools that rejected him, he wanted to know why.

“I felt like the question I was asking was: what more do you want from me?” he said. “I already did so much. I felt a sense of helplessness.”

It is a widespread sense. Experts say elite universities in the US are discriminating against Asian American candidates almost wholesale. This month, a coalition of 64 Asian American associations and civil rights groups, supported by students including Wang, filed a lawsuit against Harvard for what it sees as discriminatory admissions practices.

The complaint, which was filed on 15 May, alleges that Asian Americans, “because of their race, have been unfairly rejected by Harvard College because of such unlawful use of race in the admissions process”.

According to Daniel Golden, the author of The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges – and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates, SAT grades that would be perfectly adequate for a non-Asian student are colloquially called an “Asian fail”.

“The issue basically is that Asian Americans need better academic credentials than members of other groups to get into elite universities,” Golden said.

Edward Blum, president of Students for Fair Admissions, a group that fights for fairness in admissions processes and has a separate Harvard lawsuit pending, said that “at least 100” students who had been rejected from Harvard and other universities on the basis, he believed, of their race were on board with his group’s suit.

While the number of Asian American applicants to Harvard has almost tripled in the past two decades, Blum said, there were actually fewer Asian American students admitted to the university in 2012 than in 1992.

He said he had spoken to more than 700 students and parents, who “expressed their grave disappointment with Harvard and the other Ivy League schools when they see that their grades, their test scores, their athletic activities and their extracurricular activities are better and stronger than many of their classmates who are white, African American and Hispanic, who are admitted to the Ivy League schools whereas they are denied.”

He said the lawsuit was currently in discovery, and that while there was currently no “smoking gun” document showing that quotas exist, the data is clear.

“It’s a grave disappointment to this country for these young, often first-generation immigrant Asians to know that they have to do so much better than their classmates in order to be admitted to one of these competitive universities,” Blum said.

Both Blum and Golden compared the situation to that faced by Jewish prospective students in the first half of the 20th century.

“Jews were overrepresented in the student body compared to the population, but they were underrepresented compared to their academic credentials,” Golden said.

“Admissions officers in those days were more candid and said pretty clearly they felt it would be harmful to have too many Jews in the student body – I don’t think it’s all that different.

“And my feeling is,” he added, “some day people will look back and say, ‘How could we have let this discrimination against Asian Americans persist for so long?’”

Universities have long denied that they engage in such discrimination.

In a statement responding to the lawsuit, Harvard’s general counsel, Robert Iuliano, said the university “has demonstrated a strong record of recruiting and admitting Asian American students”, and pointed out that the percentage of admissions had increased from just over 17% to 21% in the last decade – much higher than the proportion of Asian Americans in the US population.

Other universities, such as Princeton – one of the institutions to which Wang applied – say they reject many students with perfect SAT scores. Most say the admissions process is multifaceted, taking into account letters of recommendation, extracurricular activities, athletic potential and legacy status – whether the applicant is the child or grandchild of a previous graduate.

This is also a zero-sum game. If Asian American student intake increases at Harvard, such students might be taking places from other ethnic minorities or students from disadvantaged backgrounds. There is not necessarily a conflict with affirmative action programs, but because most the application processes happen more or less in secret, it is impossible to say for sure that there is not.

Wang, who is 19, is currently a sophomore at Williams College in Massachusetts, majoring in political science and economics. He does not begrudge his non-Asian schoolfriends their place at university.

“I’m not saying that they don’t deserve to get into these schools,” he said. “They worked just as hard as I did. But I’m wondering why I didn’t get in.”

In 2013, he filed a complaint with the Department of Education’s office of civil rights, over his treatment by the Ivy League schools to which he applied. He is still waiting to hear back.

Wang said he has “no problem with positive discrimination – that’s the good part of affirmative action”.

“But if you’re using race as a minus factor – that, I don’t think is OK.”