Feds probe alleged admission discrimination

An Indian-American student who graduated at the top of his high school class in California was rejected by both Princeton and Harvard University, according to Bloomberg News. The student filed a similar complaint against Harvard.

The allegation claims “that a student was denied admission to the University based on the student’s national origin/race, Asian-American,” according to a spokesman for the Department of Education, who declined to identify himself due to department policy.

University spokesperson Martin Mbugua denied that the University discriminated on the basis of race or origin.

“The University is aware of the complaint and will provide the Office for Civil Rights with information as it is requested,” Mbugua said in an email.

In 2006, Jian Li, who was at that time a freshman at Yale, also filed a federal civil rights complaint against Princeton for rejecting his application. He claimed that the admission procedures favored other groups — minority, legacy and athlete applicants — at the expense of Asian Americans.

Because the most recent Aug. 17 complaint raised “substantially identical allegations” to Li’s 2006 complaint — which prompted a federal review of the University’s admission process in 2008 — the agency is considering the Aug. 17 allegations “in conjunction with the ongoing compliance review,” the spokesman for the Department of Education said.

Mbugua said that this compliance review did not influence the recent percentage increase of Asian Americans in the undergraduate student body. Mbugua cited the 95-percent increase in applications over the past eight years and explained that the “composition of each incoming class tends to fluctuate based on the assessment of individual applications.”

The percentage of Asian Americans among Princeton undergraduate students has risen from 14.1 percent four years ago to 17.7 percent this year.

Sociology professor Thomas Espenshade has conducted research that shows that the applications of Asian Americans are held to a higher standard in the admission process. Espenshade’s 2009 book, “No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal,” revealed that Asian Americans need to score 140 points more than whites, 270 more than Hispanics and 450 more than African Americans on the math and reading sections of the SAT to be equally competitive in private college admissions.

Espenshade said in a phone interview that this inequity was due to what he calls “the Asian penalty,” or the “Asian disadvantage.”

“What we found was that when you hold everything else constant — so you take two applicants who are statistically equivalent, but one is white and one is Asian-American — the Asian-American applicant is at a competitive disadvantage in the admission process,” he explained.

Espenshade, though, said he is wary of using the term “discrimination.” Without all the data, he explained, it is impossible to control for all variables and satisfactorily compare two applicants.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Sociology major Charles Du ’13 also cautioned against using the word “discrimination.”

“I almost feel like you would use that word if you wanted to dismantle affirmative action,” he said. “Affirmative action is one of the most important things in our country for helping to improve this racial inequality and [the] racial hierarchy we have,” he added. Du is a former Street writer for The Daily Princetonian.

Espenshade also acknowledged the benefits of affirmative action.

“I think that most people [would] feel that the entering freshman class would be less interesting if you didn’t have lots of different types of people and presumably interacting with each other,” he said.

Asian American Students Association co-president Sarah Chen ’13 said that, while there is “pretty convincing evidence” that Asians encounter more difficulty in admissions than other groups, the primary concern is the “massive stereotyping” that rises from discussions of race in college admissions.

“We have to somehow fight this idea that all Asian students are only qualified in one way and that Asian students hurt a college community because of their perceived ‘nerdiness,’ she said. Chen is also a senior writer for the ‘Prince.’

Still, Chen said, “I do have faith that the college process is a holistic process that takes into account a number of different factors.”