Anti-Asian bias resurfaces at UC system

Depicted: Sather Gate at UC Berkeley. Image by Wikimedia Commons

Supremely qualified Asian students still getting nixed by higher-ed admissions departments. Guess why? Orange County Register reports.

Despite a 4.2 high school grade-point average, near-perfect SATs, and the fact that he founded a software company while still a high school sophomore, Stanley Zhong was rejected by admissions officers at UC Berkeley, UCLA, Davis, San Diego and Santa Barbara – every University of California campus he applied to. Just 18 at the time, the Palo Alto, California, native shook off the disappointment and immediately earned a prestigious job as a Google programmer. A year later, he hasn’t given up on his dream: he’d still like to go back to school and eventually earn a doctorate in computer science.

To level the path to admissions, he’s suing the University of California system because, he says, race factored into his UC rejections.

Citing violations of the Fourteenth Amendment, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the California constitution, Zhong’s federal suit claims the UC system intentionally discriminates against Asian-American students in order to achieve racial quotas in undergraduate and graduate admissions.

Go Deeper:

• Legal experts: Beware "proxy discrimination" in wake of SCOTUS vindication of equality in college admissions
• Palo Alto CM: College admission discrimination against local Asian Americans has been obvious, widespread, unfair
• Mission creep strangles the local and statewide once-vaunted college system

And while asserting financial loss, emotional distress and reputational damage, he’s not even asking for money (beyond costs) in the suit – just that the UC system follow the law.

“We want to open up the whole secret box of what they are doing,” said Nan Zhong, Stanley’s father and president of the group Students Who Oppose Racial Discrimination (SWORD) that filed the suit and a similar action in Washington state. “They know exactly what they’re doing,” Zhong said.

Zhong’s suit illustrates what many have long understood: state university officials have circumvented Prop 209 with workarounds that allow university officials wide discretion in admissions. California’s high schools even got in on the game: they responded to declining literacy and math skills by simply lowering graduation standards. In 2021, with high school graduation rates rising and their test scores falling, the University of California system bowed to political pressure and scrapped the SAT and ACT for all applicants.

But eliminating the tests merely masks the state’s K–12 failure. Predictably, when students graduating from lousy high schools enter the state’s universities, they struggle or even drop out. They’re demoralized, and, when they leave, they’re poorer, too, thanks in part to student debt.

Following the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard, UC officials openly bragged about workarounds they believe are legal. They’ve even offered guidance to colleges and universities in other states hoping to circumvent the Harvard decision.

Read the whole thing here.

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