U.S. Widens Princeton Bias Probe
Inquiry Is Focusing
On the Admissions
Of Asian-Americans
By JOHN HECHINGER
June 12, 2008; Page A3
Princeton University said the Education Department broadened its investigation of possible discrimination against Asian-American applicants.
In 2006, federal officials began investigating a claim from a student that Princeton rejected him because of his race and national origin. The student, 19-year-old Jian Li, initially enrolled at Yale University and is now at Harvard. Princeton says it didn't discriminate against Mr. Li.
Jim Bradshaw, an Education Department spokesman, said the agency closed its investigation of Mr. Li's complaint in January "after reviewing preliminary data and statistics from the university" and instead initiated a broader "compliance review" to determine whether Princeton discriminates against Asian-Americans. Mr. Bradshaw said the review "covers the original complaint" and "in no way implies" that the agency "has made a determination on the merits of the complaint."
Princeton said the inquiry would focus on the class of 2010, to which Mr. Li had applied. The university disclosed information about the new inquiry late Tuesday and said it welcomed the chance to explain its admissions process to officials.
The inquiry comes as many Asian-Americans families complain that the nation's elite universities set a higher bar for their children than for other students, effectively setting caps on the number of admissions granted to a high-achieving minority group.
The treatment of Asian-American applicants by top universities has a long and bitter history. In 1992, the law school at the University of California at Berkeley agreed under federal pressure to drop a policy that limited Asian enrollment by comparing Asian applicants against each other rather than the entire applicant pool. Two years earlier, a federal government investigation found inequities at Harvard but didn't bring charges.
Mr. Li called the expanded inquiry "great news for those opposed to the use of racial preferences in college admissions" and said he "had hoped from the start that the scope of the complaint would be much wider than my individual case."
Mr. Li, who immigrated to the U.S. from China as a 4-year-old, scored the maximum 2,400 on the SAT college admissions test, and registered a combined 2,390 -- 10 points below the maximum -- on three SAT2 subject tests, in physics, chemistry and calculus. He was spurned by three Ivy League universities, as well as Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• Is Admissions Bar Higher for Asians At Elite Schools?
11/11/06The Education Department's civil-rights office initially rejected Mr. Li's complaint, saying the evidence was insufficient. Mr. Li successfully appealed, citing a white classmate from his public high school in Livingston, N.J., who was admitted to Princeton despite lower test scores and grades. Mr. Li's complaint was covered in a 2006 page-one Wall Street Journal article.
Princeton said 17,564 students applied to the class of 2010 and 1,231 enrolled. The university said 14% of its freshmen were Asian-American that year and in the most recent one. The school said it admitted only half of applicants with maximum SAT scores. About 5% of the U.S. population is Asian-American.
"We treat each applicant individually," said Princeton spokeswoman Cass Cliatt. "We don't discriminate on the basis of race and to the contrary, we seek to enroll classes that are diverse by a wide variety of measures."
