Despite a 4.42 GPA at Palo Alto's Gunn High School and a near-perfect 1590 on the SAT, Stanley Zhong was rejected last year by 16 colleges from Stanford and MIT to the not-so-elite University of California at Santa Barbara. Now a Google software engineer, the 19-year-old and his father, Nan Zhong, have filed a racial discrimination suit against UC, five campuses (Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB and UC Davis) and the U.S. Department of Education, reports Kristen Sze for ABC News.
"What we're trying to get out of this is a fair treatment for future Asian applicants going forward, including my other kids and my future grandkids," says the father, who's formed a group called SWORD, Students Who Oppose Racial Discrimination.
The complaint charges UC's admissions process illegally excludes Asian Americans to admit more black and Hispanic applicants. State law bans using race in admissions. In addition, says Nan Zhong, "We have collected evidence that the UC is using race, in clear violation of the law, in faculty hiring."
"The Zhongs' suit follows one filed on Feb. 3 by Students Against Racial Discrimination, which alleges UC's use of holistic admissions -- meaning non-academic factors, like extracurriculars and life circumstances -- diminishes academic merit and hurts Asian American and white applicants," reports Sze.
In a statement, UC said its admissions procedures comply with the law, and that information on applicants' race and ethnicity is collected for statistical purposes only.
The "statistical" and "Documented Instances" is rather thin.
Perhaps that why part VI of the suit is titled "Prayer.."
A lot of the students are being rejected because they are applying for the most desirable majors. And the UC system cannot function with everyone want to be an engineer or doing pre-med or just having all of the non-Asian students filled to not prestigious slots.
The UC Regents are going to have to explain why they rejected the advice of their own Academic Senate, which voted 51-0 in favour of continuing with the SAT or ACT, at least until it could develop something better, and not only went test-optional, but became the only highly ranked system in the United States to ban consideration of test scores altogether, even if voluntarily submitted by applicants.
Lucky this Zhong guy wasn't around in the '80s when I got in to UCSB or there never would have been space for a low-effort, high achieving slacker kid who eventually dropped out after two years and joined the Air Force. Seems like they changed all the rules so much that today I woulda ended up at Mission College (not that there is anything wrong with that).