Education Department Looks Into Alleged Anti-Asian Admissions Bias at Princeton

A Yale University student has complained to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights that Princeton University discriminated against him based on his Asian heritage when it put him on its waiting list and then rejected him for admission this fall. According to Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, the student, Jian Li, who graduated from a public high school in New Jersey, got top SAT scores but was rejected by MIT, Stanford, and three Ivy League colleges, including Princeton.

He complained only about Princeton because two Princeton researchers found, in a study published last year, that eliminating the use of race in college admissions would significantly raise the number of Asian-American students admitted. The student’s complaint, which asks the government to threaten to suspend financial assistance to Princeton, seeks the end there of preferences based on race, athletic ability, and legacy status. The civil-rights office, which is required to look into nearly every complaint it receives, usually resolves such matters in an agreement with the college.

Princeton said it would cooperate with the office and denied that it discriminates against Asian-American students. Several former high-school classmates of Mr. Li denounced his complaint in today’s Daily Princetonian. “I think it’s absolutely ludicrous, considering that in the past few years the people that my high school has sent to Princeton are 50 percent Asian,” said one of them, Chen Zhang.