Stop Racial Discrimination in College Admissions

Why We Are Suing The University of California For Racial Discrimination

I’m an Asian parent in California. Let me start with my son Stanley’s story. As a self-taught programmer, Stanley loves coding contests. Competing against top professionals from around the world, he ranked so high that Google invited him to a full-time job interview in 2019 without realizing he was only 13 years old. (The interview didn’t happen because Google can’t hire minors.)

During the COVID pandemic, when the lockdown created a surging demand for e-signing, Stanley was unhappy that DocuSign didn’t provide any relief. So, he created an unlimited free e-signing service named RabbitSign. Built on Amazon Web Services, it was designed and implemented so well that Amazon’s Well-Architected Review concluded that it was “one of the more secure and efficient accounts” they’d ever reviewed. Amazon decided to feature it in a case study, which is an honor very difficult to achieve even for professionals. Naturally, Amazon also wanted to hire him. But Google moved faster. Five randomly selected Google engineers spent no less than ten hours in total assessing his skills, including soft skills. Purely based on their skill assessments, Google offered Stanley a position that required a Ph.D. degree or equivalent practical experience in September 2023, shortly after he turned 18.

In contrast, a few months before the Google job offer, he received disappointing college application results. He applied to eighteen colleges, but was rejected by sixteen of them, including all five University of California (UC) schools to which he applied. Apparently, his resume was good enough for Google to consider him for a position that normally requires a Ph.D. Yet the same achievements, along with a 3.97 GPA and a 1590 SAT score, plus many other achievements such as the highest level of the Presidential Volunteer Service Award, were not sufficient for undergraduate admissions at the UC. (More details about his college application can be found here.)

After we shared Stanley's story with a local Chinese parent group, it spread coast to coast within 24 hours like a spark in a tinderbox. ABC7 did 3 interviews.

CBS, CNBC and USA Today reported it too. His case was presented in a congressional hearing. I received tons of emails from Asian-American parents and students sharing similar stories, including applicants as qualified as Stanley if not more being rejected by all colleges they applied to. As these cases accumulated, a pattern of racial discrimination against Asian-American students became clear. The Asian community is fed up with repeated, outrageous college admission stories like this.

Stanley got lucky with the Google job. He no longer has to look at his college application results as a sign of personal failure. Instead he can joke about it. I am glad that Stanley is using that privilege to speak out on behalf of other Asian kids.

As a long-time California citizen and taxpayer, I assumed that when I pointed out to UC and government officials that UC was producing absurd admission results and many Asian-Americans believed that UC was engaged in discrimination, they would respond with honest concern and undertake investigations or make reforms. Boy, how naive I was! My letters to various UC and government officials either got ignored or generated boilerplate and dismissive replies. For instance,

1. After receiving my letters, the UC Board of Regents said or did nothing other than forwarding them to the Admissions Office. The Admissions Office claimed that my assertion of racial discrimination was unsupported because California has laws prohibiting that. So I questioned them if they were saying having a law means there must be no violation. They never replied. Here are the links to my exchanges with the Board of Regents and the Admissions Office: comment 1, response 1, comment 2, response 2, comment 3, response 3, comment 4, response 4 and rebuttal.
2. We filed a civil rights complaint to the federal Department of Education. After misinterpreting our message and citing the opposite of what we meant as a reason, they dismissed the case. When we clarified what we meant, they insisted the case was closed. The official case dismissal letter cites the reason they know to be false. Even though we repeatedly asked them to update the case dismissal letter to remove the false reason, they refused.
3. A year after learning about the issue, the California state lawmakers did practically nothing. As we kept asking them for action, they threw delay tactic after delay tactic at us. For example, after we told Assemblymember Marc Berman that hundreds of constituents in his district care about this issue deeply and we wouldn’t accept being ignored, he never replied to us.
4. Most shockingly, when other parents and I secured over four thousand signatures on a letter explaining our concerns to Governor Newsom (an ex officio Regent of the UC), we received no reply at all! (Mr. Newsom, I regret my votes for you in the past. You don’t deserve my vote anymore!)

However, in addition to Stanley’s case and numerous similar cases I received, I find some corroboration for my conclusions.

1. Compiling his Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting into a book titled “Price of Admission”, Daniel Golden documented multiple highly qualified Asian applicants rejected by UC. e.g. UCLA and UC Berkeley rejected Stanley Park, a Korean American kid who faced serious adversity (single immigrant parent with cancer and no college degree), while accepting non-Asian students with SAT scores 560 points lower.
2. In 2003, John Moores, then chairman of the UC’s Board of Regents accused UC’s flagship campus of “blatantly” discriminating against Asian-Americans.
3. After changing to a holistic review system for admissions, UCLA disallowed the faculties on its own Admissions Committee to access its admissions data. Professor Tim Groseclose invoked whistleblower protection and eventually resigned from UCLA in protest.
4. In two internal reports, UCLA sociology professor Robert Mare documented a strong pattern of anti-Asian discrimination in five successive admissions cycles at UCLA.
5. In 2020, California State Auditors documented that UC Berkeley and UCLA ”admitted thousands of applicants whose records demonstrated that they were less qualified than other applicants who were denied admission.” In July 2024, in a letter to a California state lawmaker, the current California State Auditor Grant Parks said, “we have found [UC’s] responses to not address weaknesses we have seen in their implementation of [the 2020] recommendation.”
6. In contrast with UC’s claim that it has no “racial targets” in its amicus brief with the US Supreme Court in SFFA v. Harvard, every UC campus is or is pursuing to become a Hispanic-Serving Institution, which means they set an official goal to have “at least 25 percent of enrolled undergraduate students to self-identify as Chicanx/Latinx” (source). For example, in 2019, both UC Berkeley and UCLA created task forces led by their Chancellors Carol Christ and Gene Block, respectively, to work toward this 25% goal. This numeric target amounts to a racial quota and clearly violates Article I, Section 31 of the California Constitution (and very likely violates federal laws too). This target explains why UC has a strong motive to suppress Asian-American enrollment.
7. In a talk to a large audience, Professor Erwin Chemerinsky, the Dean of UC Berkeley Law School, admitted that although he would deny it in court, his school systematically considers race in its internal decision-making. It’s eye-opening to see a law school dean teaching students how to break laws and hide the evidence. It’s a disgrace! No wonder so many of us got the impression that there are institutionalized illegal activities at UC. No wonder UC tightly guards its admissions data because it’s probably incriminating. It starts to make sense.

The SFFA v. Harvard lawsuit gave us legal clarity that overt racial discrimination is unconstitutional. Now we are calling out UC’s covert under-the-table discrimination in practice.

As I said in the ABC7 interview, as a taxpayer, I hate the idea for UC to use taxpayer money to defend its illegal activities in court. That was why we made a good-faith effort to start a dialogue. However, I have been utterly disappointed and dismayed by how UC conducts itself. It seems groupthink and moral cowardice at UC have made seeking the truth taboo. UC officials, I believe, operate in a culture that believes deeply in racial balancing while devaluing academic excellence and intellectual honesty. Racial discrimination is deeply baked into the system – in admissions and in faculty hiring. While California voters mandated racial neutrality in state institutions twice (through passing Prop 209 in 1996 and defeating Prop 16 in 2020), UC officials treated voters’ will and the California Constitution with contempt. Under these circumstances, the only realistic path to change is through litigation. After exhausting all avenues for an honest conversation over the course of a year, many others working with me have reached the same conclusion.

By ignoring our letters or sending boilerplate and dismissive replies, the UC officials sent us a message: accept the nonsensical and shut up; we can do whatever we want. Now let’s send them a message: we will NOT accept the nonsensical; we will NOT shut up; we will NOT let you do whatever you want to our kids and their dreams; we will NOT let you continue with your “Asian Hate”; we will NOT accept being ignored; we will NOT stop until those breaking laws are held accountable; we will NOT rest until justice prevails! We will NOT apologize for inconveniencing anyone’s political agenda. If that shatters the model minority stereotype, so be it! I warned you.

I hereby announce we have created Students Who Oppose Racial Discrimination (SWORD), an all-volunteer advocacy group focused on stopping racial discrimination in college admissions through litigations. We are suing the UC for racial discrimination. We’ll watch out for perjuries and obstructions of justice carefully and pursue offenders aggressively. It’s time to bring the UC to justice! It is time to pierce UC and Newsom’s fake narratives of social justice and democracy with our SWORD!

If you or anyone you know had a UC application experience similar to Stanley’s or if you want to put an end to the UC’s flagrant racial discrimination, join our fight!

Thanks,
Nan Zhong
nanzhong1@gmail.com
(Stanley’s dad)

P.S. If you disagree with me, I also welcome your honest opinions about the conclusions I have reached.

Observations

While participating in the college admissions debate, I noticed a few weird things. They are listed below with the hope to engender fact-based rational discussions instead of throwing labels around.

1. A lot of people conflate Affirmative Action and racial preferences. Affirmative Action is a goal to help historically disadvantaged groups. There are legal and illegal ways to do it, giving racial preferences at admission being an illegal one. In fact, the Supreme Court’s majority opinion on SFFA v. Harvard by Chief Justice Roberts has no reference to “Affirmative Action”. Yet many people use these two terms interchangeably, perhaps intentionally to muddle the discussions. Let’s not fall for that trap. All the news reports with titles like “The Supreme Court strikes down Affirmative Action” did a great disservice for the public.
2. Given the zero-sum nature of college admission, racial preference for someone is racial discrimination against another. So racial preference is racial discrimination. We’ll use them interchangeably in the context of college admissions.
3. A lot of people supporting racial discrimination claimed that race is just a “plus” factor or a “tiebreaker”. Stanley’s case and tons of similar cases make it clear that they are either blowing smoke or don’t know what they are talking about.
4. A lot of people supporting racial discrimination hate transparency. They strenuously resist independent examinations of college admission data. If they truly want to better our democracy, why do they violate the basic democratic principle of checks and balances, and let the power of the Admissions Offices go unmonitored? Why aren’t they appalled by the Varsity Blues scandal and the California State Auditor’s 2020 report on UC admissions? Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Hiding admission data is an assault on reason. It is an attack on intellectual honesty and academic integrity.
5. A lot of people supporting racial discrimination justify their position by citing that most Asian Americans support Affirmative Action (example 1 & example 2). However, they grossly misled the audience by omitting the fact that Asians (and virtually all racial groups) oppose racial preference in admissions by a wide margin according to Gallup and the Pew Research Center (details). This for-affirmative-action-but-against-racial-preference-in-admission pattern is consistent survey after survey (example 1 & example 2). I am in this bucket myself. If we picture college admission as a 100-meter dash competition, I support helping disadvantaged athletes before the race through coaching, equipment, etc so any hidden talent can be unlocked and blossom. However, during the race, every athlete should have the same finish line. It makes no sense for some minority groups to finish at 90 meters while other minority groups have to run 110 meters. Of course, the real world is far more complicated than a 100-meter dash. So some considerations can be given to individual circumstances. However, immutable characteristics such as one's skin color should not be a dominant factor. I am not sure why Professor john powell found it confusing that most Asians support Affirmative Actions while opposing racial discrimination in admissions. If he’d like to discuss, I am happy to chat.
6. A lot of people supporting racial discrimination cite “social justice” to justify it. Let’s be absolutely clear: they want to automatically favor some minority groups at the expense of other minority groups, particularly Asians. The US has a long and recent history of anti-Asian discrimination. For example, with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, no Chinese could get US citizenship until after WWII. How can anyone advocate anti-Asian discrimination while waving a “social justice” banner? I have always found President Obama’s speeches inspiring. (That’s why I voted for him twice.) If I understand them correctly, I’m pretty sure that he would agree that his daughters don’t need preferential treatment over Asian-American kids. In particular, it pains me to read Harvard’s statement issued after the SFFA ruling. It says “Harvard must always be a place of opportunity, a place whose doors remain open to those to whom they had long been closed.” Harvard's then-president Ms. Claudine Gay said "We will comply with the court's decision. But it doesn't change our values." Give me a break, hypocrites. If you mean what you say, abolish legacy admissions today! To Ms. Gay and every Harvard administrator who signed that statement, shame on you!
7. A lot of people supporting racial discrimination cite “remedying historical wrongs” to justify it. Interestingly, a 2007 study shows that “41% of Black students at four Ivy League colleges surveyed (Columbia, Yale, Princeton and Penn) were children of foreign-born parents, hailing primarily from sub-Saharan African and Caribbean nations.” By admitting such a high percentage of Black students with no connection to slavery, these colleges make me question whether they care about remedying historical wrongs more than making themselves look good.
8. A lot of people supporting racial discrimination claim that no Asian-American kid was hurt in college admissions. E.g. Professor Janelle Wong and Professor Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote that “not a single Asian American student has testified that they faced discrimination in the high profile Harvard case”. First, this statement demonstrates their lack of legal knowledge. Based on United States v. AVX Corp., 962 F.2d 108, 116 (1st Cir. 1992), one of the requirements for associational standing is “neither the claim asserted nor the relief demanded necessitates the personal participation of affected individuals.” Id. (citing Hunt, 432 U.S. at 343). That’s why SFFA couldn’t have any of its members personally assert claims without losing its legal standing. I suggest Professor Wong and Professor Nguyen do some homework (e.g. read the SFFA ruling linked above) before making sweeping generalizations from legal matters they seem to know little about. Second, what’s more troubling is their blind insistence that no Asian-American kid was hurt. Even without understanding the legal standing issue, a little bit of research would have quickly surfaced evidence that Asian-American kids were hurt and fighting back. For instance, were they unaware that Harvard lawyers deposed the Asian-American students that SFFA represented? Did they not read the SFFA’s legal complaint and see the Applicant’s profile on page 8 and the Asian names on page 60? (Tip: search for “Iris Wang” or “Jamie Lee”.) Did they not peruse Pulitzer Prize winner Daniel Golden’s book The Price of Admission and the chapter titled “The New Jews: Asian Americans Need Not Apply”? Would they mind explaining why UCLA and UC Berkeley rejected Stanley Park, a Korean American kid who faced serious adversity (single immigrant parent with cancer and no college degree), while accepting non-Asian students with SAT scores 560 points lower? Are the Asian students’ faces at the rallies in front of the Supreme Court just an inconvenient truth they suddenly became colorblind to? It’s outrageous to see comments that ignore the basic facts and trivialize the damage done to Asian-American kids. If Professor Wong and Professor Nguyen still insist that no Asian-American kid was hurt, I’d like to ask them to say it to Iris, Jamie and Stanley while looking them in the eyes.
9. A lot of people supporting racial discrimination claim that somehow Asians are “being used as pawns”. That is disingenuous, absurd and offensive. In the first post-SFFA admission cycle, for instance, MIT admitted significantly more Asian-American students (up from 40% to 47%) and slightly fewer white students (down from 38% to 37%). So, who is using Asians as pawns? Are Asians supposed to suffer silently when their rights are violated? Is it not OK for Asians to build alliances to protect their rights? I found this attack deeply racist.
10. A lot of people supporting racial discrimination are the beneficiaries of that system (e.g. admitted college students or faculties/administrators who built their careers advocating for it). That by itself is understandable. However, for some of them to trivialize the damages done to the victims while claiming the moral high ground, it is disgusting.
11. A lot of people supporting racial discrimination claim that it creates campus diversity, which benefits “all students”. But they never bother to explain how it benefits the rejected students. (Maybe their definition of “all students” is not inclusive enough?) Perhaps more problematically, their logic assumes that people of the same race must be all alike whereas people of different races must be different. Isn’t that judging people by the color of their skin?
12. While I follow the convention of using “Asian-Americans”, we have to recognize that Asia is a huge continent with a diverse population. It seems bizarre to force someone who immigrated from Tokyo and a refugee from Kabul to check the same box. It also seems bizarre to force President Obama’s children and a black kid from a poor neighborhood to check the same box.
13. If some people insist on using race as a factor, can they please at least define how races are classified? Is someone half Black classified as Black? What about someone who is 1/4 Black? 1/8 Black? 1/16 Black? 1/1024 Black? It is incredible how unscientific the top academic institutions are on this.
14. For folks fixated on any race being underrepresented, why aren’t they concerned with Asians’ being underrepresented in sports leagues such as the NFL or the NBA?
15. The UC insists on both “holistic reviews” and “test-blindness”. However, this position is self contradictory. How can a review be truly holistic if it deliberately excludes objective measures such as standardized tests, particularly for STEM applicants? Interestingly, in 2020, the UC Academic Senate overwhelmingly voted 51-0, with one abstention, to retain standardized tests like the SAT. Its letter to the UC president said, “The Assembly motion communicates the Senate’s support for the STTF’s overall recommendations, including the recommendation that the tests remain mandatory for the time being." Despite this, the UC Board of Regents unanimously rejected the Academic Senate's recommendation, raising concerns about their motivations. This decision appears to be a thinly veiled attempt to compromise intellectual honesty and academic integrity, potentially masking discriminatory practices against Asian American applicants. Notably, other institutions such as MIT, Dartmouth, Yale, Brown, and the University of Texas at Austin have reinstated the SAT, further highlighting the need for scrutiny of UC’s “test-blind” policy and the motivation behind it.
16. When the colleges rejected Asian-American applicants, they used languages like “textureless math grind”. Dehumanization is often a pretext for discrimination. Some of the most liberal institutions are doing exactly what they accuse their ideological opponents of. Isn’t that fascinating?
17. A lot of news reports and commentaries on the Supreme Court’s ruling on SFFA v. Harvard used languages like the Court “scrapped decades of precedent”. (Example 1, example 2, example 3 & example 4) They neglected to mention the important historical context that the Supreme Court had always held that race-based admissions programs must end at some point. In Grutter v. Bollinger, it said “[R]ace-conscious admissions policies must be limited in time” and “[e]nshrining a permanent justification for racial preferences would offend” the Constitution’s unambiguous guarantee of equal protection. In fact, in 2003, the Court expressed its expectation that, in 25 years, “the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” While it is debatable how rigid the “25 years” phrase was, by and large, the Court did in 2023 what it said it would eventually do. How was that “scrapping precedent”? In fact, Professor Michael McConnell at Stanford Law School, a former Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, shares the same view that the majority opinion primarily relies upon precedent.
18. The people who disagree with the Supreme Court’s majority opinion apparently also disagree with Justice Gorsuch's interpretation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act in his concurring opinion. However, in Bostock v. Clayton County, when Justice Gorsuch applied the same textualism methodology to interpret Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which has languages strikingly similar to that of Title VI, these people somehow never had any issue with it. Title VI prohibits discrimination based on race, and Title VII prohibits discrimination based on sex. It’s amazing to hear that the defendant in the SFFA case argued that the word “discrimination” is ambiguous in Title VI but not ambiguous in Title VII.
19. The majority opinion actually permits individualized consideration of an applicant’s racial experience, as it states, “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” Even the lawyer representing the UNC says, “in all actuality this is the way that Affirmative Action and higher education through holistic admissions plan has been operating over the last several decades since the Bakke decision.” Then why is he still so upset by the majority opinion?
20. I also found incoherence in the Supreme Court’s minority opinion on SFFA v. Harvard by Justice Sotomayor.
    1. For example, it says, “Asian American enrollment declined at elite universities that are prohibited by state law from considering race.“ This directly contradicts the facts of the enrollment at the University of California post Proposition 209.
    2. In addition to permitting individualized consideration of an applicant’s racial experience, the key difference in the minority opinion is its support for automatically boosting the admissions chances of certain non-Asian minority groups, regardless of their individual circumstances. In this context, it is difficult to see how a single checkbox that all Asian applicants tick would enable Harvard to genuinely “consider the vast differences within [the Asian] community” as the minority opinion claims.
    3. Most importantly, throughout the minority opinion, I can’t find a single compelling justification to discriminate against Asian-American students. The only one remotely relevant is this nebulous statement: “At bottom, race-conscious admissions benefit all students, including racial minorities. That includes the Asian American community.” It suggests that somehow magically the discrimination would benefit the discriminated. Without much evidence or reasoning to support it, that is a sloppy, tenuous and strange argument at best.
21. If Justice Jackson gets a chance to see the concrete examples of discrimination faced by Asian-American kids, I hope she can understand why I feel her dissenting opinion on SFFA v. Harvard, which barely mentions Asians, displays a “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness”.