By Staff
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
A law professor has filed a lawsuit against the University of California (UC) system for withholding records he believes could show it’s illegally using race in admissions.
Richard Sander believes UC is discriminating against Asian American applicants based on a 2014 report commissioned by UCLA.
On Nov. 15, Sander and former California state senate candidate George Shen requested that the UC system provide admissions data on socioeconomic and academic metrics.
The Asian American Coalition for Education (AACE), which has filed federal discrimination complaints against Yale University, Brown University, and Dartmouth College, is supporting the lawsuit.
In a statement, AACE said, “The petitioners’ allegation that race has been unlawfully considered in UC’s holistic admissions to the detriments of Asian American applicants is empirically rooted in an internal UC report conducted by UCLA sociologist Dr. Robert Mare in 2014, which examines how different groups of applicants fare throughout UCLA’s admissions process between 2007 and 2011. Buried away previously, the Mare report uncovers the practice of “supplemental review” of applicants from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, through which applicants of East Asian origins received less favorable scores, ceteris paribus. As a result, the study finds that nearly 1,400 Asian American applicants were denied admissions because of race during the five-year period.”
AACE president Yukong Zhao said, “University of California is a taxpayer-funded institution. If UC has not discriminated Asian Americans as it claims, it should have the courage to make its admissions data accessible for public to examine and monitor.”