Henry thought his record gave him a good shot at an elite college, particularly as classmates with lower grades and SAT scores seemed confident about their chances at Harvard, Yale, and other premier schools. What he failed to realize was that these classmates—legacies, development cases, rowers, underrepresented minorities—compensated for any academic shortcomings with admissions preferences that had little to do with brainpower. Unlike these students, Henry couldn't rely on any hook. As an Asian American, he did not qualify for affirmative action, which colleges generally limit to blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans. His parents had gone to college in Korea, ruling out legacy preference for their son in the United States, and they couldn't afford to donate to a university; in fact, Henry applied for financial aid to pay his college tuition.

  His Groton guidance counselor knew the score. She discouraged Henry from applying to the Ivy League, telling him it was a long shot at best, and advised him to lower his expectations to second-and third-tier schools. When Henry disregarded her advice, he was spurned by four Ivies—Harvard, Yale, Brown, and Columbia—as well as Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While they rejected Henry, Ivy League universities admitted thirty-four of his Groton classmates. Brown accepted the daughter of a best-selling author; Harvard, the grandson of one of its biggest donors; Columbia, an African American candidate; and Stanford, the daughter of an oil tycoon who chaired the university's board.

  “When the decisions came out, and all these other people started getting in, I was a little upset,” Henry told me. “I feel I have to hold myself to a higher standard.” Added his mother, Suki Park, “I was naive. I thought college admissions had something to do with academics.”

  Unlike Henry, Stanley Park seemed to have a special hook to bolster his academic credentials, which included a 1500 SAT score. Stanley was born and raised in California, where voters abolished affirmative action in public university admissions in 1996. In the wake of that ban, the University of California, Los Angeles, revamped its admissions criteria to favor students who had conquered “life challenges,” such as family illness, being raised by a single parent, or being the first in the family to go to college.

  Stanley, who graduated from University High in Irvine in 2002, had overcome more than his share of adversity. After his parents—immigrants of modest means with only high school educations and little English— divorced in 1999, he lived with his mother. When she was diagnosed with breast cancer a year later, he began tutoring children to help pay the rent.

  “All the money he earned tutoring was donated to his family,” his high school guidance counselor wrote in Stanley's college recommendation. “In the time I have known Stanley I have been impressed with his incredible balance. It's easy to view him as a top mathematics student, but there is so much more to this complex young man that makes him interesting. For the past three years, he has gone to the Bethel Korean Church at 6:30 a.m. every Sunday morning. Once there, he loads vans with food, and with other church members distributes food to the homeless.”

  Stanley's own college application essay movingly recounted how his mother's illness had inspired him. “I have the most loving and caring mother anyone can ever have,” he wrote. “I admire her so much because she works hard even after her divorce last year. She sacrificed her youth and free time so that I might have a promising future. She went as far as to giving up her whole Christmas bonus to pay for an SAT class. Then something unfair happened to my mother; she was diagnosed with breast cancer. When my mother had her breasts removed, I could visibly see the pain and shame on her face. Although I am very grateful that she is alive, I could not bear to see my mom in that kind of pain. Now that she can't work as hard as she used to, I do not want to let all my mom's past sacrifices for me to be in vain. I slowly realized that the only thing I can do to help out was to make her happy by showing her the fruits of her sacrifices. I began to study harder in school and take my volunteer work… more seriously.”

  Nevertheless, UCLA and the state university's other elite campus, Berkeley, rejected Stanley while admitting black and Hispanic applicants with far lower scores. Stanley learned the hard way that the “life challenge” preference at his state university was a back-door substitute for affirmative action. It was never meant for him or other Asian Americans at all.

  ASIAN AMERICANS are the new Jews, inheriting the mantle of the most disenfranchised group in college admissions. The nonacademic admissions criteria established to exclude Jews, from alumni child status to leadership qualities, are now used to deny Asians. “Historically, at the Ivies, the situation of the Asian minorities parallels very closely the situation of the Jewish minorities a half a century earlier,” said former Princeton provost Jeremiah Ostriker.

  Once ostracized, Jewish students are now widely coveted for their intellectual prowess. Today, many Jewish applicants have admissions hooks, often as children of alumni, donors, or faculty. Having apologized profusely for restricting Jewish enrollment in the past, selective universities now vie to provide the best kosher meals, build the biggest Jewish cultural centers, and offer the most complete array of Judaic studies courses.

  Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, for instance, not only built a Jewish center but also hired a rabbi to recruit students as part of what chancellor Gordon Gee called an “elite strategy” to lift the university to Ivy League status. “Yes, we're targeting Jewish students,” Gee told a March 17, 2002, board meeting of the Vanderbilt affiliate of Hillel, the national Jewish campus organization. “There's nothing wrong with that. That's not affirmative action. That's smart thinking.” The proportion of Jews among Vanderbilt freshmen soared from less than 5 percent in 2000 to nearly 13 percent in 2004, according to a university survey.

  Few universities apply the same “smart thinking” to pursuing another academically proficient group: Asian Americans. Instead, just as they constrained Jewish enrollment before 1950, they now set a higher bar for Asian American applicants, freezing out students who would be considered scholastic superstars if they hailed from a different heritage. To be sure, working-class and middle-class white students—such as John Simmons, the high school valedictorian rejected by Notre Dame—also face a rough go in college admissions. But overall, Asian Americans are the odd group out, lacking racial preferences enjoyed by other minorities and the advantages of wealth and lineage mostly accrued by upper-class whites. This second-class status stymies Asian aspirations to join the country's inner circle of political, economic, and social leaders; limits that leadership circle's exposure to bright minds with fresh ideas; and breeds cynicism among Asian students and parents who emigrated here in search of opportunity. Meanwhile, by rejecting top applicants, elite universities damage their own educational quality—and inadvertently boost the academic status of second-tier schools that, in hopes of joining the first rank, welcome high-achieving Asian students.

  Like Jews during the quota era, Asian Americans are overrepresented at selective colleges compared with their U.S. population (which is why they don't qualify for affirmative action as an underrepresented minority) but are shortchanged relative to their academic performance. Legacy preference, initiated to keep out Jews, has become academia's justification for excluding Asian Americans. Similarly, geographic preference for applicants from rural states, popularized to squelch Jewish applicants from New York City, now hurts Asian students concentrated in metropolitan areas, particularly Los Angeles.

  Now as then, a lack of preferences can be a convenient guise for racism. Much as college administrators justified anti-Jewish policies with ethnic stereotypes—one Yale dean in 1918 termed the typical Jewish student a “greasy grind”—so Asians are typecast in college admissions offices as quasi-robots programmed by their parents to ace math and science tests. Asked why Vanderbilt poured resources into recruiting Jews instead of Asians, a former administrator told me, “Asians are very good students, but they don't provide the kind of intellectual environment that Jewish students provide.”

  Similarly, MIT dean of admissions Marilee Jones rationalized the institute's rejection of Henry Park by resorting to stereotypes. Although she wasn't able to look up his application because records for his year had been destroyed, “it's possible that Henry Park looked like a thousand other Korean kids with the exact same profile of grades and activities and temperament,” she emailed me in 2003. “My guess is that he just wasn't involved or interesting enough to surface to the top.” She added that she could understand why a university would take a celebrity child, legacy, or development admit over “yet another textureless math grind.” College administrators who made such remarks about black or Jewish students might soon find themselves higher education outcasts.

  “ASIAN AMERICAN” is not an identity deeply rooted in history or tradition. Chinese and Japanese students popularized the term in the 1970s in an effort to be included in affirmative action programs. In 1977, the federal government (which had previously counted immigrants from China, Japan, Korea, and so forth by their countries of origin) introduced “Asian or Pacific Islander” as a data collection category—defined as “a person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, or the Pacific Islands.”

  The strategy worked almost too well. Soaring Asian enrollment soon provoked a backlash. In 1984, with Asian Americans accounting for more than a quarter of its freshman class, the University of California at Berkeley declared they would no longer qualify for affirmative action as an underrepresented group. Five years later, under pressure from a federal investigation into allegations of Asian quotas at Berkeley and UCLA, Berkeley's chancellor publicly apologized for a decline in Asian admissions. By 2007, Berkeley was 41 percent Asian and hailed by the New York Times as “the new face of merit admissions.”

  In 1990, a report by the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights documented that Harvard admitted Asian American applicants “at a significantly lower rate than white applicants” despite their “slightly stronger” SAT scores and grades. From 1979 to 1988, it concluded, Harvard admitted only 13.2 percent of Asian Americans, compared with 17.4 percent of whites. Applicants from California and those intending to study biology—two disproportionately Asian American groups—had lower admission rates as well. Accounting for most of the admissions gap between white and Asian applicants, federal investigators concluded, was “preference given to legacies and recruited athletes—groups that are predominantly white.” Asian Americans accounted for 15.7 percent of all Harvard applicants but only 3.5 percent of alumni children and 4.1 percent of recruited athletes.

  Federal investigators also turned up stereotyping by Harvard admissions evaluators. Possibly reflecting a lack of cultural understanding, Harvard evaluators ranked Asian American candidates on average below whites in “personal qualities.” In comments written in applicants” files, Harvard admissions staff repeatedly described Asian Americans as “being quiet/shy, science/math oriented, and hard workers,” the report found. One reader summed up an Asian applicant this way: “He's quiet and, of course, wants to be a doctor.” Another wrote that an applicant's “scores and application seem so typical of other Asian applications I've read: extraordinarily gifted in math with the opposite extreme in English.”

  Nevertheless, the Office for Civil Rights concluded that Harvard did not violate federal antidiscrimination statutes. Although legacy and athletic preferences “adversely affected” Asian Americans, it said, the hooks were “legitimate and not a pretext for discrimination.” As for the stereotyping, it “could not be shown” to have hurt the chances of Asian applicants.

  Federal investigators also found no evidence of a quota on Asian enrollment because the proportion of Asian Americans among entering freshmen had increased from 5.5 percent in 1979 to 19.7 percent in 1990. Since the federal reprieve, that growth has stalled. In the past decade, the percentage of Asians among Harvard's admitted students has fluctuated between 14 and 20 percent. By comparison, Harvard's Jewish quota in the 1930s was slightly lower—between 10 and 16 percent.

  Given free rein by the federal decision, most elite universities have maintained a triple standard in college admissions, setting the bar highest for Asians, next for whites, and lowest for blacks and Hispanics. According to a 2004 study by three Princeton researchers, an Asian American applicant needs to score 50 points higher on the SAT than other applicants just to have the same chance of admission to an elite university. (Being an alumni child, by contrast, confers a 160-point advantage.) Yale records show that entering Asian American freshmen averaged a 1493 SAT score in 1999-2000, 1496 in 2000-1, and 1482 in 2001-2. For the same three years, the average for white freshmen was about 40 points lower. Black and Hispanic freshmen lagged another 100-125 points below whites. A Yale spokesman attributed the Asian-white gap to more whites being recruited athletes, and said Asians and whites are held to the same academic standards.

  At Notre Dame, average SAT scores for Asian American freshmen are 19 points higher than for whites. “The scores are identical between the two ethnic groups when you take out athletes, alumni children, development admits, etc.,” said Daniel Saracino, assistant provost for admissions.

  The higher expectations for Asian students may be most damaging to low-performing ethnic groups trapped under the Asian American umbrella. Students from Chinese, Korean, Indian, and Japanese families drive the high enrollments and SAT scores of Asian Americans at Yale and other elite universities. Those from countries such as Laos, Cambodia, and the Philippines, as well as the Pacific Islands, come from poorer, less-educated families, have lower scores, and are underrepresented in colleges compared with their population. If they were considered as separate groups, they might qualify for affirmative action.

  As a result, both Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders have lobbied to secede from the Asian label. Pacific Islanders gained a victory in 1997 when the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, noting that only 11.9 percent of Hawaiians obtain college degrees compared with 37.7 percent of Asians, designated “Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander” as a separate group. They were counted separately in the 2000 federal census. The common application form used by many colleges now contains a check box for “Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander.” But as of January 2005, the College Board, which oversees the SAT and other standardized tests, still grouped all Asian Americans together. And Southeast Asians haven't been able to shed the Asian American label.

  “Southeast Asians are at the very bottom of the Asian American population, with poverty rates several times higher than the national average. Some Southeast Asian communities have higher welfare defendencies than any other groups, including blacks and Latinos,” said Paul Ong, a professor of public policy at UCLA. “Talking to people about college admissions and recruitment, there's a growing acknowledgment there are groups of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders that are disadvantaged. They need to factor that somehow into screening and admissions.”

  DISCONTENT AMONG Asian Americans over college admissions has long simmered at Princeton, where Asian enrollment (12.8 percent of 2004 freshmen) lags behind rivals Yale (18 percent), Harvard (19.7 percent), and MIT (26 percent). In the late 1980s, an internal Princeton study found that admission rates for Asians, as at Harvard, were lower than for whites; the gap was similarly traced to a scarcity of Asian legacies and athletes. But this explanation did not satisfy the late Chang-Lin Tien, the first Asian American chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley and a Princeton trustee. Every year, upon receiving enrollment figures, Tien would demand an explanation from Princeton's admissions dean as to the relatively low number of Asians.

  Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt was one of a group of professors who raised the issue with the university administration a decade ago. “I tend to feel in my gut that there is an anti-Asian policy,” said Reinhardt, whose wife is Chinese. “There are many non-Asians with lower SAT scores admitted to the Ivy League. A lot of Asians have been rejected with far higher SATs than non-Asians who have been accepted. Within the Asian community, of which I'm a part, there's this feeling that, for you to get into Harvard or Princeton, you've got to be better than everybody else.

  “We had several frank discussions with the administration. It was kind of a standoff. We told them, ‘We're really conscious of it.” But there was nothing we could do. They would say that academic criteria aren't the only thing they use, and it's useful to have different cultures represented here. You wouldn't want half the campus to be Chinese. Well, why not?” He added that the stereotype of the quiet Asian student is “really a strange notion. My Asian American students are very lively. They take leadership positions. They're not at all shy or reticent.”

  Reinhardt, a German immigrant, told me that the selection of white legacies over Asian scholars reflects a disturbing trend in American society. “When I got to the USA in the early 1960s, this country had become, by virtue of the GI Bill, pretty much a meritocracy,” he said. “The GI Bill showed how much talent had been wasted in the generation when the Ivy League was a gentleman's club. We've never had a corporate aristocracy like the one that was started in the mid-eighties. You look at some of the worst losers in corporate America, who walk away with half a billion dollars, and where their kids go to college. I do worry about the future of America in connection with these legacies. I don't think we ever had as huge or as monied an aristocracy as we are building now.”