Kai Chan, a Princeton doctoral student in economics and the son of Chinese immigrants, has been another campus voice appealing for equity for Asian applicants. In a November 29,2004, column in the student newspaper, the Daily Princetonian, Chan wrote, “Is it fair in the name of (skin-deep) diversity to hold back qualified students from admission to the Ivies because of their race? After all, it is a fact that Asians need higher academic achievements than their peers to get admitted to the same school… Besides, aren't programs such as legacy admissions just another form of ‘affirmative action” that also works against Asians?… The misguided approach of programs like affirmative action can be seen through my experience. I am the son of poor, non-English speaking parents, neither of whom attended high school. They never read to me as a child. They never attended my graduations. I went to some terrible high schools. (Altogether, I attended five high schools, one of which was known locally as “last chance high.”) I worked practically full-time while attending high school and college. But I've never gotten the benefit of the doubt anytime in my life. If anything, I've had to be better than my peers.” In a follow-up column, Kai urged Princeton to promote socioeconomic diversity by including more people from low-income backgrounds in admissions decisions: “A more diverse admissions committee would see the merits of an applicant who waited on tables to support her family.”

  A Princeton spokesman said that the university does not discriminate against Asian American applicants. “We consider each applicant as an individual and take into account everything we know about the applicant—including not only grades, scores, and activities, but recommendations, the application itself, and anything else that helps us develop as full an understanding of the applicant as possible,” the spokesman wrote in an email. “No candidate is ‘typecast.” When we make admission decisions, we are limited by the size of the entering class, and the overall quality of the applicant pool is so high that many truly excellent candidates cannot be admitted.”

  Asian American students who are admitted to Princeton, Chan said, often feel socially excluded there. In particular, they rarely join its five invitation-only “bicker” clubs, which have about six hundred to nine hundred members in the junior and senior classes, predominantly from white, affluent backgrounds. While Princeton's six “sign-in” eating clubs pick members by lottery, candidates for bickers undergo two days of interviews and games, sometimes with an element of hazing. But the humiliation— and $6,500-a-year membership fee—often pays off with postgraduation jobs and advancement from bicker alumni and parents.

  “If you get a chance to actually join one of these clubs, it helps a lot with your professional career,” Chan said. “You have a whole social network to fall back upon.” Without such connections, he added, Asians bump into a glass ceiling; employers “want an Asian as a quant person. They're not expecting someone to take a leadership position but to work in a back office, printing numbers.”

  Why few Asians apply to the bickers is hotly debated on campus. In 2003, a South Asian student who worked as a minority affairs adviser caused a furor with an online posting on a Princeton search engine that mocked other Asian Americans for “self-segregation” in Spelman dorm, which he characterized as an “internment camp.” Spelman provides housing with kitchen facilities for students who don't belong to eating clubs.

  J. W Victor, a senior in 2004-5 and president of the Princeton Inter-Club Council, acknowledged the scarcity of Asians in the bicker clubs but said they aren't intentionally ostracized. He noted that the bicker process is much like college admissions, giving preference to children of alumni and donors. “I don't think it's malevolent,” he said. “It's who your friends are.” Quadrangle, a sign-in club of which J. W is president, promoted inclusion by cosponsoring parties with black and Asian student groups in the spring and fall of 2004. The parties, billed as “Rush Hour 3” and “Rush Hour 4” in reference to the popular Rush Hour movies costarring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, “made a loud statement,” J. W said.

  THE HIGH test scores and humble backgrounds of many Asian American applicants have created a political quandary for the University of California, the nation's premier public university system.

  In 1996, California voters adopted an initiative prohibiting the university from practicing affirmative action. Nevertheless, university administrators are under heavy pressure from Hispanic legislators to have student demographics conform more closely to the California population. Hispan-ics make up a third of the state population but only an eighth of the university's 150,000 undergraduates; Asians are 11 percent of the population but almost 40 percent of the undergraduates.

  To redress that imbalance, Berkeley and UCLA first considered replacing race-based affirmative action with a preference for low-income applicants. But officials vetoed the idea when they realized that it would mostly elevate Asian Americans such as Stanley Park, who combined poverty with academic achievement, rather than low-income blacks and Hispanics, relatively few of whom could qualify for Berkeley even with a boost. “We found that using poverty yields a lot of poor white kids and poor Asian kids,” said former Latino legislative leader Marco Firebaugh. Socio-economic diversity was a “pie-in-the-sky solution,” Robert Laird, who was then Berkeley's admissions director, told me. “That was never going to work in California.”

  The UCLA School of Law did test Laird's conclusion. In 1997, it adopted a formula to select 40 percent of its first-year class that gave preference to students from families and communities with low incomes and limited education. As Laird would have predicted, the main beneficiaries were working-class and lower-middle-class white and Asian students with solid academic credentials. Asian enrollment rose to eighty-two students in 1997 from forty-eight the year before, while black enrollment fell to ten from nineteen. Disappointed by the failure of the formula to boost Hispanics and blacks, UCLA law phased it out and initiated a program with lower entrance standards called Critical Race Studies, which was intended to appeal to minority students.

  Instead of an income-based preference, the University of California accommodated Firebaugh and other Latino legislators by adopting an undergraduate admissions system known as comprehensive review, which awards extra credit for surmounting a wide range of personal, economic, economic, family, or psychological obstacles—“life challenges,” in UCLA's words. “Applicants with extraordinary academic performance, alone, are not offered admission at UCLA,” declared the campus website. University officials say comprehensive review gives preference to educationally disad-vantaged students, not to any particular minority, and can identify diamonds in the rough. But the rules seem to count more for some groups than others, and to penalize low-income families, many of them Asian, that have sacrificed to move to districts where their children can attend better schools.

  Like Stanley Park, Blanca Martinez grew up in a working-class immigrant family, and helped support it when her mother had breast cancer. Although her SAT score was 390 points below Stanley's, both Berkeley and UCLA admitted her. Blanca, the daughter of a blue-collar worker from Mexico, attended 99 percent Hispanic South Gate High, an overcrowded facility near Los Angeles with temporary classrooms and few advanced courses, and got extra points under comprehensive review for participating in a university outreach program to low-performing schools. Berkeley admitted sixteen South Gate seniors in 2002, compared with six in 2000, while UCLA took thirty-six, up from fourteen in 2000.

  South Gate's Susana Pena, daughter of a construction worker and another outreach participant, was admitted to UCLA with a 940 SAT score, 560 points below Stanley Park's. “People should understand it's harder for us,” she told me when I visited Southgate in 2002. “Once in a while, they should give us a little break so we can catch up to them.”

  At another mainly Hispanic high school near Los Angeles, Belmont, UCLA student and outreach worker Alex Paredes helped Rosaura Novelo edit her application essay, which appeared tailored to fit the “life challenge” criterion. “It has been difficult for my parents, Mexican immigrants who did not even get to third grade in school, to raise a family of seven,” Rosaura's essay began. “My father is the only person in the family who works, getting only minimum wage…. Our situation has taught me to appreciate education, learn how to overcome challenges that I have been faced with, and to take advantage of the benefits that come from all my hard work…. Taking advantage of the opportunities my parents have provided me with has sometimes been difficult because of all the challenges I have had to overcome…. Things have not been handed to me on a silver platter, which makes it challenging for me…. My community has also been an obstacle: gangs and violence are an everyday occurrence.” UCLA—which took twenty-four Belmont seniors in 2002, tripling the previous year's number—admitted Rosaura despite an SAT score of 980, 520 points below Stanley Park's.

  When I dropped by University High in Irvine on the same trip, I found that its admissions to Berkeley and UCLA were plummeting. University High is one of the best public schools in California, with a mean SAT score of 1247 in 2003-4 compared with a state average of 1015. It's also 45 percent Asian American. UCLA admits from University High dropped from 112 in 1998 to 65 in 2004, and Berkeley admits from 91 to 46 over the same period, relegating more University High graduates to less selective campuses such as Riverside and Santa Cruz. As a highly ranked school, University High didn't qualify for University of California outreach, hurting its students” prospects under comprehensive review. In other words, Stanley Park's mother had moved to a cramped Irvine apartment she could barely afford to provide him a better education—and may thereby have thwarted his admission to Berkeley and UCLA.

  I chatted with Stanley and several Asian American classmates who had also been rebuffed by the two elite UC campuses. Hyejin Jae thought she had hurt her chances by soft-pedaling family hardships. But “I didn't want too much of a pity party,” said Hyejin, who scored 1410 on her SATs and is the daughter of a struggling Korean-immigrant pastor. “No matter how bad your situation is, someone has it worse.”

  Asian applicants to Berkeley or UCLA who hadn't confronted a life challenge soon rued this gap in their resumes. Albert Shin, another University High student and the son of an engineer, scored 1540 on his SAT, had a 3.9 grade point average, and could read English, Korean, and Latin. Both Berkeley and UCLA turned him down. “It would be okay to look at social disadvantage a little bit, but judging it more than academics would be wrong,” Albert told me. He, Stanley Park, and Hyejin Jae enrolled at the university's San Diego campus. As of March 2006, Stanley Park was a senior bioengineering major with a 3.5 grade point average, and “pretty worried” about admission to medical school. Financial aid and a job as a nuclear medicine assistant at a San Diego hospital had helped pay his tuition.

  By 2003, parental complaints that comprehensive review meant rejecting top Asian and white students caught the attention of John Moores, then chairman of the university's board of regents. Studying Berkeley's admissions records, he found that in 2002—the year Albert, Stanley and Hyejin were rebuffed—Berkeley turned down 1,421 Californians with SAT scores above 1,400, including 662 Asian Americans. Of the 359 students accepted with SAT scores of 1,000 or less, 231 were black, Hispanic, or Native American.

  The regents chairman accused his flagship campus of “blatantly” discriminating against Asian Americans and denounced comprehensive review as “fuzzy… It's silly to pretend that very low scoring applicants should be admitted to one of America's premier universities with the expectation that somehow these students will learn material that they missed in K-12.” University officials disputed Moores's contention, noting that SAT scores are an imperfect measure of academic ability. Still, in April 2004, a university study group compared a statistical model of how the UC admissions process was supposed to work with actual cases. Buried deep inside its report was the finding that “somewhat fewer Asian students, and more African American and Chicano/Latino students (and, in some cases, White students) were admitted” on most campuses than would have been expected. One possible explanation: “small but real racial or ethnic effects on admissions decisions.”

  LESS THAN two weeks before Christmas 2004, a festive mood prevailed in the lobby of Hunter College High School, a mammoth brick fortress on the corner of 94th Street and Park Avenue on Manhattan's East Side. Sere-naded by the mellow warbling of a nearby flute lesson, beaming students lined up to buy fifty-cent “candy grams”—holiday cards designed by ninth graders with a choice of candy canes, lollipops, or chocolate inside.

  Four floors up, cheer yielded to anxiety as seniors, many of them Asian Americans, drifted in and out of the college counseling office with little to do but wait and hope. It was early decision week, when most Hunter seniors learn whether they have been accepted, rejected, or deferred to the regular pool by their first choices. One of the country's best public high schools, with an average SAT score of 1430, Hunter sends one-third of its graduates to the Ivy League. Nevertheless, its Asian American students face an uphill battle against legacies, development cases, and athletes.

  “All the schools basically say, ‘We don't discriminate,”” observed Iris Wang, a Hunter senior who arrived in the United States from Beijing at the age of eight, not knowing a word of English. Her father is a chemist, her mother a postal worker. With a 1520 SAT score and top grades, she applied early to MIT, which deferred her. “But I went to the Columbia session and they said they value a multicultural community. If they want to be multicultural, there's only so many of one culture they can take.” Asked whether legacy preference is justified, she added: “If you're going to accept a kid with a 1230 SAT score, you don't know he's going to accomplish anything, just because his parents did something great.”

  Iris would hear more bad news the following spring. Despite her stellar credentials, she was turned down by Harvard and Yale and wait-listed by MIT, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins. She was accepted by only one private school, New York University, and two public campuses, the State University of New York at Binghamton and at Stony Brook. She enrolled at NYU as a presidential honors scholar—a designation signifying that she was in the top 5 percent of the entering class.

  For Asian students such as Iris, the subjective, nonacademic criteria for college admissions—wealth, legacy, athletic prowess, personal qualities—stand in stark contrast to the process that got them into Hunter. Put simply, Hunter's mission is to find and educate New York City's most intellectually gifted students. Even to qualify for its entrance exam, public school students must score above the 90th percentile in both math and reading on the city's fifth-grade test; private schoolers must display equivalent proficiency. Then, through tests in math and language arts plus an essay, Hunter winnows three thousand candidates to an entering class of two hundred seventh-graders. Other than giving a small edge to applicants from poor families—the income cutoff is whether they qualify for a subsidized school lunch—Hunter picks the best students. No preference is given to legacies, athletes, or underrepresented minorities. (An additional thirty students, who were identified as gifted in kindergarten but did not surpass the cutoff on the Hunter exam, come from a feeder elementary school run by Hunter in the same building.)

  This system produces a student body that is nearly 40 percent Asian American, including many first-generation students. They flourish at Hunter High, often achieving exceptional grades and test scores. But as they begin to think about college, Hunter advisers drum into their minds that they need more than academic excellence to distinguish themselves from the pack—and from each other. Like Opal Mehta, heroine of a novel by Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan, they have to overcome the stereotype.

  Although How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life was recalled by its publisher in 2006 for plagiarism, its story rings true to anyone familiar with the college-application experience of Hunter's Asian Americans. A Harvard admissions interviewer advises Opal, a brilliant Indian American teenager, that it isn't enough for her to excel in science and be fluent in four languages, she also needs a rambunctious social life.

  Beverly Lenny, then Hunter's director of college counseling, said admissions officers at elite universities often complain that Asian American applicants all look the same on paper. “When Harvard calls us back and gives us a brief synopsis of why certain kids didn't make it, they'll say, ‘There were so many kids in the pool that looked just like this kid.”” Lenny said she understands their viewpoint, but it makes her job harder. “We run Hunter more like a meritocracy,” she said. “That's what you have to do for gifted education. Harvard isn't necessarily a meritocracy. They're trying to build a community.

  “We have five counselors doing the college process. We draw lots and assign groups by alphabet. What is the most difficult group to get? K-L, the Kim-Lee group. That group is the hardest to write recommendations for. Part of what makes that group survive is the exact same thing that works against them in college admissions. The way they survive is more of a group mode. Their community is very strong for them. They make kids the same. They want to be like everybody else. You get a group of them. Every single child has had music lessons. Every single child succeeds well in math. Every single child has done community service in a hospital. Every child has done Chinese or Korean studies on Saturdays and is fluent in that language. You're writing the same letter” again and again.

  Lenny acknowledged that the failure of college admissions staffs and high school counselors to probe below these superficial similarities and get to know Asian American students as individuals may reflect unconscious racism. As a “white melting-pot woman,” she said, it may be harder for her to communicate with Asian students than it would be for an Asian counselor. At the time of my visit, none of Hunter's counselors were Asian American.