An 18-year-old Asian-American student is blaming affirmative action practices after he was denied from six elite colleges despite a near-perfect SAT score.
Florida native Jon Wang applied to a number of prestigious universities across the country. With his 4.65 high school GPA and a score of 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT, he was presumed to be an obvious acceptant to numerous prestigious universities.
But after applying to a list of six top-tier universities that included MIT, CalTech, Princeton, Harvard, Carnegie-Mellon and U.C. Berkeley, Wang was rejected by all of them.
In an interview with Fox Nation, Wang claimed that he was warned by school guidance counselors that he may have a difficult time getting accepted into these colleges because of his race.
“They all told me that it’s tougher to get in, especially as an Asian American,” Wang Said. “I just took it as gospel.”
In recent years, it has become more transparent that affirmative action programs penalize Asian-Americans in particular. In 2009, a study by Princeton found that Asian students face much higher odds of getting accepted into universities than other races. The study, written by sociologist Thomas Espenshade, found that, “to receive equal consideration by elite colleges, Asian Americans must outperform Whites by 140 points, Hispanics by 280 points, Blacks by 450 points in SAT (Total 1600).”
Wang found a similar result when he reached out to Students for Fair Admissions.
“I gave them my test scores, and then they must’ve ran the model on that… [they] told me I had a 20% chance of getting accepted to Harvard as an Asian American and a 95% chance as an African American,” Wang explained.
Affirmative action practices, even when implemented by people with sincere intentions, discriminate against those who work the hardest and achieve the greatest success. As Americans, we must acknowledge that we cannot undo the discrimination of the past with new forms of discrimination in the present. Instead, we must do as Martin Luther King Jr. instructed: judge people by the content of their character over the color of their skin.
This piece was originally published on TPUSA.
