The firestorm over a recent New York Times 

The revelations came via the discovery phase of a lawsuit targeting Harvard for allegedly having de facto quotas meant to limit Asian-Americans to about 20 percent of incoming freshman classes – a percentage that has held relatively firm for decades. Internal documents appeared to confirm that low marks for alleged personality traits reduced how many Asian-Americans would have been accepted by about half. Several other Ivy League schools have also been accused of similar practices.

University of California campuses wouldn’t seem likely to face such potential headaches. Proposition 209, passed in 1996, bans the use of race as a consideration in college admissions and other state government functions. Some of UC’s most elite campuses – at Berkeley, Irvine and San Diego – have student bodies that are more than 40 percent Asian-American.

But when it comes to UCLA, where 32 percent of students are Asian-American, according to collegedata.com, the school could face embarrassment if its internal admissions processes were exposed by a lawsuit as happened with Harvard. That’s because there’s a long paper trail showing UCLA employed the same sort of subjective evaluations of applicants as Harvard.

In 2006, responding to disappointingly low enrollment numbers for African-Americans, UCLA officials adopted a “holistic” approach that they said represented the “most dramatic” changes in admissions in years – an approach they explicitly compared to those seen in Ivy League schools. This approach looked not just at grades and test scores but at life circumstances.

But even as the change was introduced, Ward Conerly – the African-American former UC regent who championed Proposition 209 – ridiculed the idea that the policy would be “fairer” to all groups, as acting Chancellor Norman Abrams then said.

Two years later, UCLA political science professor Tim Groseclose resigned from the university’s undergraduate admissions committee, alleging it had become obvious that UCLA was using the latitude provided by subjective assessments of applicants to favor African-Americans over others. Groseclose challenged UCLA’s assertion that it was using socioeconomic backgrounds – not race – in evaluating what obstacles that applicants had overcome. He noted that after the UCLA policy change, admissions of students from Vietnamese-American families – among the poorer subsets of Asian-Americans – had actually fallen.

In defending its “holistic” approach, UCLA officials have pushed back, then and now, saying critics had agendas and were cherry-picking statistics.

Ex-UCLA professor: Rich black applicants favored over poor Asians

But in April 2014, soon after leaving UCLA for George Mason University, Groseclose published “Cheating: An Insider’s Report on the Use of Race in Admissions at UCLA.” It cited internal documents that showed that an applicant from a wealthy African-American family had a likelihood of admission that was “almost double that of a poor Asian, even when the two applicants have identical grades, SAT scores and other factors.”

The book was published amid intense debate in the California Legislature over Senate Constitutional Amendment 5, which would have asked state voters to repeal part of Proposition 209 to allow for race to be considered in college admissions. It passed the state Senate in January 2014, with Lieu – then a state senator – among the yes votes.

But the constitutional amendment was never voted on in the Assembly. By May 2014, it had been scrapped after an intense backlash from Chinese-Americans who believed it would suppress Asian-American enrollment in UC’s most elite campuses.

The backlash was strongly criticized by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which urged a continuation of traditional Asian-American support for affirmative-action-type programs. But then-Rosemead Councilwoman Polly Low, a leader of the Chinese American Elected Officials Association, told the Los Angeles Times that many in the local Chinese community were incensed with SCA5. “I have never seen so many people so mad,” she said.

The lawsuit, filed in Boston federal court, was prompted by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2013 in a case involving the University of Texas’ admissions practices. The court didn’t invalidate the Texas system, but it sent the case back to lower courts with an admonition that race had to truly be only one of several factors in weighing close calls in admission decisions — not the crucial factor.

The Harvard lawsuit, launched by the Project on Fair Representation and the Students for Fair Admissions, targets the same practice that has drawn fire at UCLA and UC Berkeley: a “holistic” evaluation of applicants’ merits that considers how much they have had to overcome and their personal qualities, among other factors.

In his recent book, “Cheating: An Insider’s Report on the Use of Race in Admissions at UCLA,” UCLA political science professor Tim Groseclose found black students were three times as likely as white students and twice as likely as Asian students to gain admission under “holistic” grounds. Proposition 209 sponsor Ward Connerly, a former UC regent, has long charged that UCLA, UC Berkeley and other UC campuses manipulate admissions to get around the race-neutral requirement of his 1996 law.

The numbers in the Harvard case seem to suggest that an Asian student quota exists. Over the past 20 years, Asian-Americans have comprised 20 percent of the freshman class with little variation.  As the Project on Fair Admissions — sponsor of the Harvard suit  — notes, over the past 20 years, the number of high-performing Asian-American high school students has doubled.

But Harvard’s freshman admissions suggest quotas for all races. In recent years, blacks have made up around 12 percent of freshmen, Latinos around 13 percent and whites and decline to state students a little more than half.

The numbers for UC’s top schools also suggest a de facto quota system. At UCLA, Asian-Americans consistently make up one-third of freshmen; whites about 27 percent; Latinos about 20 percent; and blacks about 4 percent. At Berkeley, Asian-Americans consistently make up about 40 percent of freshmen; whites about 30 percent; Latinos about 12 percent; and blacks about 3 percent. (The UC numbers don’t add up to 100 percent because they don’t have racial breakdowns for international student admissions.)

Asian-American state lawmakers seem satisfied with this status quo and strongly opposed Latino and African-American lawmakers’ interest in weakening Proposition 209 last year. But Groseclose’s research found an interesting fact that could someday become a hot potato in California politics. “Holistic” admissions policies are supposed to weigh to a big degree on the disadvantages facing potential enrollees. Yet …

… race outweighs socioeconomic status, according to Groseclose. For instance, black applicants whose families had incomes exceeding $100,000 were about twice as likely to be accepted in round two [after holistic reviews] as Asian and white kids whose families make just $30,000 and had similar test scores, grades and essays.

While Harvard is a private institution, it receives tens of millions of dollars in federal funding with strings attached, making it vulnerable to lawsuits over admissions. Thus, virtually all U.S. universities are at risk of being sued over practices that appear discriminatory.

The Project on Fair Representation intends to sue other universities over what it sees as rigid racial quotas.

It’s interesting to note that incoming freshmen at Yale are also 20 percent Asian-American, as are those at Princeton.

In the most recent numbers from Stanford, Asian-Americans made up 23 percent of the undergraduate student body.

The first case in which the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on affirmative action in college admissions was the 1978 Bakke case, involving the University of California. More information on Bakke is here. The court found affirmative action to be constitutional — but not the use of racial quotas.