Matthew C Klein, Columnist

Are Ivy League Schools Biased Against Asians?

Asian students make up a small share of the population but are under-admitted to top universities based on their grades and test scores.

April 3, 2014 at 3:33 PM UTC

By Matthew C Klein

Matthew C. Klein writes for Bloomberg View about the economy and financial markets. He previously wrote for the Economist magazine and its economics blog, Free Exchange. Before that, Klein was a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he spent more than two years studying the history of the Federal Reserve and the intellectual history of monetary economics for an upcoming book by Sebastian Mallaby. He also worked at Bridgewater Associates, where he studied the economies of Central and Eastern Europe and advised institutional investors on asset-liability management. Klein has a bachelor's degree in history from Yale University. Originally from Chicago, he lives in New York.

Who has what it take to get in here? Photographer: Scott Eells/Bloomberg

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America's 18-year-olds have just learned where they will and won't be going to college for the next four years, which makes it as good a time as any to reflect on one of the injustices in the U.S. college admissions system: Apparent bias against Asians.

This might seem like an odd claim. After all, 20 percent of those admitted to Harvard last year were Asian, even though Asians only make up about 5 percent of the U.S. population. But Asians do much better than other racial groups on standardized tests and have much better grades, so the comparison is misleading.