Apartheid. USA 1988

January 16, 1987:

Dr Ling-chi Wang, associate professor of Asian-American studies at the University of California at Berkeley, has discovered that after admissions of Asian students began reaching 10 or 12 percent at some of the most prestigious universities in the United States, ‘a red light went on’. Since 1983 admissions at Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale and other Ivy League schools have either stabilized or gone down. ‘I don't want to say it was a conspiracy,’ Dr Wang maintained, ‘but I think all of the elite universities suddenly realized they had what used to be called “a Jewish problem” before World War II. They began to look for ways to slow down admissions of Asian students.’ Some university officials say they are increasingly troubled by the potential for ethnic strife and political repercussions if more and more parents believe Caucasian children have been squeezed out of the state's best-known tax-supported university by a disproportionate number of Asian, black and Hispanic applicants. Whites constitute 62 percent of California's high-school graduates. But since 1977, the proportion of whites admitted as freshmen at Berkeley has fallen from 63 to 45 percent. Meanwhile, the proportion of Asians, about 10 percent of graduating classes in California, has risen from 21 to 26 percent at Berkeley for the freshman class. Many of these students are recent immigrants. The

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proportion of Hispanic and black freshmen is 11 and 8 percent.^26.

26. The New York Times, from a report by Robert Lindsey