Asian American student with 1590 SAT score blames affirmative action for rejections from 6 colleges

About the student: Jon Wang, an 18-year-old student with a 4.65 high school GPA and a perfect score on the SAT’s math section, was rejected from MIT, CalTech, Princeton, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon and the University of California, Berkeley. He blames affirmative action, which notably was banned in California in 1995.

“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, whose parents immigrated from China, told Fox News.

Wang has since been accepted at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Wang joined the anti-affirmative action nonprofit Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), which is currently seeking to overturn the Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger in cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

The lawsuits: The two landmark cases — Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina — were kept separate by the Supreme Court due to Harvard’s status as a private institution; UNC, on the other hand, is public. The case against Harvard examines whether the university violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by “discriminating against Asian American applicants in favor of white applicants,” while UNC is similarly being sued for refusing to consider a “race-neutral alternative” in their admissions.

The Supreme Court is expected to make its decisions for both cases before July 4.