(Source: Princeton University)

Are Asian-Americans penalized in the elite-college admissions process? Yes, says a Yale freshman rejected by other top colleges, including Princeton, which he's now suing. He hopes to shed light on an emerging issue: that Asian-Americans face tougher odds than do white, black and Hispanic applicants.

Read this commentary from the Boston Globe:

In most contexts on college campuses, Asian-Americans are "people of color," a stripe in the multicultural rainbow. But when it comes to elite-college admissions, Asian-Americans put a strain on the usual "minority" alliances.

Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that Jian Li, a freshman at Yale, had filed a complaint against Princeton with the Office of Civil Rights at the US Department of Education, charging that the university had rejected him because he was Asian-American. Despite perfect SAT scores, near-perfect achievement test scores, nine AP classes, and a class rank in the top 1 percent at Livingston High School in New Jersey, Li says he was rejected by Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT, while getting into Yale, Cooper Union, Rutgers, and Cal Tech.

Li, whose family moved to the United States from China when he was 4, told The Daily Princetonian that he was "fine" with being at Yale, but that discrimination against Asian-Americans in admissions had long bothered him. His decision to sue Princeton alone was "kind of arbitrary," he said. "If something comes of it, it will send a message for all the universities."

To judge from the responses in Ivy League newspapers, most students wish he'd spared the effort. In The Daily Princetonian, Zachary Goldstein, a 2005 graduate, said the Yale frosh was "like a bad ex-boyfriend," harassing Old Nassau after she'd spurned him. A Yale Daily News columnist, Jonathan Pitts-Wiley, in a guest piece for the Princeton paper, called it "reprehensible" that "Li had the gall to unnecessarily racialize a personal defeat."

The Yale writer went on to note that, in fact, "Asian-Americans are over represented" at Princeton: They make up 13 percent of undergraduates, compared with 4.5 percent of the population.

Princeton's admissions office, for its part, maintains that it makes no effort to align student demographics with that of the national population. Describing Li's complaint as "without merit," Princeton spokespeople have said that every student is evaluated using both academic and nonacademic criteria (such as leadership and artistic ability). And like other colleges, Princeton defends giving black and Hispanic students, children of alumni, and athletes a boost on the nonacademic side of the ledger.

Read on here.

This case certainly warrants further attention. Stay tuned.