Discrimination against Asians is inherently required by most University AA policies. The policies call for special considerations (e.g., lower standards) only for "under-represented" minorities. Asians are generally over-represented in Universities relative to their proportion of the US population. Also, the groupings, are not by ethnicity or culture but rather by the racial groups that supposedly don't exist. What your actual ethnic and cultural background is does not matter, if you are "Asian", then there are already too many of your kind, so you are SOL. Same goes for "white non-Hispanic" even if you are a recent immigrant from the impoverished former Chech Republic whose family narrowly escaped genocide, you are still a full beneficiary of "white privileged" and thus less worthy of an education than a black student who grew up with far more advantages than you. All that matters is the relative number of students already in University that happen to share your superficial physical features used to create racial categories. AA policies use these to determine how many of "your kind" will get in and thus what level of qualifications you will need.
The same holds for faculty hiring. My last university had a 2 for 1 policy where if your department hired an under-represented minority, the Provost would kick in money to allow you to hire a second one, but they also had to be a minority or no deal. We were explicitly told that Asians do not count.
If Asians have to have higher scores to get in and, as I linked above, of the 1495 admissions spots how do Asians only make up about 410 admittees? What factors could be at play here causing Asians to require higher scores for the seats they get when overall they get so few seats comparitively?
It is simple. AA policies determine the number of people from each racial group that get in, while deliberately ignoring the differences in the number of each group that apply. Thus, AA policies mean that whites and Asians (because they are already over-represented in Universities) will have a smaller % of applicants that are admitted. Since those admitted are not random but selected from the top part of the distribution of qualifications, a smaller % inherently means that they have to have higher qualifications to make it into that smaller and more select portion of their racial group.
Also, on objective measures (whether tests, GPA, or other valid indicators of academic qualifications) Asians score highest, Whites second, Hispanics third, and African-Americans forth (among those 4 groups). So, imagine that only the top 5% of Asians and top 5% of Whites get in, while the top 25% of African Americans get in (which is similar to the pattern that AA policies lead to). That would mean that Asians and Whites would both have to score much higher than African Americans do to get in (as the report shows, 450 and 310 points higher respectively). But even though a similar % of Asian and Whites get in, because Asians score higher than whites overall, that means that their scores will be somewhat higher than whites (140 points).
It is likely that blacks are at most 1-3% of the students who would qualify for admission if race were ignored. Thus the extra 10% of the admitted slots is being taken mostly from Asian and to a lesser extent from whites.
