New York state Sen. John Liu was fortunate to graduate from the State University of New York at Binghamton, earning a degree in mathematical physics.
Starting next year, someone like him may not even get into SUNY Binghamton.
The problem?
He attended the Bronx High School of Science, the highly competitive, furiously fast-paced public school that, admitting students only by exam, graduated an amazing nine Nobel Prize winners and counts two Regeneron Science Talent Search finalists this year.
The top 10% of Bronx Science graduates would be quickly scooped up by the nation’s top-50 universities or liberal-arts colleges.
But a Bronx Science student in the other 90% could still be eagerly admitted to a very fine school like SUNY Binghamton (ranked 73 by U.S. News & World Report) and train his mind in awesome majors like mathematical physics.
Well, no longer.
Gov. Hochul announced in her State of the State address that every New York high-school student graduating in the top 10% of the class will get automatic admission to SUNY and the City University of New York.
With its strong academics and attractive in-state tuition, Binghamton’s seats would be highly coveted by — and given to — top-10% students from around the state, in which case a Bronx Science student merely in the top, say, quarter of his class would face suddenly worsened prospects.
This is despite the fact such a Bronx Science student would be far more meritocratically deserving of admission to Binghamton than most top-10% students elsewhere.
For the plan to make sense, we’d have to pretend every New York high school is as demanding as Bronx Science. Most aren’t even close.
In fact, almost every Bronx Science student breezes through the Algebra II and Geometry Regents exams, while fewer than one in four at Buffalo’s PS 197 Math Science Technology Preparatory School can pass them.
Advocates of such anti-meritocratic “source diversity” schemes won’t admit it, but we know why they are doing this.
Hint: In another infamous, equally shameful episode of bigotry, Harvard in the 1920s instituted “geographic diversity” in admissions: It had “too many Jews.”
It’s now “too many Asians.”
We can tell from their dog-whistle terms, such as “equity,” “underrepresented,” “marginalized.”
Those are the same terms used to defend discrimination against Asian Americans at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, New York City’s specialized high schools (which include Bronx Science) and Boston’s exam schools — the first two declared unconstitutional and the latter three in litigation.
Indeed, top-percent schemes were integral to “equity” proposals at Thomas Jefferson (top 1.5%) and the specialized high schools (top 7%); they were instantly recognized for their real anti-Asian intent and justly energized Asian-American activism in Virginia and New York City.
That’s not to say we don’t have a problem: PS 197 is an educational disgrace.
But that’s not a race problem for blacks; it’s an educational problem — for all students in that failing school, including the 17% who are Asian American.
Gov. Hochul, your 10% scheme merely distracts us from the real problem.
If a PS 197 12th-grader has no basic proficiency in math, you can exclude all the Asian-American kids you want to make room for this kid at Binghamton — he’d still have no basic proficiency in math.
Meanwhile, you divert resources at Binghamton, a university that challenges students with median SAT math scores of 730 — that’s the 97th percentile nationally — to spoon-feed students you failed to teach since middle school.
In sum, your 10% scheme flops in at least three ways: It discriminates against Asian Americans, it promotes a fake “solution” that does nothing for kids you failed long before college, and it makes universities redo middle school.
Incidentally, to those who hold up Texas’ 10% scheme as a “model” for Hochul’s proposal: Not that it should be copied, but the full scheme doesn’t apply at the two Texas campuses that crack the top 100 in U.S. News’ ranking — the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M.
And so-called “studies” claiming the Texas scheme “worked” academically are worthless because, among other flaws, they rely on invalid metrics like their own (often-inflated) college grades.
So what does it take, Gov. Hochul, for you to retract this triple-losing 10% scheme?
Wai Wah Chin is the founding president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Greater New York.