According to a new study released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Asian American applicants are 28% less likely to be accepted at selective colleges and universities compared to White applicants who had similar grades, test scores, and extracurricular activities. 

Disaggregated data also found significant gaps among Asian American applicants. East Asian and Southeast Asian Americans were 17% less likely to be accepted compared to White applicants. But the gap was much worse for South Asian American applicants who were 49% less likely to be accepted compared to White applicants with comparable applications.

“We haven’t seen any other paper that really treats Asian American students as anything other than this monolithic group, but there is a marked heterogeneity in their experiences,” Josh Grossman, one of the study’s authors and a data scientist at Stanford University’s Computational Policy Lab, said. “If you don’t consider that, you lose an important part of the story.”

Grossman also said that this study’s findings were largely unrelated to affirmative action cases. “If you consider that Black and Hispanic students have a disadvantage in a world where affirmative action exists and don’t believe that Asian American students have those disadvantages … then Asian American and white students should be admitted at similar rates,” Grossman told Inside Higher Ed. “What we found is that is not the case.”

Grossman says that legacy admissions helped explain some of the study’s findings. Legacy admissions tend to give wealthy, mostly White applicants more access to selective colleges/universities. This study showed that White applicants were more likely to have a parent or family member who was a graduate of a selective college/university. East Asian and Southeast Asian American applicants were about 3x less likely than White students to have legacy status, while South Asian American applicants were nearly 6x less likely. 

In this primary analysis, researchers say they excluded students who appeared to be athletic recruits. If athletes had been included, the gap would have widened because these recruits are 4x more likely to be White than Asian.