In this powerful piece, The Myth of American Meritocracy, Ron Unz demolishes the notion that American universities are meritocratic .

He shows that Jews are heavily over-represented at universities, relative to their performance, while Asians are effectively subjected to quotas.

Indeed, in modern America, Asians (whether Indians, Vietnamese, Koreans or Chinese) are the new “Jews,” he argues:

As noted earlier, America’s Asian population has been growing rapidly over the last couple of decades, so the substantial decline in reported Ivy League Asian enrollment has actually constituted a huge drop relative to their fraction of the population. Meanwhile, the population of American Jews has been approximately constant in numbers, and aging along with the rest of the white population, leading to a sharp decline in the national proportion of college-age Jews, falling from 2.6 percent in 1972 and 2.2 percent in 1992 to just 1.8 percent in 2012. Nevertheless, total Jewish enrollment at elite universities has held constant or actually increased, indicating a large rise in relative Jewish admissions…….”

With meticulously compiled statistics of ethnic performance levels across the country, Unz proves that Jewish over-representation is not a result of the higher IQs that  intelligence tests have attributed to them. 

Instead, it goes along with substantial Jewish under-performance, relative to Asians and to Jewish past performance.

For example, consider California, second only to New York in the total number of its Jews, and with its Jewish percentage far above the national average. Over the last couple of years, blogger Steve Sailer and some of his commenters have examined the complete 2010 and 2012 NMS semifinalist lists of the 2000 or so top-scoring California high school seniors for ethnicity, and discovered that as few as 4–5 percent of the names seem to be Jewish, a figure not so dramatically different than the state’s 3.3 percent Jewish population, and an estimate which I have personally confirmed.⁵⁴

Meanwhile, the state’s 13 percent Asians account for over 57 percent of the top performing students. Thus, it appears that California Asians are perhaps three times as likely as Jews to do extremely well on academic tests, and this result remains unchanged if we adjust for the age distributions of the two populations.

One means of corroborating these surprising results is to consider the ratios of particularly distinctive ethnic names, and Sailer reported such exact findings made by one of his Jewish readers. For example, across the 2000-odd top scoring California students in 2010, there was just a single NMS semifinalist named Cohen, and also one each for Levy, Kaplan, and a last name beginning with “Gold.” Meanwhile, there were 49 Wangs and 36 Kims, plus a vast number of other highly distinctive Asian names. But according to Census data, the combined number of American Cohens and Levys together outnumber the Wangs almost two-to-one, and the same is true for the four most common names beginning with “Gold.” Put another way, California contains nearly one-fifth of all American Jews, hence almost 60,000 Cohens, Kaplans, Levys, Goldens, Goldsteins, Goldbergs, Goldmans, and Golds, and this population produced only 4 NMS semifinalists, a ratio almost identical to that produced by our general last name estimates. The 2012 California NMS semifinalist lists yield approximately the same ratios.”

Lila: The same pattern continues across the USA, even in New York, where Jews are highly concentrated and enjoy a higher economic status than any other group.

Even in New York, Asians outperformed the Jews. In some states, there were four and five times the number of high-scoring Asians as Jews:

 Across six years of Florida results, Asian students are more than twice as likely to be high scorers compared to their Jewish classmates, with the disparity being nearly as great in Pennsylvania. The relative advantage of Asians is a huge factor of 5.0 in Michigan and 4.1 in Ohio, while in Illinois Asians still do 150 percent as well as Jews. …”

Lila: Furthermore, Unz claims that this pattern holds true across the country, even though the school tests themselves favor both Jews and the general population of whites and go against Asian strengths:

Earlier we had noted that the tests used to select NMS semifinalists actually tilted substantially against Asian students by double-weighting verbal skills and excluding visuospatial ability, but in the case of Jews this same testing-bias has exactly the opposite impact. Jewish ability tends to be exceptionally strong in its verbal component and mediocre at best in the visuospatial,⁵⁷ so the NMS semifinalist selection methodology would seem ideally designed to absolutely maximize the number of high-scoring Jews compared to other whites or (especially) East Asians. Thus, the number of high-ability Jews we are finding should be regarded as an extreme upper bound to a more neutrally-derived total.”

Lila: Given that and given the greater percentage of Asians in the population than Jews, the inescapable conclusion is that American colleges (except for a handful of meritocracies) universally and egregiously discriminate against Asians and practice affirmative action in favor of Jews, even while the media and public believe that it is foreigners and dark-skinned people who benefit from affirmative action the most.

But suppose these estimates are correct, and Asians overall are indeed twice as likely as Jews to rank among America’s highest performing students. We must also consider that America’s Asian population is far larger in size, representing roughly 5 percent of college-age students, compared to just 1.8 percent for Jews. Therefore, assuming an admissions system based on strictest objective meritocracy, we would expect our elite academic institutions to contain nearly five Asians for every Jew; but instead, the Jews are far more numerous, in some important cases by almost a factor of two. This raises obvious suspicions about the fairness of the Ivy League admissions process.”

Lila: In the more meritocratic schools – Cal Tech, the University of Berkeley, and MIT, the real picture emerges, with Asians dominating, while Jews command a small presence much more in keeping with their actual performance:

…. Caltech’s current undergraduates are just 5.5 percent Jewish, and the figure seems to have been around this level for some years; meanwhile, Asian enrollment is 39 percent, or seven times larger.”

And at the fiercely competitive University of Berkeley, the same numbers hold good:

” The average Jewish enrollment is just over 8 percent, or roughly one-third that of the 25 percent found at Harvard and most of the Ivy League, whose admissions standards are supposedly far tougher. Meanwhile, some 40 percent of the students on these UC campuses are Asian, a figure almost five times as high.”

And at meritocratic MIT:

But today, MIT’s enrollment is just 9 percent Jewish, a figure lower than that anywhere in the Ivy League, while Asians are nearly three times as numerous, despite the school being located in one of the most heavily Jewish parts of the country.”