In 2012, Michael Wong was a senior at James Logan High School, one of these pretty competitive

high schools in California's Bay Area, and he had really tried to position himself to

check off all the boxes that colleges look at.

You know, he had really high grades.

I think something like a four, six, he'd a-stall-assandardized tests, but he'd also done a lot of

community work, organizing sort of clubs and being part of the debate team, and he felt

pretty confident that he would get into at least one of the four schools that he applied

to.

I think he dreamed of going to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton.

Unfortunately, he didn't get into any of these schools.

He started looking around and he realized that other people at his high school had gotten

into some of these schools.

He started to think about what made their cases stronger than his, and one thing he realized

was that none of these other people were Asian.

It sort of spoke to this informal belief among Michael and some of his friends that to be

Asian-American and to be applying to these elite schools, you had to be extra good.

So he started looking into things he could do to figure out whether this was true.

He began to ask questions and these questions really captured the imagination.

Not just of some anti-affirmative activists who are working at the sort of DC policy level,

but also among a lot of Asian-Americans, particularly middle-class, sort of newer immigrants,

living in California.

And these two sort of constituencies are now at the forefront of this Harvard lawsuit

...