p paulhauggis Joined 15 years ago Karma 1,714 Submissions 2,102 Member since Nov 30 View on Hacker News
It's because Asian-Americans statistically score much higher than white Americans so the competition is fierce.
If you check the "Asian" box when you take the SATs, you actually get points deducted from your overall score.
I'm not sure what started it, but the vicious cycle of over-achieving continues to make it so they need to get extremely high scores to be accepted to many ivy-league universities.
On top of this, most universities in the US have student quotas based on ethnicity, instead of basing admission on merit.