Stress perennially rises this time of year for high-school seniors waiting to hear where they’ve been accepted to college, especially for those seeking entrance to the Ivy League and other extremely selective institutions. The feeling is even more intense for Chinese-American, Korean-American, Japanese-American and Indo-American students, who worry they’ll face the "Asian penalty" that seems to cap enrollment of even stellar young scholars.

"When acceptance and rejection letters go out over the next three weeks, we anticipate a surge of interest in this issue, just like we saw last spring," said Edward Blum, the Texas lawyer whose group, Students for Fair Admissions, sued Harvard University in November. The suit accuses Harvard of discriminatory admission practices that impose a de facto quota on Asian-American students, as the elite university did against Jewish students early in the 20th century. Blum’s group filed a similar complaint against the University of North Carolina.

Both colleges deny the allegations, insisting that their "holistic" admission processes are fair to all applicants and weigh a variety of criteria, including academic achievement, teacher recommendations, athletic prowess, leadership, extracurricular activities, community involvement and socioeconomic status, designed to enroll a highly talented, vibrant and diverse campus population. Although strict quotas are illegal, colleges can consider race as one of a variety of attributes, as long as it is not the determining factor in admission, according to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Blum and others insist that the opaque process followed by Harvard, UNC and many other highly selective colleges, especially private ones, is mere cover for selection that actually hinges on applicants’ race and ethnicity, violating the 14th Amendment and federal civil rights laws.

Moreover, Blum said, the implication that rejected Asian-American students failed to measure up when broader criteria are considered "feeds the false, harmful stereotype that these kids are one-dimensional nerds. The kids that I’ve met, while very serious students academically, are just as diverse as any other type of student," he said during a telephone interview on Thursday.

"They are athletes, they are musicians, they are student leaders, they are deeply involved in community service. They are everything everyone else is, and their parents frankly resent that their kids are tainted with the false label, ‘uninteresting science nerd.’ It’s very disappointing to have these stereotypes follow around these Asian-American kids. For some reason (American culture) makes fun of and marginalizes these kids who live up to this academic ideal and should be emulated!"

More than 300 students from across the country have contacted Students for Fair Admission since the group first put out the call last spring for students interested in challenging admission policies that consider the applicant’s race. That number includes "at least a couple or so from Hawaii," although none of them are among the 12 plaintiffs in the pending Harvard and UNC cases, he said.

Thomas J. Espenshade — the Princeton University professor who, with a colleague, documented what he describes as the "Asian penalty" or the "Asian disadvantage" at elite colleges, holding Asian-Americans to higher standards on college-entrance exams than white, Hispanic or African-American applicants — said that Asian-Americans seem more willing to directly confront the issue today than they did a few years ago.

Espenshade is co-author of the 2009 book "No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life," which reviewed data from 10 highly selective colleges and concluded that Asian-American students needed about 140 more points on the SAT or 3.4 points on the ACT to compete with white students in the applicant pools. The gap between Asian-Americans and Hispanic and African-American students was even larger. Follow-up research estimated that Asian-American admittance would rise by nearly a third, from 18 percent to 23 percent, if race was eliminated as a consideration.

"I taught a freshmen seminar (at Princeton), and we would talk about this Asian penalty and I would ask the students, ‘What do you think of this?’ and they would say, ‘It’s not really our style to make a big fuss about it, we just sort of accept it and work harder. That’s how we overcome it.’ I think that’s changing," Espenshade said in a telephone interview. "Asian organizations are starting to be much more vocal and push back against it. It’s a group response, one that says we don’t need to work harder, we can’t really work harder, we need to be treated fairly."

A collective, politically engaged response is the only way to reform an admissions system that dampens Asian-American enrollment at the United States’ most elite colleges, relative to their population growth and achievement, asserts James Chen, founder of an Alameda, Calif.-based admissions counseling service called Asian Advantage College Consulting.

Chen charges an hourly rate to help high-achieving Asian-American students maximize their chances of getting in to the Ivy League and similarly selective colleges, a huge challenge for students of all races seeking entry to institutions that generally accept fewer than 10 percent of all applicants. His advice to Asian-American students is blunt: Highlight unique, exceptional qualities and downplay your race.

"I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, and I’ve figured out that Asian-American students not only face higher hurdles, they face different hurdles. They have to go above and beyond to prove they are well-rounded, for one thing," he said. "And on the essays, never, ever remind the admissions officer reading your application of your race. Then you become the stereotypical Asian robot. It’s a very simple directive, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t get that advice."

Chen’s short-term goal is to help individual clients get into top schools, but his long-term one is to raise enough awareness to overhaul the current system.

"Basically, Asian-Americans are competing against each other for these few slots," he said during a telephone interview. "The main problem is that the Asian-American community has not been willing to fight for their rights. We’re too passive politically. I make this abundantly clear when I am speaking to students and parents. Some people don’t want to hear it, but that’s my personal opinion."

Of course, many disagree with Blum’s and Chen’s assessment that the current admissions process discriminates. Affirmative-action proponents praise the holistic evaluation process as one that takes many important aspects of a prospective student’s life into account, and blunts what they consider an overemphasis on standardized test scores. Such advocates emphasize the importance of expanding racial diversity at American campuses and decry Blum’s continual legal attempts to dismantle race-conscious admission standards. This view holds that fueling race-based grievances against super-selective universities that reject the vast majority of all applicants exploits Asian-American students, turning them into a political wedge.

"The Harvard lawsuit seems clear-cut, arguing that well-qualified Asian-Americans are being discriminated against, just as Jewish students were in the first half of the 20th century. In reality, the college admissions landscape has transformed radically since then, even in the past decade," Julie J. Park, an assistant professor of education at the University of Maryland at College Park and the author of "When Diversity Drops: Race, Religion, and Affirmative Action in Higher Education," wrote in a January commentary in the Washington Post. "We live in a time when thousands of students who score well on standardized tests will not be admitted into their top-choice institution, though most will likely gain entry to some quality institution. What we have is not discrimination but elite schools being limited in the number of outstanding students they can admit. There are no golden tickets."

Still, the perception of an anti-Asian-American bias is pervasive. The National Association for College Admission Counseling held a panel discussion on the issue at its 2012 national convention in Denver, offering as "takeaways" that "whether the phenomenon is real or imagined," the perception is real, and needs to be addressed at both the high school and college levels; that high-school counselors and college admissions officers should be mindful of stereotypes that might influence their handling of Asian-American applicants; and that Asian-American students likely would be admitted at higher rates if colleges and universities "removed arbitrary limits placed on applicants for the sake of diversity."

The issue arises continually at Hawaii high schools, where the majority of students claim at least some Asian heritage, and high-school counselors take care to reassure students that no single college offers the path to a great education and a great life. Managing expectations is important, especially when there is no "magic formula" for getting in, even for high-achieving students. The stress intensifies as elite colleges finalize and release their enrollment decisions, generally by April 1.

"Our approach is to convey to our students and parents the highly competitive nature of the admissions process, and to convey to the prospective colleges the full strength of each of our applicants," said Todd Fleming, director of college counseling at ‘Iolani School. "At the most selective colleges, everybody has great test scores and grades, so our goal is to help our students tell their full story. We encourage our students to present themselves as the multidimensional people they are, so that they can’t be reduced to an SAT score or a GPA."

That’s the approach with all ‘Iolani seniors, Fleming said, not only those who are Asian — an overly broad category that includes a full spectrum of distinct ethnicities and also students of more than one race. "Obviously, in Hawaii we take a much more nuanced view of what Asian-American even means. Every student is unique, with unique abilities and unique perspectives, and that’s how we want the colleges to see them."