The other significant difference is that all these policies were completely opaque, not like you can find out how much Jews the university can accept this year. Officially, no such policy existed, but everyone knew it did.

In my dad's case, he was told he failed the health exam, which was a complete lie.

There were many other cases in my family where a similar thing happened:

- Besides having a passing score, my grandmother was not accepted into a tech university, while her Russian friend with the exact same grade was.

- Another one of her friends disappeared (taken to a political prison camp), after she publicly complained that she wasn't accepted into her desired university because of religion.

- my mom wanted to be a teacher, but had been told by her neighbor (who worked as a professor) to not even try applying to the Pedagogical University of St. Petersburg, as they flat out didn't accept Jews.

- post graduation, my dad wanted to work at a high-tech Moscow university lab. Back then, you were assigned to a job after graduation based on your grades. The Moscow lab was reserved for the top of the class (and my dad was in the top 5%). However, during the assignment committee, the director repeated "David Vladimirovich" twice. This was a common Jewish name, and he made sure that everyone knew it. The committee decided that my dad was to go work in a lab in Ufa (2000 km away - http://goo.gl/maps/a342A). Far places like that were reserved for lower placing students. When my dad asked why he didn't place into the Moscow lab, they told him, "we're the ones that ask the questions here."

Note that she wasn't denied admission: this happened mid-flight. This is very different from being turned down at one university, choosing to attend another university, and from that point being judged solely on academics. Another example is Moscow State University having a computer program that looked for Jewish sounding student last names and automatically lowered their grades.

Anti-Semitism/Anti-Judaism in Tzarist Russia was incredibly harsh (see the etymology of the word "pogrom"), but it was codified and known: one knew what the Jewish quotas were at the universities and the entire nascent capitalist sphere was open to Jews (e.g., a Jew could become a "merchant of first guild"). Being baptized was also the way out for some (e.g., Anton Rubinstein) as Jewish identity was considered a religion as opposed to an ethnicity.

Again, I don't mean to white-wash the harsh and destructive anti-Semitism of the Tzars -- indeed, it contained many seeds (Protocols of Elders of Zion, conflation of Judaism with both Marxism and Capitalism, etc...) for the racist anti-Semitism of Nazis and Soviets, but there's something to be said for at least an official acknowledgement that the system existed as opposed and being able to work around it.

I was through similar experiences to your dad's roughly at the same time.

Quotas, where they were in place, WERE proportional to the population (2%). There was a number of very good schools where we Jews were more than welcome (e.g. MIIT) - your dad was supposed to be aware of this. You have to thank God that he was not accepted to Military Academy - you probably won't be here if he was.

I don't blame them for not accepting me to Moscow University. I blame them for not letting us go, locking us in their country and using as hostages in "peace" negotiations with US. (Every concession from US was accompanied by opening the gates for a small number of people).

People of Russia were (and still are, to large extent) victims of brainwashing. Beware of brainwashing, it's effective regardless of country.

And Americans aren't?

After WWII my grandfather wanted nothing to do with his Jewish heritage. He bribed officials for new papers that changed the families last name and official ethnicity.

There is no doubt in my mind of the discrimination Jews faced in the Soviet bloc. On the other hand, I think it's a little more nuanced. Jews often occupied important positions in the system and were entitled to privileges that came along with said positions.

FYI, it was often known how many Jews were allowed each year. My dad had to take last two years of HS in one year (via extern) in order graduate a year early to get into Kiev medical school (circa 1970). Limit was only 1 Jew per year and he was the same age as the son of the dean (who was also jewish).

There are no asian quotas at the governmental level in the US. You're referring to an unfortunate side effect of diversity policies and affirmative action at the university level.

The US gov't going to silence or jail you for speaking up about university policies you believe are racist.

Don't compare the incomparable, it's an injustice to those that suffered under oppressive governments.

Edit: You've exemplified the sort of notions that caused me to make a 'Mythbusting' bucket.

Jews were disproportionally represented in universities in USSR even with all the quotas.

Similar quotas also existed for Russians and other non-locals in national republics - e.g. it was much harder for a Russian to be admitted to the university in Uzbek SSR compared to an Uzbek. This was a bit more nuanced than just Anti-Semitism.

Soviets had a quite complex migration policy, including moving people around "by order" (both forced mass movements of nationalities and also job location assignments that could move you 2000km away), and also 'carrot/stick' with having opposite policies in various parts of USSR to achieve whatever people/nationality migrations and grand social engineering plans they had.

[Disclaimer: Soviet Jewish immigrant to the United States. We immigrated to a heavily Asian community (Cupertino) when we moved to the United States, so I'm also acutely aware of the prejudice many brilliant Asian students face in college admissions here.]

The anti-Asian discrimination in elite private universities in US, is nothing compared to the Soviet system.

For starters, in Soviet Union, if one did not get into the one university they applied to, they would be drafted into the military. In United States if an individual does not get into Stanford, they would probably be accepted into Berkeley, UT Austin, UW, UCLA, or the like -- provided they're qualified to get into Stanford and are denied due to affirmative action. That, in a nutshell, is the huge difference.

There is, however, one major similarity between Soviet Union's anti-Jewish discrimination and the anti-Asian quotas/"affirmative action"/discrimination in the United States: they are both "plausibly deniable", vague, and ill-understood. This in opposition to the strictly set percentage-based quotas used by Ivy Leagues against Jews in the early twentieth century and in Tzarist Russian Universities at roughly the same time: an applicant knew what the quota was, so it was possible to calculate how well one would need to do to get into a specific university.

The "holistic" admissions process in American universities as well as the rigged exams, deliberately lowering of grades, etc... in Soviet universities were essentially unpredictable -- no one had a clear picture of what their chances were when applying to a specific university.

In both cases prejudice at the most elite universities (Moscow State University in Soviet Union, Stanford and the Ivy Leagues in the United States) lead to many strong students/grad-students/post-doc researchers going to what were once "lesser" colleges ("Public Ivies" in the United States, universities in non-Russian Soviet republics, e.g., Belarusian State University -- where my dad was a professor) which in turn made them more academically rigorous and reputable.

Overall, American system with all its flaws is many orders of magnitude better: I'll gladly take American system at its worst (e.g., being a Jewish student in the 1920s and 1930s) over the Soviet system as its best. There are simply far more opportunities for young people who do not fit the "mold": if you do not get into a good university in US right out of high school you can attend a community college and then transfer. Even if one doesn't have the means, time, or requisite psychological profile to graduate from a university it isn't a career death sentence: while drop-out success stories are over-stated, it's still clearly possible (even if significantly harder) to find knowledge-work (i.e., enter the "intelligentsia" class) for someone who did not graduate from or even attend a university.[1]

The downside of collectivism and equality is the attitude that "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down". America's "rugged individualism" has a cost (often times "in-your-face" inequality), but individual freedom -- broadly understood, not only in the political realm -- including the freedom to carve out your own educational and career path is what made the (difficult) decision to immigrate to the United States worth it for us. My parents abandoned a privileged lifestyle (a flat in city center, a country home, a tenured professorship, guaranteed retirement, excellent public transportation, etc...) to come to the United States as they knew it would be one of the few places where someone like myself (or even my older and already college educated brother) could have a fulfilling life and career.

[1] To any young hackers reading this: please don't take it as encouragement to drop out from or -- even worse -- not attend college in the first place. Even if there was absolutely no career benefit to attending a university, it is still worth it. Here's just one example: unless you get lucky, it will be a long time in the industry until you're considered to have enough experience to be "allowed" to build an operating system, TCP/IP stack, a compiler -- or to build something non-trivial in Haskell, Lisp or ML; yet, these are routine projects in undergrad CS classes. On the other hand, if after making a genuine effort, you discover you simply cannot learn in a structured setting such as a secondary or tertiary educational institution, do not surrender your career inspirations: plenty of choices are still available to you.