It sounds to me like the student was relying on his grades and intellect, and denied admission into the honors program solely due to his race and gender.
He adopted the null hypothesis that his lack of acceptance to the program was due to random chance alone. The evidence used to reject that null hypothesis consisted of some hand-picked samples from a subpopulation of applicants with whom he had social-networking contacts (and sure, he's got some friends who don't look like him, maybe even some of his best friends), further categorized by him and his collaborator subjectively into racial groups and the proxy metric of being on the dean's list, compiled into some regression numbers of unspecified strength. There are plenty of opportunities for skew and bias an the method of his research. If this study was robust enough, there would be plenty of parties interested enough that it would be a career-making, not career-breaking publication.
The author of the piece simply wanted an anecdata to support his racist views, and if you're thinking "hell yeah, white guys gotta stand together to stop those people" you're exactly the base he's pandering to.