Harvard’s Asian Problem

Harvard’s Asian Problem

A lawsuit says racial preferences hurt high-achieving minorities.

From the Wall Street Journal

The Supreme Court declined to draw a clear line on racial discrimination in university admissions in last year’s Fisher v. University of Texas decision. Now new lawsuits are moving to challenge how far colleges can go in using racial preferences.

A group called Students for Fair Admissions filed lawsuits Monday against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina in federal court. The suits argue that the schools use race preferences to reach a specific racial balance on campus and have failed to abide by the strict scrutiny of racial preferences required by the Supreme Court.

The Harvard challenge concerns what the lawsuit calls a de facto quota on the number of Asian students the school admits. The suit compares its current racial admissions to Harvard’s quotas limiting Jewish students in an earlier era. In both cases, Harvard kept out minorities who would have been admitted based on academic merit.

Over the last eight years Asian students have comprised between 17.6% and 20.7% of students admitted to Harvard. Though the number of Asians applying for admission has increased, the percentage of offers has barely budged. In 1992, 19.1% of Harvard’s admissions offers went to Asian applicants, compared to 25.2% who were admitted to the California Institute of Technology, a school that doesn’t use racial preferences. In 2013 Harvard made 18% of its offers to Asians, while CalTech admitted 42.5% Asian students.

Similar admissions percentages at Harvard have held steady for other racial groups with remarkably little variance. In other words, while schools like Harvard say the goal of racial preferences is to achieve a “critical mass” of minority students, the admissions evidence suggests that the school is reserving pre-rationed pie slices for racial groups.

The other lawsuit argues that UNC at Chapel Hill is evading Fisher’s strict-scrutiny requirement that a school cannot use race preferences to achieve diversity if it can get the same result using race-neutral methods. The lawsuit says UNC hasn’t adjusted admissions policies since the Fisher decision. The university itself did a study showing that it could increase diversity on campus by admitting the top 10% of the state’s high school classes more than with racial preferences. UNC rejected that alternative because it would have slightly lowered the school’s average SAT scores.

Some of this trouble could have been avoided if the Supreme Court had used Fisher to end the race-drenched admissions policies that proliferated after its lamentable Grutter decision in 2003. The Court’s 7-1 Fisher decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy instead opted to move the needle slightly and pressure colleges to limit the use of preferences. Many schools have flouted that requirement or will continue to skate along the edge of legality until there’s a clear policy.

Let’s hope that day is getting closer. Since 1978’s bad turn in Bakke, the Supreme Court has allowed schools to pursue diversity on campus in what it called a “holistic” way. Now we see that in pursuit of diversity, schools treat some minorities as less equal than others based solely on race. Nothing holistic—or constitutional—about that.

Poster’s comments:

1)       Mostly all I want to do is be able to eat enough food when I am hungry.

2)      Obviously, at least to me, I am merit oriented.

3)      As always it seems to be working out that the “Golden Rule” applies.