The Justice Department confirms investigation into admissions practices at Harvard University

https://www.buzzfeed.com/zoetillman/the-justice-department-has-an-active-investigation-into

Thanks for sharing this. Will be interesting to see how this turns out.

Seems that the DOJ investigation will make admissions committees even more secretive than they currently are. If their work can be turned into a lawsuit, it will just make the process even more opaque.

All documentation, paper, computers etc., can be seized. Nothing is confidential in an investigation.

At first I thought this was old news due to pending court cases, but what is new is the involvement of the Justice Department in the issue of affirmative action at Harvard. Here is info in the article linked above, concerning this issue going back to 2015:

"The issue of new affirmative action–related activity was first raised by an August article in the New York Times, which reported on an internal DOJ announcement that the paper claimed related to investigating allegations of discrimination against white students. The Justice Department disputed that report, and released a statement saying that the internal announcement was seeking volunteers to investigate an “administrative complaint filed by a coalition of 64 Asian-American associations in May 2015.”

The DOJ statement in August did not name Harvard, but the reference to the May 2015 complaint squared with a complaint filed by Asian-American associations against Harvard with the US Department of Education. The Education Department dismissed that complaint in 2015 because a lawsuit raising similar allegations had been filed in federal court, according to news reports.

The lawsuit against Harvard was filed by the group Students for Fair Admissions, which also sued the University of North Carolina. Both cases are pending. In court filings, Harvard has denied engaging in racial discrimination."

Will this impact their admission selection process?

The charges impacted their admission processes 4-5 years ago. The evidence built up that there was something like a 15% ceiling on Asian-American admits, and then all of a sudden a few years ago the numbers changed pretty sharply. There’s more variability year to year, but the percentage has been at least several points higher than 15% every year.

Things are a little confused because an increasing number of kids identify as multi-racial, or refuse to identify their race, and there is evidence that a high percentage of those kids would probably be considered Asian as well. Plus a pretty high proportion of international students admitted are of some Asian ethnicity. The ground-feel at Harvard is that at least a quarter of undergraduates are ethnically Asian.

Do you think they will accept fewer minorities? In order to hide the impact of affirmative action?

I strongly, strongly doubt that.

A quota on Asians is indefensible. I find it almost impossible to believe that Harvard ever actually had a quota on Asians, but the numbers pretty clearly said that whatever it was doing had the same effect as a quota. And I think when that sank in a little the admissions department changed what they were doing enough to have a significant effect on Asian admissions.

Notwithstanding that some people disagree with it, affirmative action is far from indefensible. Harvard has been committed to it for 50+ years. Harvard’s policy was specifically endorsed by Lewis Powell, the Anthony Kennedy of his day. It’s certainly not going to change on Drew Faust’s watch, and it’s not going to change because people at Harvard fear Jeff Sessions and whatever ragtag crew of Justice Department lawyers he can assemble to bring the case. Something may change when Harvard gets a new president and Trump gets to replace Kennedy with another Neil Gorsuch, but it’s not going to affect anything this year.

I’m going to go out on a limb here – and granted this observation is both subjective and several years old. That said, when my daughter was attending Harvard (she graduated in 2015), my wife and I would drive from NYC to Cambridge to take my daughter out to brunch every 3rd weekend or so. And back then, walking around campus – mind you, not in Harvard yard, but around Mather, Dunster, Leverett and Quincy – at least one quarter (25%) of the Harvard students we met were Asian or Asian biracial.

So, if Harvard had/has a quota of Asian admits, it was not apparent from this person’s observation. FWIW: by comparison, we saw very few Black and Latino students. So, I’m not sure what more Harvard Admissions can do about increasing Asian admits vs decreasing white admits. Admissions can (and should) strive to do a much better job of increasing Black and Latino admits – which may require a decrease in White admits or Asian admits.

@gibby looking at the Harvard CDS for 2014-15, it would take assuming virtually every single multi race - non hispanic and unidentified race kid enrolled at Harvard that year was really Asian-in-disguise to put the numbers up over 25%. Regardless of the actual percentage, the question is whether race should be a factor in admissions. You explicitly say it should be, many others think otherwise. As you’ve identified yourself as a parent with children who attended Stuy, you must have been aware of what a student body looks like at a highly selective school in the North East when admissions are solely based on objective, quantifiable, merit based criteria - very, very different from Harvard’s.

The reason that Harvard came up with “holistic” (aka:discriminatory) admissions in the first place wasn’t to increase diversity but rather to reduce it. “Holistic” was a solution to what they perceived as a very real problem: TMJ. Too Many Jews. Now it is is their solution to TMA.

@tdy123 :

  1. If you estimate that a quarter of the international students are Asian (including some ethnically Asian students from the UK, Canada, Australia), and a third of the kids who identified as mixed-race or refused to specify, that gets you to 25%, pretty reasonably. You can also take the international students out of the numerator and denominator, and you get to 25% of the domestic students the same way. Are you really suggesting that the ~150 kids who identified as mixed-race or non-race don't include 50 kids who might be considered Asian by their families and friends?

In any event, 22% of domestic students identified as Asian. That’s a long way from the years when it looked like there was a 15% quota. For the past 10 years or so, the percentage of domestic students identifying themselves as Asian has generally been over 20%, although it bounces around. And in some of those years 15% or more of the class did not identify a race.

  1. New York City (and San Francisco) are not the same as America. My kids attended a selective public high school in Philadelphia (which is in the northeast, by the way) where admissions are based solely on objective, quantifiable, merit based criteria. Guess what? It doesn't look like Stuyvesant. It looks a lot more Asian than the population of the city as a whole, but Asian students of all varieties don't add up to as much as a third of the student body. And that's in a city with a meaningful Asian population. They don't generally dominate the top of the class, either. (But those who do, and who apply, often get accepted at Harvard.)

It’s like JHS said. Love it or hate it, nothing significant about AA will change until there’s another Supreme Court vacancy. However, the results of a DOJ investigation could provide a fascinating look into the admissions process.

^^ @tdy123:

Those are the current ethnicity stats from Stuyvesant High School and IMHO, Stuyvesant’s Admissions process, which is based strictly on an SAT-like test and prescribed by NY State Law, is utterly broken and should NOT be used as a model for Harvard, any other college, or any other high school. http://schools.nyc.gov/OA/SchoolReports/2015-16/School_Quality_Snapshot_2016_HS_M475.pdf

When so many students of one ethnicity (be they black, white, asian or hispanic) dominate a school, the culture and the environment of that school tends to be skewed in a single direction – and that is not a positive thing IMHO. Hence, I do think that a “holistic” Admissions process benefits a campus even though it may be discriminatory towards some.

FWIW: Harvard’s website currently states that 22.2% of admitted freshman are Asian American so my anecdotal observation of 25% Asian or Asian biracial is not that far off. And as previously stated, I’m not sure what more Harvard Admissions can do about increasing Asian admits, unless they opt for a broken system like Stuyvesant’s: https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics

Also see: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/08/02/harvard-incoming-class-majority-nonwhite/5yOoqrsQ4SePRRNFemuQ2M/story.html

So again, I think Harvard is going in the right direction, even though their “holistic” Admissions process may be discriminatory towards some.

@JHS I found your comments to be very interesting. You have a point about the international student population which is explicitly excluded from the ethnic analysis, and what you wrote about your experience at your children’s HS made me curious to what extent the Philadelphia HS admissions criteria were indeed “objective, quantifiable, merit based” and it seems that the answer to that is: maybe not so much. According to the Pew Charitable Trust report released last month http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/assets/2017/09/pri_getting_into_high_school_-in_philadelphia.pdf

“These schools and programs have the most stringent academic, attendance, and behavioral criteria. The school district’s policy is that acceptance decisions to special admission high schools depend on a combination of these factors. But the importance of each criterion varies from school to school, based on the judgment of the principal. Special admission school principals also have considerable leeway in how they enforce their criteria, sometimes ignoring their school’s stated admissions standards. For example, a principal could decide to overlook a student’s poor behavior record, even though the admission criteria state that no disciplinary infractions are tolerated. Or a principal might give differential treatment to two students with the same grades, based on which of their previous schools was the more rigorous academically. In the selection process for the academic year 2015-16, standardized test scores were the most clear-cut, objective, and quantifiable of the admissions criteria, although principals said high test scores alone did not guarantee admission.”

Much closer to “holistic” admissions than the system at Stuy.

I agree with this. How do people feel when colleges balance for equal representations of each gender? That seems to be pretty openly acknowledged and while I know there are grumbles from male applicants to places like MIT and female applicants to places like Vassar, it seems to be accepted. Or am I wrong? And do you think this is different?

For those who agree with this statement (which, to be clear, I don’t): " When so many students of one ethnicity (be they black, white, asian or hispanic) dominate a school, the culture and the environment of that school tends to be skewed in a single direction – and that is not a positive thing IMHO" Why should it only apply to students at schools? Do you think it should also apply to housing, health care, hotel occupancy, dining in a restaurant, hiring and every other aspect of society?

@3girls3cats

Since you brought up gender, what do you think about the Virginia Military Institute case?

I’ve really enjoyed reading this discussion and have little to add, other than the observation that adding a significant number of Asian/mixed students to the population is a good thing, as they are typically exceptionally attractive.

Of course not. Why? I think this Amicus brief to the Supreme Court says it more eloquently than I ever could: https://www.washingtonpost.com/r/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2012/10/05/Editorial-Opinion/Graphics/11-345bsacDeanRobertPostAndDeanMarthaMinow.pdf?tid=a_inl

@gibby

I doubt that Martha Minow (whose Supreme Court brief you link) would ever concede that any school should deploy holistic admissions in order to reduce the proportion of the student body that is comprised of a certain race or ethnicity - particularly a race or ethnicity that has experienced invidious discrimination in the recent past. That is what you’re proposing here but I don’t see it in Minow’s brief. There’s a reason for that. It’s because such a policy would be unlawful under the US Constitution.

Stuyvesant has been very, very, very successful over the years by offering a high powered academic environment to students who have demonstrated the ability to handle a high powered academic environment. How is that not one way of structuring a high school? Why can’t a large public school district have at least one or a few such high schools so that the academically gifted and driven can have a school that matches their abilities?

Are you against the very notion of Caltech as well for Caltech selects pretty much the way that Stuyvesant does?

A lot of Stuyvesant students are low income and/or first generation and they make it into the school despite their family circumstances, not because of them. They don’t have the income or the social capital to get admitted to selective New York City private schools. If they’re able to bootstrap their way into Stuyvesant by studying hard and sacrificing, then so can many others if they so choose.