@Hunt The same cast of characters is involved in the current lawsuit as has been involved in legal actions and campaigns against affirmative action / diversity efforts / holistic admissions going all the way back to the 1970’s.
Whether they describe their goal as “anti-affirmative action” or “race blind admissions” or “true meritocracy,” they really are about eliminating any policy that tips the scales in anyway against their favored groups (high SES, white people, and in this particular case, high achieving Asian students) versus other groups (black / brown / hispanic, low SES.) Whether these efforts are motivated by racial animus or simple interest group politics or a desire for a more perfect world is really beside the point, in my opinion.
@TatinG
Did Harvard say that the pertinent evidence was strictly statistical? They could have, I’m just wondering. Again, comparisons are the thing. Plenty of high scorers could have been rejected, and low scorers accepted, but what is often left out are the high scoring non-Asians who were also rejected. That’s a convenient missing piece of information dismissed by all those screaming “discrimination” against Asians.
@TatinG "If Harvard feels they are on rock solid legal ground, they won’t fight discovery by the other side. "
This is the second time you (or maybe someone else?) has asserted this, and frankly I find this a nearly indefensible statement. In some idealized world, there might be something to this, but in the world I live in, people with axes to grind will cherry pick statistics, use them to support whatever position they want to espouse, and spread them all over the world with nary the slightest bit of concern for the truth. The media will mindlessly parrot whatever silliness is spoon fed to them, and more objective opinions can easily be drowned out.
These media darlings aren’t the only lawsuits and the Ivies aren’t blindsided. A Harvard can let the clock run.
People like to look at this ass backwards- X Asians applied, Y were accepted…and Asians tend to have high scores, so why aren’t they forming the bulk of the class? Ohhh, must be an artificial cap, let’s get some discovery going. Ohhh, my dreams are big and I worked had to achieve the stats, so it must be unfair.
And the chorus is the same, over and over: just tell me how you do it, so I can copy that. It’s a head smacker.
That’s the mantra on the interminable “Race” rant thread on CC (College Admissions subforum). The teeny tiny problems with that statement are two: (1) Students are neither admitted nor rejected as a group; (2) Students aren’t admitted or rejected based on “tendencies” of any group they identify with – national origin, ethnicity, gender, how great their State is, or (and this is prevalent in my area), how mythically great their high school is. The high school is not an individual student.
The question will be is race THE determining factor in whether Tom got into Harvard versus Harry, which is not constitutional. Nor are quotas of any racial group constitutional. Obviously these lawsuits drag on for years and years. So we’ll just have to wait and see.
In a mutli-page app, where much ground is covered, I don’t see how anyone can even begin to prove it’s all about race. Some start with the false idea one kid is objectively more qualified, beyond doubt and based on stats. Yet this is a self presentation. Kind of like other contests. Say, debate: the fact that Harry is val, does some vol work and is president of the debate club, etc, says nothing about his actual debate presentation, doesn’t guarantee him anything.
So you can go backwards and say, but he’s president of the club…is the “real” problem that he’s Asian and “they” can’t let too may Asians win? But the issue is his presentation.
Harvard no doubt wants to have a well-rounded, balanced and diverse class in many ways. What I think most would acknowledge is that they include “racial diversity” as one type of diversity that they desire. Whether this desire is noble or inherently dividing and discriminatory is perhaps better discussed in another forum. More pertinent to this thread are the steps they are entitled to take to ensure racial diversity. This is an area of law that is very active, but in general affirmative action policies (specifically) are considered to be legal provided they are consistent with “strict scrutiny” to ensure that they serve a compelling interest, are not overly broad, and are the only means available to achieve the goal. It is not clear, however, whether achieving racial diversity itself – not specific to URMs in the context of affirmative action – would also be legally acceptable. If policies to achieve racial diversity were held to be constitutional without reference to URMs, then Harvard could legally have admissions practices that take into account the racial background of applicants in the same way they take into account other demographic variables such as the home state of the applicant. I suspect the plaintiffs in this case want to find out if Harvard is already taking race into account in this way. Based on the year-to-year stability of the percent of Asians at Harvard, I suspect the answer is that they do; i.e., that they are effectively “racially balancing” their class. But I have serious doubts about whether the plaintiffs will be able to prove this.
Didn’t the % of Asian Americans go up this year, at least in matriculating kids?
The shame is that the hs scenario is so entrenched in kids’ and parents’ minds. Get the best grades, be what the school and your peers consider a leader, please teachers, and it should be easy, right? But this isn’t about getting some award from the principal. Or even about winning a local or state math award.
Each piece of your app represents your thinking. (Over the past few years, the choices you made, and in the choices of how to actually write the app.) The activities you took on can show titles- hey, you ran the prom committee, founded a club, collected 5k for some distant charity- or they can show vision, stretch, how you roll up your sleeves and do for others around you, not just your own “passions.” The topic of your essay and how you write it can show self awareness, maturity and perspective, maybe some flexibility- and be relevant to a college app review- or not. If asked about your future plans, maybe your hs teacher is impressed that you wanted to be an engineer since you were 4, when someone gave you Legos, but an adcom may wonder why you haven’t explored the field, don’t have math-sci activities, and don’t seem to understand what engineers do.
You don’t have to stand out for curing cancer or be a juggling unicyclist. But you do have to have more than great stats and hs approval. Any race, any SES, any state, any major.
@TatinG, not to pick on you, but I’m going to respond to several parts of your post, because I think it might help illuminate the legal situation.
Well, the first thing that will happen is that Harvard will say that the plaintiffs don’t have enough evidence even to state a claim. Personally, I think this argument will prevail, and that the case will be dismissed. I don’t think any court will want to open up Harvard’s admissions process, because the judge will realize that the whole thing is likely to be a waste of time.
Is that, in fact, what statistics show? My understanding is that, at best, statistics may show that Asian applicants to Harvard who are accepted have, on average, stats that are better than white applicants, on average. (Again, the stats of URMs will not be relevant.) In my opinion, this is far from enough to show a disparate impact, since Harvard considers many characteristics beyond stats.
Again, it’s unlikely that Harvard will have to do this. But if it did have to, then it’s most likely that the full discovery of Harvard’s process will show a mushy, highly subjective process in which notes say things like, “Impressed. Suggest admit.” Or maybe, “From Idaho. Champion Irish step dancer. Scores iffy. Suggest waitlist.”
That story would be worth money right now. And it hasn’t materialized, after years of debate about this very issue. I’ll bet you that there would be lots of documents that say just the opposite, that candidates are to be considered on their own merits, that there are not racial quotas, etc. Note that the U Penn article writer said, at most, that there was general bias, not that there were quotas, or a discriminatory policy, or anything like that.
No matter how strong your case is, you don’t want to go through discovery, because it’s a huge pain. It costs a lot of money and time, and something embarrassing could emerge even if there’s no liability. So resistance to discovery is not at all a sign that there is a smoking gun they are hiding.
Finally, it’s important to note that Harvard is a private university. It has more freedom than does a public institution to set its own admission policies.
It is absolutely, uncontrovertibly true that Harvard (and similar schools) practice affirmative action with respect to URM candidates, and that this results in the admission of URM candidates with lower average stats than ORM candidates, and that a substantial portion of these URM admits would not be admitted in an entirely race-blind process. So what? This is legal, and many people continue to think it’s a good idea. If you don’t like it, there are colleges that don’t do it.
What colleges do with respect to Asian vs. white candidates is an entirely different question. Colleges claim that they don’t care if an applicant is white or Asian, and there has never been a smoking gun of any kind to indicate that this is a falsehood. At best, a few admissions people have said that there is probably some bias against Asians, and there are some statistical arguments based on grades and scores. That’s it.
This is, again, a matter of individuals. They don’t pile up the Asian apps and then throw darts.
“…a substantial portion of these URM admits would not be admitted in an entirely race-blind process.”
Hunt, I don’t want to get into a UC style argument, but for some looking for ammo, that may be misleading. When you consider the sorts of URMs and/or low SES kids who apply to an elite, extracting the ones who could never survive academically, their other accomplishments can exceed those of other groups. They’re activated, doing as much as (or sometimes more than) many other kids. Many elevate themselves, without this notion they have to be carried across the finish line…
A statistical argument is not the same as a weak argument. Forensic DNA evidence, for example, is evaluated based on statistical likelihood methods. Moreover, the statistical arguments likely go beyond grades and scores, and will probably focus more on the racial composition of the class, which has been very stable over time. If the plaintiffs can convincingly argue, using statistical analysis, that the probability of Asian admittances remaining between 15% and 18% for 7 consecutive years (even as the proportion of Asian applicants doubled) is negligible, that would be strong evidence that would need to be refuted.
Omg. The real stats are that it’s nearly impossibly hard to get in and not everything can be quantified, no matter how delightful some people find playing with numbers.
These arguments always strike me as a bit naive. Go get involved, look at some real apps from your alma mater, a swath of them, and see what strikes you. See if your preconceived notions hold.
@foosondaughter Isn’t it entirely plausible that due to choice of study, Asian applicants are competing with themselves to a higher degree than other racial and ethnic groups?