The New Jews of Harvard Admissions:By Jason L. Riley
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-jews-of-harvard-admissions-1432077157
Asian-Americans are rebelling over evidence that they are held to a much higher standard, but elite colleges deny using quotas.
Last year’s Supreme Court decision upholding Michigan’s ban on racial preferences in public-university admissions included a passionate dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who argued that such policies benefit “racial minorities,” by which she means blacks and Hispanics. Nowhere in Justice Sotomayor’s 58-page opinion will you find any mention of how affirmative action affects Asian-Americans, the fastest-growing racial group in the country. The omission is common among defenders of campus double standards for favored minorities, and it’s starting to annoy an increasing number of Asian-Americans. This is progress.
A coalition of more than 60 Chinese, Indian, Korean and Pakistani organizations is asking the U.S. departments of Justice and Education to investigate possible racial bias in undergraduate admissions at Harvard. The complaint announced on Friday, echoing a lawsuit filed by another group in November, accuses Harvard and other elite institutions of holding Asian-Americans to far higher standards than other applicants, a practice used to limit the number of Jewish students at Ivy League schools in the first half of the 20th century.
Citing several academic studies, the complaint notes that Asians have some of the highest academic credentials but the lowest acceptance rates at the nation’s top schools, a result that the coalition attributes to “just-for-Asians admissions standards that impose unfair and illegal burdens on Asian-American college applicants.” A 2009 paper by Princeton sociologists Thomas J. Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford found that “Asian-Americans have the lowest acceptance rate for each SAT test score bracket, having to score on average approximately 140 points higher than a white student, 270 points higher than a Hispanic student and 450 points higher than a black student on the SAT to be on equal footing.”
It’s too early to tell whether the Obama administration will take action or wait for the legal process to play out. Regardless, Chunyan Li, a professor of accounting at Pace University and a coalition organizer of the administrative complaint, told me that the complaint will help raise awareness of a problem that is only getting worse. The numbers have become too lopsided to ignore.
“In the past 20 years our population has doubled,” she said, but the percentage of Asians admitted to elite schools “has been capped artificially low. There have been some individual complaints, but they have gone nowhere. An investigation is long overdue.”
Harvard officials deny these allegations. The school’s general counsel said in a May 15 statement that the admissions process, which “considers each applicant through an individualized, holistic review,” is legally sound. Schools use “holistic” criteria as a way to apply different standards to different applicant groups—e.g., play down objective test scores for Asians, play up subjective recommendation letters for blacks and Hispanics. The Supreme Court blessed the approach in 2003. The court has said repeatedly that while explicit racial quotas are unconstitutional, race can be a factor in admissions, just not the predominant factor.
In practice, however, there is strong evidence that racial balance is the highest priority at schools like Harvard, and holistic admissions are used to obscure the racial bean-counting necessary to obtain the desired racial mix. At the California Institute of Technology, a selective private college that uses color-blind admissions, Asian enrollment grew steadily to 42.5% in 2013 from 29.8% two decades earlier, reflecting the nation’s growing Asian population. At Harvard, Asian enrollment consistently remained between 14.3% and 18.4%. Harvard would have us believe that this remarkable consistency in the percentages of Asian (and other racial and ethnic groups) on campus has been achieved without quotas.
Asian interest groups typically have sided with their liberal black and Hispanic counterparts in support of racial preferences, though the negative impact on high-achieving Asian youngsters has been obvious for decades. In 1995 Asian freshman enrollment at the University of California, Berkeley, stood at 37%. The next year California made it illegal for state universities to consider race in admissions, and inside of a decade Berkeley’s freshman class was nearly 47% Asian. UCLA experienced a similar spike in Asian undergrads over the same period, suggesting that the California schools had been doing what Harvard allegedly is still doing.
Last year the California legislature moved to reverse the ban on race-based admissions, but Asian-American lawmakers, primarily at the urging of their Asian constituents, pushed back hard. The legislative leadership dropped the matter. Ms. Li said the episode alerted many of her fellow activists: “That opened up many people’s eyes. They saw it as going backward. These race-based admissions policies pit one group against another.”
Mr. Riley is a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and Journal contributor.
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