Harvard University and the University of North Carolina are being accused of discriminating against Asian-Americans in their admission decisions. Lawsuits are currently pending against each school for this reason. The old, but still-charged term “Affirmative Action” is at the center of this legal controversy, but here Affirmative Action is being used to exclude Asian Americans, a minority group in the USA (5.6% of the population). We will focus on Harvard, as it is regarded as a premier elite academic university. The rationale/defense being embraced by Harvard appears to have merit at first glance, but hides (we think intentionally) a very ugly truth.
The issue on the plaintiffs’ side is one of simple math – there has been a steady increase in the number Asian-American applicants whose academic credentials surpass the rest of the applicant pool, but no corresponding increase in admission rates of Asian-Americans to Harvard. In contrast, states with laws strictly prohibiting racial discrimination in college admissions, like California and Michigan, have shown a commensurate increase in Asian-American admissions to their top-tier universities as the number of high-achieving Asian-American applicants increases1. The Asian-American plaintiffs assert that Harvard (and UNC) are practicing racial discrimination in their admission practices.
Harvard doesn’t deny racial discrimination, but goes to great lengths to make the case that guaranteeing a measured amount of diversity in the student body holds an educational “value” that is highly desirable. This value is held as more important to the overall student experience than interacting and competing with other students at the highest intellectual level. They argue that too many students of one or another demographic group will upset this balance and lessen the diversity value. Harvard’s home state of Massachusetts has no anti-discrimination laws for college admissions such as those of California or Michigan. Harvard believes its admissions policies are backed up by legal precedent and operating within the accepted framework of Affirmative Action. The resulting effect is that other minority groups (with lower academic achievement) who historically have tended to suffer discrimination are now favored over the Asian-American minority group2. The plaintiffs in this case must argue they are being denied their rights under the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment3 and/or that Harvard is implementing a veiled form of racial quotas. Racial quotas were specifically prohibited by Supreme Court precedent in 1978.
While we agree there is value to acquiring an education within a diverse student body, we strongly believe the practice of “forcing” this diversity to occur artificially is fundamentally wrong. Relying less on objective academic criteria for an admission decision and placing more weight on subjective measures such as “efforts to define and identify precise elements of character” and “personal qualities”4 lessens any prospective applicant’s ability to prepare better than the competition for a shot at admission. It’s almost as if the academicians don’t want the prospective students to know exactly what is required, lest a certain demographic of students learn to master those requirements and skew the desired diversity goal. What is worse is that we believe these subjective criteria are used to obscure the fact that some students are being penalized for immutable and inherent characteristics like race.
Rather than addressing the problem of why some groups of students aren’t achieving higher test scores and/or other objective measures of academic excellence, the educators’ solution is instead to create an invisible moving admissions target for certain groups who have mastered the curriculum, while at the same time accepting other (preferred) demographic groups who have not. This is fundamentally unfair since the decision criteria can be changed at any moment to suit artificial diversity goals. Ambiguous and subjective terms like “holistic” are used to imply the existence of a secret complex formula, known only to admission officials, that determines selection. These terms provide an excellent “cover” (who would ever dare question the wisdom of an Ivy league academician?) for implementing quotas to meet specific diversity numbers. One result of this practice is clear: high-achieving students who belong to a certain demographic group that contains a disproportionate number of high-achievers (e.g. Asian Americans) are left with fewer opportunities for attending “top” universities.
As we see it, Harvard and UNC are representative examples of universities implementing a terrible solution to a serious problem. The problem is that students from certain demographic groups in the US are not mastering high school level academic material well enough to compete with Asian-American students. This lack of mastery is what needs to be addressed. Neither high school teachers nor the curriculum can be blamed for this problem since Asian-American students often come from the same high schools as their lower-achieving peers. We believe differences in family function, discipline and personal choice are significant elements explaining this difference. These problems are not being discussed or addressed because this subject is not politically correct, is too hard to deal with, and engenders angry and defensive reactions. These are hard topics to honestly discuss, and it’s even harder to reach a consensus on a solution across cultures.
The concept that Affirmative Action is being used as an imprimatur to deny admission, and to thus penalize the highest academic achievers can only be described as “devolution”. If the goal is to level the academic playing field among demographic groups for college admissions, an advancing society will do what is necessary to help the lower performers improve up to the level of the higher performers. Only a decaying society will penalize the higher performers and reward lower levels of achievement.
What remains to be seen is how the corporate and scientific world views graduates from a program valuing diversity so highly, compared to one that prioritizes academic achievement. Graduates from the latter will have been subject to a higher level of competition, better preparing them for jobs with a similarly highly competitive nature. On the other hand, there are also careers not purely competitive in nature, that require social, communication, and creativity skills across cultural boundaries. The Harvard program may be the perfect training ground for this latter set of vocations.
For students wishing purely to learn and compete alongside the highest achievers, is Harvard really the place to be anymore? We think not. The longstanding reputation of places like Harvard as embodying the pinnacle of academic scholarship is being replaced with a reputation for diversity in the learning environment as its primary goal. Academic competition/achievement is now a runner-up. The name “Harvard” currently carries a lot of weight and opens a lot of doors for graduates. But the job market and scientific research community is pragmatic, not altruistic. It may well be that the name “Harvard” will not carry the weight it once did on the competitive stage in the real-world. Other centers of academic excellence will arise and gain ascendancy, institutions where the highest value is placed on top performance and highest-level academic competition, regardless of a student’s demographic group of origin.
1 From 2007 – 2013, the admission rates for Asian-Americans to Harvard, as well as all other Ivy League Universities, was consistently between 12% – 18%. Meanwhile, at three major universities in California (a state having anti-discrimination laws), the admission rates for Asian-Americans at UCLA, UC-Berkley, and Cal Tech was 34.8%, 32.4% and 42.5% respectively. This was in the same year (2013) that Harvard’s admission rate for Asian-Americans was 18%.
2 “African-American applicants receive the equivalent of 230 extra SAT points (on a 1600-point scale), and being Hispanic is worth an additional 185 SAT points. Other things equal, recruited athletes gain an admission bonus worth 200 points, while the preference for legacy candidates is worth 160 points. Asian-American applicants face a loss equivalent to 50 SAT points”. – From a Princeton University paper titled “The Opportunity Cost of Admission Preferences at Elite Universities” written by Thomas J. Espenshade and Chang Y. Chung.
3 Among other things, the equal protection clause in the 14th amendment says that individual states cannot enact laws that would “…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws…”. This may be a difficult argument for the plaintiffs since the state of Massachusetts does not have explicit anti-discrimination laws like California, Michigan and several other states.