I’ve been loosely following the Harvard affirmative action case with interest. The lawsuit, filed by a group of Asians, charges that Harvard discriminates against Asian American applicants in its admissions process for Harvard College. A judge recently ruled that Harvard doesn’t discriminate against Asian American applicants.
That Harvard and other colleges discriminate against Asian Americans is patently obvious given that the bar for their admittance is higher than any other race. On quantitative measures such as GPA and SATs, Asian Americans need to score significantly higher than African American and Latino applicants in order to stand a decent chance of getting in. Moreover, Harvard’s own admissions process leads them to score Asian Americans lowest in terms of “personal” scores, even though there is no evidence that Asian Americans have less courage, likability and kindness (elements that are claimed to be part of the personal score) than any other ethnic group.
The dirty truth is that if Harvard were truly non-discriminatory with regard to race, half of the freshman class would be Asian American while hardly any blacks would be admitted. This would be unacceptable to Harvard and its stakeholders in all sorts of ways. For reasons lacking any real basis, these days it is unacceptable for an elite class — from student bodies to boards of directors, and from investment professionals to doctors — to differ in racial makeup from the broader population. By the way, this applies to gender as well. Thus, Harvard’s prerogative is to get as close to a racial makeup mirroring the U.S. population, along with a 50/50 male to female ratio. And that means more blacks and latinos, and fewer Asian Americans.
The overarching argument for affirmative action is that racial diversity contributes positively to the learning environment. That is probably true, but my feeling here is that rather than focus on race, perhaps it is more constructive to focus on socioeconomic class. Of course, that may also be unappealing to Harvard given that donors are usually wealthy, and donations matter to the institution despite its endowment being the largest in the world.
