Harvard University’s own research shows that Asian-Americans applying to the college faced a penalty in the admissions process, according to a lawsuit filed against the Ivy League school.
That forced their numbers lower than they would otherwise be, according to court documents released Friday. The lawsuit cites three reports by the university’s Office of Institutional Research in 2013 that found that while the number of Asian-American students admitted that year was 19 percent, it should have been 26 percent according to the school’s method of scoring for academic and extracurricular activities and would have been 43 percent if only academic qualifications counted.
“Asian high achievers have lower rates of admission,” one of the reports concluded, according to the lawsuit filed by the nonprofit Students for Fair Admissions. The lawsuit was filed in 2014 and seeks to change the university’s admissions process.
“This filing definitively proves that Harvard engages in racial balancing, uses race as far more than a ‘plus’ factor, and has no interest in exploring race-neutral alternatives. It is our hope that the court will carefully study the statistical, documentary, and testimonial evidence amassed against Harvard and end these unfair and unlawful practices,” said Students for Fair Admissions President Edward Blum.
“We believe that the rest of the evidence will be released in the next few weeks, and it will further confirm that Harvard is in deliberate violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act,” he said.
According to the lawsuit, the three 2013 studies were conducted following a 2012 article by writer Ron Unz in The American Conservative magazine that said Harvard discriminated against Asian Americans.
The article prompted numerous email exchanges among Harvard’s leadership. General Counsel Robert Iuliano directed the university’s Office of Institutional Research to study the issue in an apparent attempt to rebut the allegations. Despite the studies, Harvard never published a rebuttal, the lawsuit says, because the data kept showing that Asian-American admissions were lower than they ought to be.
In one study, the Office of Institutional Research produced a dataset that found that the strongest positive associations for an applicant being admitted included by a “legacy,” which is a child of previous graduates, or being African-American or Native American. The strongest negative association was being Asian American, the only racial group to have a negative association. The study “provided no explanation” for the finding.
In depositions for the case, Harvard officials said the reports were merely “preliminary” and not conclusive.
The university disputed the lawsuit’s findings in a statement to the Washington Examiner: “Thorough and comprehensive analysis of the data and evidence makes clear that Harvard College does not discriminate against applicants from any group, including Asian-Americans, whose rate of admission has grown 29 percent over the last decade. Mr. Blum and his organization’s incomplete and misleading data analysis paint a dangerously inaccurate picture of Harvard College’s whole-person admissions process by omitting critical data and information factors, such as personal essays and teacher recommendations, that directly counter his arguments.”
