A barrage of amicus briefs was filed last month defending Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, whose use of race as a criterion in their admissions processes heads to the Supreme Court this term.
As others have noted, Harvard’s own data (as presented in the petitioner’s brief) expose an odious pattern of discrimination. An Asian American student in the top decile of the “academic index” (“a metric created by Harvard based on test scores and GPA”) has a 12.7% chance of admission, while an African American applicant has a 56.1% chance. In the seventh decile, it is a 4% versus a 41.1% chance. Asian American students consistently have the lowest chance of admission at every decile, even though their academic scores are often higher.
