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In 2023, the Supreme Court will make a decision on whether race can be considered a factor in higher education admissions. The case will likely affect the racial mix of students at hundreds of colleges and universities that have relied on court precedent to attain the benefits they say come from a more diverse student body. The new case argues that the existing admission process discriminates against Asian Americans. Challengers are hoping to overturn precedent and force schools to come up with race-neutral alternatives to achieve diversity. As Straight Arrow News contributor Larry Lindsey explains, it’s not hard to predict where today’s conservative Supreme Court justices will stand on the issue.
Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a challenge on the admission of people to universities based on their race.
It’s a classic affirmative action case. What happens is the two universities, Harvard and University of North Carolina, have pretty much explicit quotas for different groups that they will admit. Consider, for example, the situation at Harvard. Back in the 1920s and 1930s, Harvard had a pretty explicit Jewish quota. Jews made up around 3% of the country, and yet standardized tests, which had just been developed, 25% of those who reached a level that allowed them to be admitted to Harvard, were Jewish – eight times the share of the population.
Well, this was a bit too much for WASPy old Harvard. And so the percentage of Jews in the admitted class was capped at around 15%. Ironically, the WASPS running Harvard thought 15% was a high number, because the population was only 3% Jewish.
Today, that same kind of discrimination is being felt by Asian students. The percent of the admissions to Harvard’s incoming class should be between 30 and 35% Asian, based simply on their performance on test scores and grade point averages. Instead, it’s only 18%.
So Harvard is being sued for this. Now, one looks at their practices, and these are numbers that come straight from Harvard, and you can get a sense of the nature of the discrimination.
Harvard sends out recruitment letters, for example, to people that they’ve heard about that they really would like to have apply. And they have SAT cut-offs, SAT scores run up to 1600. Blacks and Hispanics will get a recruitment letter with a score of around 1100. Asian women won’t get one until their score is 1350. And Asian men won’t get one unless their score is at least 1380.
Recruitment letters are only sent to whites in diverse parts of the country, such as Utah and Montana. And there, the cut-off is 1310. So you can see there are several 100 point differences between who they send recruitments letters to based on race.
In North Carolina, there’s a similar pattern with regard to admissions. Asians who were admitted had an average score of 1216. Whites, 1148. Students with mixed backgrounds, 1085. Hispanics, 1043. And Blacks, 966.
These are very different average test scores in the state of North Carolina. And in order to have a class that resembles the population, obviously, Blacks and Hispanics with lower test scores tend to get admitted, whereas Asians, even with high test scores do not.
