COLLEGE PARK, MD (April, 2015) “About one-third of Harvard White students are admitted through special preferences” such as legacy admissions, according to research by Julie J. Park, an affirmative action scholar with the Department of Counseling, Higher Education and Special Education. This figure, which Dr. Park calls “a conservative estimate,” underpins her March editorial for the Huffington Post, “The White Admissions Advantage at Harvard: Unfair, But Different from Discrimination Against Asian Americans,” which criticizes a discrimination lawsuit filed against Harvard University in November 2014.
The suit, brought by a litigation group called Students for Fair Admissions, alleges that Harvard’s admissions policy discriminates against high-achieving Asian American applicants. It argues that Harvard’s policy of holistic admissions is really a smokescreen for racial quotas, which have been banned by the Supreme Court.
But Dr. Park says that the lawsuit does not adequately address why SAT scores vary between Asian Americans and Whites. According to Harvard dean of admissions William Fitzsimmons, about 12-13% of each Harvard class is legacy students, and the majority of these students are White. Almost 80% of recruited athletes are also White, according to the Harvard Crimson. Dr. Park argues that such special preferences deserve deeper scrutiny than affirmative action. In regard to her striking calculation – how one-third of all White students gain entry to Harvard – she writes:
“This statistic likely explains why White students have slightly lower average SAT scores (22 points per section) than Asian Americans at Harvard, a key point in the lawsuit . . . It is critically important to recognize that the Asian-White score gap is likely coming from these specific preferences that Whites disproportionately benefit from, and not because admissions officers are rampantly and randomly discriminating against Asian American applicants, as the lawsuit contends.”
This test score gap is relevant because, as Dr. Park pointed out in a Washington Post op-ed she penned in January, the lawsuit pivots around statistical evidence that Asian Americans admitted to elite U.S. colleges and universities have higher average SAT scores. But she says the lawsuit goes too far in using these statistics to make a conjectural leap about admissions decisions:
“The narrative that underlies the Students for Fair Admissions lawsuit — that Asian Americans need higher SAT scores to get into elite schools — is powerful. But it is also deeply misleading. It feeds the myth that elite universities have required scores for applicants and that meeting these requirements should guarantee acceptance. In reality, in elite admissions, a high SAT score is generally a necessary but insufficient condition. . . . We live in a time when thousands of students who score well on standardized tests will not be admitted into their top-choice institution, though most will likely gain entry to some quality institution.”
In a SCOTUSblog piece, legal journalist Lyle Denniston notes that Students for Fair Admissions recommends eliminating legacy admissions as one of several alternatives to race-conscious policies. But the lawsuit, he notes, also explicitly takes aim at affirmative action jurisprudence supporting race-conscious admissions, established in Supreme Court precedents such as Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) and Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), which upheld such policies as long as they do not amount to a quota system.
As a researcher intimately familiar with the effects of affirmative action, Dr. Park worries about what might happen to universities if misleading legal arguments eventually dismantle it. In the Washington Post piece, she seconds other observers’ objections to how the litigators behind the Harvard lawsuit overtly targeted Asian Americans as they sought plaintiffs for the case: “I am deeply concerned that . . . Asian American concerns about admissions are being exploited in an attempt to undermine the legality of race-conscious admissions.” Finally, in her Huffington Post op-ed, she urges principled caution: “Is it troubling that there are preferences that wealthy Whites are disproportionately more likely to benefit from? Absolutely. Still, it's also a separate and distinct issue from intentional discrimination against Asian Americans.”
Click here to read Dr. Park’s Huffington Post op-ed, published in March, and here to read her Washington Post op-ed, which appeared in January. Click here to read the Endeavors story on Dr. Park’s book on the impact of affirmative action bans, When Diversity Drops: Race, Religion, and Affirmative Action in Higher Education (Rutgers University Press, 2013).
Julie J. Park is an assistant professor in the Department of Counseling, Higher Education and Special Education. Her research addresses how race, religion, and social class affect diversity and equity in higher education, including the diverse experiences of Asian American college students. She has conducted extensive research on affirmative action, including examinations of socioeconomic diversity and the impact of affirmative action bans.
Dr. Park serves on the editorial boards of the Journal for College Student Development and the Journal of Higher Education, as well as the research advisory board of the National Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islander Research in Education. She holds a Ph.D. in Education, with a concentration in Asian American Studies, from the University of California at Los Angeles.
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