In a closely-watched case, a federal judge ruled that Harvard University does not discriminate against Asian-Americans in its admissions decisions.
The case was filed by a far-right group hoping to outlaw affirmative action, which Harvard used to promote diversity in its student body.
The challenge came from a group hoping to overturn a longstanding Supreme Court precedent that allows race to be considered as one factor among many in the admissions process, but prohibits universities from using racial quotas. The group argued that Harvard’s practices had benefited black and Hispanic students at the expense of another minority group, in a strategic reversal of past affirmative action lawsuits in which the plaintiffs denounced a perceived unfairness to white students.
The judge, Allison Burroughs of Federal District Court for the District of Massachusetts, rejected the argument that Harvard was using affirmative action as a weapon against some races and a boon to others, and said that the university met the strict constitutional standard for considering race in its admissions process….
Students for Fair Admissions made four interrelated claims: that Harvard intentionally discriminated against Asian-Americans, that it used race as a predominant factor in admissions decisions, that it racially balanced its classes, and that it had considered applicants’ race without first exhausting race-neutral alternatives to create diversity.
Judge Burroughs cleared the university of all four claims, saying that while Harvard’s admissions process was “not perfect,” the court would not tear down “a very fine admissions program that passes constitutional muster.”
As I noted in an earlier post, the proportion of Asian-Americans at Harvard far exceeds their proportion of the population.
The U.S. population is about 6% Asian, African Americans are 13%, whites are 61%, Hispanics are 18%.
The Harvard class of 2021 is 22% Asian, 14.6% African American, 11.6% Latino, and 2.5% Native American or Pacific Islander.
On the face of the data, it is hard to make a case for discrimination.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Some might see the admissions program at Harvard as something other than “very fine,”
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/harvard-affirmative-action-white-people-meritocracy.html
Beat me to it.
It’s fine if you are the son of daughter of a Harvard grad, donor, or if you are an athlete.
Otherwise, good luck. You’ll need it.
The Harvard admissions policy guarantees that black and Hispanic students gain entry. Diversity matters.
SomeDAM Poet,
Thanks to the link to that excellent article.
The problem is NOT that Harvard has an affirmative action program. The problem is that Harvard’s affirmative action program is designed in a way so that it preserves the privilege given to the very richest students (who are predominantly white).
Harvard’s use of affirmative action actually covers up the privilege the university gives to the very richest applicants.
Basically, some researchers found that 43% of the white students admitted were admitted because of some privilege — often because they were very rich or connected.
That means the applicants most affected by affirmative action are likely to be the unconnected upper middle class, middle class or low-income applicant who is white or Asian. Harvard’s program (intentionally?) pits those students against applicants who are from underrepresented minority groups.
Harvard could have an affirmative action program which took some of the extraordinarily high number of seats reserved for the most privileged students and used them to admit qualified students who are African-American or Latinx.
Instead, Harvard admissions retains that privilege extended to the already-privileged. Harvard’s affirmative action policies do not affect the privilege of the most privileged students one bit, which means that the remaining applicants have to fight for the seats not reserved for the already-privileged.
It is similar to our country writ large and how the Republicans get middle class and poor white folks to blame affirmative action instead of the fact that it is the privileged who get the largest share while they like seeing the people who aren’t privileged blaming the “other” instead of what is right in front of their eyes.
A really important decision. We desperately need affirmative action to begin to undo this sickening legacy of institutional racism in the United States, something that black and brown people here live with and struggle against every day.
But yes, legacy admissions, and admissions of the sons and daughters of the wealthy, are an undemocratic obscenity. How does someone with as little scholarly aptitude as, say, George Bush, Jr., get into Yale and the Harvard Business School? How does a semi-literate moron like Donald Trump get into and graduate from Wharton? Well, there are two Americas, one of which very, very few live in.
Forget that little thing called the American Revolution. Hereditary aristocracy is alive and well in the Ivy League.
In the case of Trump, it’s an erristocracy.
Or maybe a hairistocracy.
(Hot)airistocracy works too.
And in the case of Betsy DeVos, it’s a bearistocracy.
Like enthusiastically.
As you well know (and it amazes me that you continue to say it over and over), the demographics of the entire country are not particularly relevant to whether a subset of applicants are or are not discriminated against. By this weird logic, white students are shamefully underrepresented (and perhaps the victims of discrimination) at New York City’s specialized high schools. Which they are obviously not.
There are legitimate, good-faith arguments for why Harvard’s admissions policies do not discriminate against Asians and Asian-Americans. Simply referencing the demographics of the entire United States is not one of those arguments.
Having a class that is 22% Asian does not suggest anti-Asian bias.
Having 9 black students admitted to Stuyvesant High School our of a class of 800-800 is fishy
I apologize for taking this in another direction.
When it comes to the specialized / gifted and talented debate, New York City needs to decide what their responsibility or aim is for the students. If all the children getting a “4” is our responsibility and our purpose, then all specialized / gifted and talented schools should end immediately. Those with 4’s can keep learning, but assist the students with increasing their scores.
With a business the agenda is usually clear – help it to make money and grow. With education, it’s extremely fuzzy. As a teacher, I would like to know what you believe is the country’s main goal for her children?
It seems like an easy question, but I know that everyone has different agendas and that’s why everything gets so muddled.
The more interesting set of facts is that if one looks only at the white students admitted, they tend to come from very wealthy families, to be legacy students, and to have significantly lower high-school grades than do the other students admitted. So, it’s quite clear that the school runs two admissions systems, one for the oligarchs and one for everyone else. No surprise that Harvard gets such enormous donations and has such an enormous endowment. It’s a finishing school for rich kids.
Not speaking rationally here, but rather momentarily lashing out with my class-based rage (among other types of rage), I would be fine with Harvard burning to the ground.
All this is really, really sad, because it’s of such value for a country to have centers of profound scholarship, which is what these “elite” institutions are supposed to be.
Harvard is good in some departments because it is able to “buy” it’s professors and whatever they need just like top sports team buys it’s championships.
It is able to do that largely because it gets over $500 million every year from the federal government.
Given the latter, should Harvard even be allowed to have two separate admissions policies?
Harvard is (supposedly) a “private” University and can therefore do what they want, right?
They clearly think it’s fine and dandy to keep the vast majority of the $9 million they got from young girl sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, because, as they say, “we didn’t know” — as if ignorance somehow legitimizes money that effectively came from a grotesque criminal operation. And no I don’t buy the claim that the money did not come from Epsteins sex trafficking because it is very possible that the latter played some role in Epsteins wealth.
I thought Harvard was supposed to have top lawyers in their law school. Oh, I forgot. One of them has actually been accused by one of Epsteins victims. And another “reasoned” at one point that MIT was right to keep the Epstein donations secret.
Fine, who am I to argue with such brilliant minds? But if that’s the ballgame they wish to play, put a stop to all Federal funding. Let them do what they want (lincluding laundering the reputation of human traffickers) with THEIR money, not ours (the taxpayers’).
Harvard is funded by sex traffickers.
What does it need our tax dollars for?
Good Point. I had no idea Harvard got so much money from the Feds. They can afford to offer financial aid to students from under served communities.
In 2017, Harvard got $550 million from the Federal government
https://247wallst.com/special-report/2017/03/22/universities-getting-the-most-money-from-the-federal-government/3/
Several of the universities on that list are public institutions, but many , like Harvard, Stanford ($679 million), John’s Hopkins ($2 billion!), Columbia ($600 million)are private.
And many of them are very rich and getting richer every single year at OUR expense.
The subsidies for heavily endowed universities makes no sense unless they are for federal research.
What makes even less sense is the nearly $500 million spent each year to expand KIPP, IDEA, and other corporate charter chains that are already subsidized by Waltons, Gates, Broad, Koch, etc.
Harvard has close to a $40 billion dollar endowment (plus pocket money from sex traffickers) so do they really “need” $550 million from the taxpayers’ every year?
Almost all of the federal money is in the form of research grants, primarily from NIH. That is why Johns Hopkins have such a large share of federal money. If you are interested in NIH funding, they have an extensive web site: https://report.nih.gov/nih_funding.aspx
There is also some funding available through NSF and NEH, but they are both much smaller sources.
“It’s a finishing school for rich kids.”
So, as SDP also indicates, it’s something to think about why private universities should be supported by the Government. Shouldn’t they be considered similarly to private or charter K-12 schools?
So called “federal research” is a whole issue into itself.
Much of the research ends up in patents and profits for private universities and licensing to private companies that turn around and charge the public out the him yang for drugs and medical and other technology that was developed with federal dollars.
And there are LOTs of public institutions that could do the research just as well as Haaavid if given the resources.
Harvard is private. Perhaps it is time for the US taxpayers to treat them as such.
And last but certainly not least, I don’t want my tax dollars funding crackpots in the Harvard econ department who are too stupid to do simple spreadsheet calculations and/or who believe that VAM is the greatest invention since the wheel.
Harvard has legitimate departments (physics, biology, history, languages) but econ is certainly not among them. It’s basically the dregs from science and engineering who could not do the math.
“Harvard has legitimate departments (physics, biology, history, languages) but econ is certainly not among them. It’s basically the dregs from science and engineering who could not do the math.”
There could be other reasons to choose econ over science: at many universities, the starting salary of an econ prof is double of a science prof’s.
I was referring specificly to Harvard econ department, which has some of the most math challenged people on the planet.
And at Harvard, the science and engineering profs get paid very well.
I think you will find it is the medical school at Harvard that gets the bulk of the federal funding. That is why UCSF, a school with a total enrollment of just over 3,000 students, receives over $500 million in federal research funding. Harvard, with almost 23,000 students, gets just a little more than UCSF.
In most cases it is best to think of these research grants as funding the individual researcher rather than subsidizing the university. If the faculty member leaves to join another university, the research funding typically goes with the faculty member to the other university.
Individual researchers like Raj Chetty?
Ha ha ha.
Surely you jest.
I don’t want my tax dollars funding individual math challenged “researchers” like Raj Chetty on their pseudoscietific VAM studies.
I realize you and he believe he is Ramanujan reincarnated, but the reality is that he is actually VAManujan.
SomeDAM Poet,
Perhaps you were confused by my use of an abbreviation. The overwhelming source of federal research dollars to research universities like UCSF, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Michigan, are provided by the National Institute of Health, which I abbreviated as NIH. These funds go to the health sciences, the folks trying to cure cancer, Alzheimer, childhood leukemia, ALS, diabetes, malaria, etc.
These seem like worthwhile research goals to me. You, of course, may have a different opinion.
The
Perhaps you were confused by my use of plain English (in the comment you responded to)
“there are LOTs of public institutions that could do the research just as well as Haaavid if given the resources.
Harvard is private. Perhaps it is time for the US taxpayers to treat them as such.”
Finally, I will leave you with these (although I realize that the rhymes and other poetic devices may confuse you even more than basic English does. Forgive me.)
“The Man who knew Inanity”
VAManujan cowculates
The students’ yearly growth
He models or he mathturbates
And sometimes does them both
“A way for a Manager”
A way for a manager, a plan for his
sham,
The little Economist laid down His sweet
VAM.
The stars in the White House look down
where He lies,
The little Economist, with powerful ties.
The cattle are lowing, Economist
awakes,
And little Economist, a model He makes;
I love Thee, Economist, look down from
the sky
And stay by thy cattle till morning is
nigh.
(The Value Added Model – VAM — was
originally designed to model cattle growth –
and then tweaked to model student growth
and teacher” value added”. )
SomeDAM poet,
Again, I think your are mistaken about how these grants work. Harvard gets no grants. UCSF gets no grants. Researchers get grants, some who have an affiliation with Harvard, some who have an affiliation with UCSF.
NIH allocates these grants based on which researcher is likely to be the most successful in achieving their research goal, that is which researcher is likely to be more successful in finding the cure for Alzheimer, ALS or childhood leukemia.
Your suggestion that these grants be allocated based on the type of institution where they work instead of the likelihood of success would, if enacted, delay important medical discoveries that could reduce suffering in the world. I think your suggestion is immoral.
“Researchers get grants,”
Two points here. One, if a researcher gets a Federal grant, the host institution gets 40-50% so called overhead money. So if the grant money NSF sends to Harvard is $100K, only $50K goes to the Principal Investigator, and the remaining $50K goes to Harvard.
Two, if there was a law saying researchers at private institutions won’t get federal grants, the best researchers would go to public colleges.
Harvard simply buys the best researchers by giving them high salaries, but then these researchers bring in plenty of Federal money to the university—I suspect much more than the university pays in salaries, but I could be wrong.
Harvard gets no grants?
That is complete and total bs.
First, not all Federal grants to Harvard are specifically research grants.
That alone proves you are talking nonsense.
But since every dollar that a researcher at Harvard gets is a dollar that Harvard does not have to spend out of its own pocket, that a grant is made to a particular researcher at Harvard and not to Harvard in general (something I never claimed, by the way) is a distinction without a difference. That is what I was getting at when I pointed out that Harvard has a $38 billion dollar endowment which keeps getting bigger each year at taxpayer expense, precisely die to the fact that Harvard is getting federal funds that allow it to defray the costs (including salaries and overhead) of doing business.
I should be surprised that an “economist” does not understand this very basic point, but in your case I’m not.
And if Harvard were indeed banned from receiving Federal grants, the researchers would almost certainly move to a public University that did, so the idea that the research would simply cease is just utter nonsense.
Finally, coming from you, a comment that something or someone is “immoral” is just a hoot.
After your claim a while back that there is no economy of scale operating in education, nothing that you say suprises me any more.
If it takes two admission systems to create a school like Harvard that is endowed beyond belief, then that is a commentary on what makes us tick. Some people rail at the Ivy leagues for their liberalism. Others call them conservative. Ho hum.
I would be happy if students who wanted to learn all they could had a place to go learn all they could where they did not incur massive debt. It would also make me happy if the sons and daughters who came to college motivated to party and not think found their belongings outside on the sidewalk in front of their dormitory after some of the bashes I recall hearing of.
Admissions policies would be less important if we used them to send students to school who were serious. Whatever the institution.
I don’t think “us” is the proper term to use.
It’s what makes THEM tick, not (the vast majority of) US.
If most of us learned that a sex trafficker had donated money to an organization we were running we would return the money — all of it — even if we did not know about it at the time. And if we were not running the organization but part of it, we would demand that the one running it return the money.
But THEY (the ones running Harvard) have said they will only return the pittance that is unused. And THEY (the Harvard faculty) are by and large silent on the matter
That tells you all you need to know about the profound difference between US and THEM.
They (and their pals at MIT) should donate EVERY last time that they got from Epstein to organizations fighting sex trafficking and organizations that benefit victims of sex trafficking and abuse.
That’s what ethical people would do.
Harvard and MIT sure as hell do not need that money.
Both get hundreds of millions EVERY year from the Federal government and have multibillion dollar endowments to boot.
There are much more deserving public colleges and universities that need the money much worse and do not accept money from sex traffickers, cli are change deniers and other “dubious” donors.
Every last DIME
It’s great to have the revealing stats on Harvard admission linked above by SomeDAM Poet. But probably not news to the public. I grew up naive on this score in an Ivy uni hometown. Little wealth, but lots of brainy prof’s kids in my hisch; 800SATs/ Harvard admission was more revered than jock/ purely social popularity. In retrospect it’s easy to see that those stars were Harvard’s “loss leaders.” And that the public’s cynical view of Harvard et al may be more about “buying admission” than about knee-jerk anti-intellectualism. However the stats in these two articles show that’s an overreach. And not really “fair” or “unfair.”
51% of a recent Harvard class is white. Breakdown: 22% big donors/ athletes/ legacy or profs’ kids, 29% admitted on academic merit alone. Lesser academic credentials of first group means, at least 8% of ALL admits did not earn it academically.
49% of that recent class is minority. No doubt a %age of them look promising but don’t have the high grades/ scores to assure success – they were admitted to gain a more diverse entering class. Add that to the % of clout-y but lesser-qualified whites: maybe raises the total number of less-academically-qualified to 16%, maybe higher. What’s the diff? A segment of white kids are added to help support U finances, a segment of minority kids are added to increase diversity.
As for the $500million US govt support, it represents 10% of annual budget. Annual [mostly alum] donations outnumber it 2:1.
In other words, they don’t need the Federal funding.
So let’s cut it and give it to a public institution that does
It was actually $550 million (in 2017), but hey, what’s %10?😀
And more importantly, what’s 10%?
I live in a community that has a very large asian population. Our whole school system is test prep and competition based so that the kids score well on tests (real education is an afterthought). Try and change this and asian parents go crazy. The fact that MANY colleges (including the Ivies) are starting to look at other factors besides test scores has put their communities into a frenzy, because asian families spend an enormous amount of time and money making sure their children score well on these tests so that they can get into the most elite universities. Many are now filling out their child’s college application listing their child as “white”. Test taking and high test scores has been their “super power” (as as asian community) and now that is being threatened and they will not stand for it. They believe in the testing, they believe in the scores, they believe that their children are smarter because the tests say so and they don’t think that other factors should be considered in the college application process. I know this because I live within this and my children are most affected by this.
I wonder, though, how admission policies limiting certain groups of people relate to similar laws in the past like
the Nazis limited the number of Jewish students enrolled in German schools to 1.5% of the total enrollment.
and
In 1922, educational discrimination became a national issue when Harvard announced it was considering a quota system for Jewish students. Although it was eventually dropped, the quota was enforced in many colleges. As late as 1945 Dartmouth College had a limiting quota of Jewish students. To limit the growing number of Jewish students, a number of private liberal arts universities and medical and dental schools instituted a quota system referred to as Numerus clausus. These included Harvard University, Columbia University, Cornell University, and Boston University.
I see the Harvard admission policy not as a limit on Asian but as an effort to include African American and Hispanic students.
I am well aware of the Jewish quotas at the Ivy League schools in the 1920s. Patricians were fearful that their own children would be crowded out by smart Jewish kids from public schools.
The Nation writes
Students with legitimate concerns about Harvard’s admissions process allowed their case to be co-opted by a conservative hell bent on restoring white privilege to the admissions process.
That’s why this victory for affirmative action is likely to be short-lived. For Blum and the other members of his conservative support group, this trial was always merely a prologue for the fight they really want to have at the Supreme Court. Now that Judge Burroughs has issued her ruling, Blum can appeal. The US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit is likely to affirm this ruling, which will allow Blum to appeal to the Supreme Court. Waiting for him there will be five justices likely eager to strike down affirmative action once and for all.
https://www.thenation.com/article/harvard-affirmative-action/
Affirmative action is a band-aid, a fig leaf to cover racial disparity on a bigger scale like redlining, declining of mortgage, workspace profiling, etc. Affirmative action had not fixed racial issues in the country at their root, instead it tries to fix some of the branches of this rotten tree. It is a half-solution, a quarter-solution for something that has to be fixed and it has not for all these years. As it stands, affirmative action is a spit in the face to everyone involved. To whites, because it says, “you can try as you want, but we will take this black guy”. To blacks, because it says, “we will go easy on you and will accept you with less than stellar test score”. To Asians, because it says, “we think you are too career-oriented”. And even if you are a black person with stellar scores or an asian with a dozen of patents, you still feel that you are treated because of your race. The question of race should be abolished.
And no, percentage of Asians in the nation’s makeup and percentage of Asians accepted to a uni do not have to correlate.
Test scores on SAT Or ACT should not be the only criterion for college admission.
What actions do you suggest, BA, for fixing this problem at its root? Much of it is economic. Level of degree attainment correlates highly with income.
Yes, “level of degree attainment correlates highly with income”, but unlike the now defunct Soviet Union, this country has never made claims that everyone is entitled for an equal share of national wealth. This is a capitalist nation, some are wealthier and some are poorer.
Those who are worried that the wealthy get more benefits should look into how wealth is distributed, into social change at large, not into how perks are distributed between rich and poor. The should try figuring out how to make the poor richer, and how to make ultra-rich pay taxes, not how to give the poor an extra seat in a college (and then charge $200 per textbook).
I would suggest educational reparations for African Americans for 88 years. Even if there is one African American child in a class, it is reduced to 10-12 students. An increase in funds for every child that is African American in a school. Extra funding for after school programs and trips. Pay the tuition fees for college – no matter where they go.
BA, your answer doesn’t address my question. Odd.