In his op-ed at the New York Times yesterday, Yascha Mounk, a fellow at New America, asked “Is Harvard Unfair to Asian-Americans?” A century ago, Harvard had a problem, he writes: “Too many Jews.” Today it’s Asian-Americans. Euphemistic admissions criteria like “character and fitness” solved Harvard’s problem back then. Today, numbers do the job. To get into the top schools, Mounk writes, Asian-Americans “need SAT scores that are about 140 points higher than those of their white peers.” And that’s brought on a suit by a group called Students for Fair Admissions.
If this case is decided eventually under current law, as is likely, the result will be less than clear or satisfying in several respects. To see why, just follow Mounk’s argument. One reason this “new discrimination” is tolerated, he notes, is that “many academics assume that higher rates of admission for Asian-Americans would come at the price of lower rates of admission for African-Americans.” But the two issues are unrelated, he continues:
As recognized by the Supreme Court, schools have an interest in recruiting a “critical mass” of minority students to obtain “the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.” This justifies, in my view, admissions standards that look favorably on underrepresented groups, like African-Americans and Latinos. But it can neither explain nor justify why a student of Chinese, Korean or Indian descent is so much less likely to be admitted than a white one.
Then what does explain why an Asian-American student is so much less likely to be admitted than a white one? Mounk continues:
Conservatives point to Harvard’s emphasis on enrolling African-Americans (currently 12 percent of freshmen) and Hispanics (13 percent) but overlook preferences for children of alumni (about 12 percent of students) and recruited athletes (around 13 percent). The real problem is that, in a meritocratic system, whites would be a minority—and Harvard just isn’t comfortable with that.
Ah! There we have it, Mounk believes. But notice that this “explanation” mentions, almost in passing, “a meritocratic system,” as if that were what we had. If we did—at least one based heavily on SAT scores—the aforementioned academics would be right: Harvard would admit far more Asian-Americans and far fewer African-Americans and Hispanics—and perhaps fewer legacy and athletic applicants as well.
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