COLLEGE ADMISSION
DOES RACE MATTER IN WHO GETS ACCEPTED?
EDITOR’S NOTE: On Aug. 4, The New York Times podcast The Daily had a question-and-answer conversation led by host Michael Barbaro about affirmative action. We thought this conversation might be informative to our readers.
MICHAEL BARBARO: In 2013, Abigail Fisher sued the University of Texas, saying she was discriminated against for being white. Now, a group of students is suing Harvard, saying they were discriminated against for being Asian-American. Both lawsuits take aim at affirmative action, and both can be traced to the same man, but this time the White House is taking up his cause.
GUEST MICHAEL WANG: So, a brief background. I had a 4.67 for my GPA. I took multiple honors and AP classes. I had a perfect ACT score. For extracurriculars, I have played the piano for over 15 years. I did speech and debate and sing in a choir.
BARBARO: With that resume, where did you apply to college?
WANG: I applied to all Ivys except one. BARBARO: And how many accepted you?
WANG: One, and that was Penn.
BARBARO: What was your reaction to that ratio of acceptance to rejection?
WANG: I was definitely quite disappointed in that. I reached out to the schools’ admissions offices. I wanted to know how these schools used the factor of race in their consideration. There is a natural perception that there is a quota set on how many Asian students a school can accept simply because there are so many qualified Asian-American students that it would be difficult to accept them all. There just seems to be a separate standard set for Asian-Americans and a minimum bias that is higher than for other races. I wanted to see if there was any evidence or any kind of science that shows that.
BARBARO: Tell me about Harvard. Is that where you were most eager to go?
WANG: Yes, Yale and Harvard were pretty much a tie for me.
BARBARO: After the rejection from Harvard, Wang joined the group of Asian-American students who questioned the university’s decision-making process. My colleague Anemona Hartocollis is reporting on the story.
HARTOCOLLIS: In November 2014, a group calling itself Students for Fair Admissions filed a lawsuit in federal court in Boston against Harvard University alleging discrimination in admissions against Asian-Americans. And the lawsuit says that Harvard has been doing this through what are essentially illegal quotas. The Supreme Court has ruled that numeric quotas are not acceptable in college admissions. Harvard says that it does not have them, but this lawsuit says that in effect it does because year after year after year roughly the same percentage of Asians and of whites and of blacks and of Hispanics are admitted
to the freshman class. So they are saying if Harvard were going strictly on merit, there would be a lot more Asian-American students there and Harvard does not want that because that would reduce the numbers of white students and black students and Hispanic students.
BARBARO: What is happening with this legal case now?
HARTOCOLLIS: Just a few months after the lawsuit was filed, a coalition of 64 Asian-American groups went to the Department of Justice and the Education Department to file a complaint that tracks very close to the lawsuit. This was under the Obama administration. It languished in the Justice Department. Now a new administration has come in, and they say that they are going to look at it.
The Department of Justice hosted a job opening for lawyers who would work on university admissions discrimination, and affirmative action is what we are essentially talking about.
The lawsuit likens it to discrimination against Jews at Harvard, going back to the 1910s-1930s when many historians have said there was an informal quota against Jews, who were then the high-achieving minority and started to get too numerous at Harvard. The lawsuit claims the same thing is happening with Asian Americans.
Some research has shown that to get into a school like Harvard as an Asian-American, you need to have a SAT score that is 140 points higher than a white applicant. The lawsuit quotes the Princeton Review, a very mainstream college prep company: “If you are an Asian American or even if you simply have an Asian-sounding surname, you need to be careful about what you do and don’t say in your application. Don’t attach a photograph. Don’t write an application essay about the importance of your family or the positive/negative aspects about living in two cultures, something that most kids think is good to write about.”
BARBARO: This is extraordinary advice. How did this Harvard case come about in the first place?
HARTOCOLLIS: It was orchestrated by Edward Blum. He is a former stockbroker; he is not a lawyer. He has filed a number of court cases … He has become very adept at this.
BARBARO: So tell me how you got into this work.
EDWARD BLUM: That story begins with my wife and I living in sort of a garden-variety Houston neighborhood. We decided we wanted to move closer to the inner city. So we did that, and when we went to vote for the first time in our new neighborhood, the Republican party had not fielded a candidate, so I ended up running for Congress as the Republican nominee in that district. My wife and I went door-to-door and introduced ourselves to the voters of the 18th Congressional District of Texas. It was during that process of determining who was in that congressional district we realized the Texas legislature had block-byblock identified residents by their race and ethnicity and harvested them into a congressional district …
BARBARO: You are describing what you believe to be a racially gerrymandered district?
BLUM: A racially gerrymandered district. I lost the race, but I sued the State of Texas. First time
I had ever filed a lawsuit. That was my first win at the Supreme Court, and that was the beginning of my legal advocacy in the arena of race and ethnicity.
HARTOCOLLIS: He orchestrated the Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin case which went to the Supreme Court and which was just decided last year.
BLUM: Abigail Fisher applied to the University of Texas in 2008. Abby was rejected from UT.
BARBARO: What was the central question in her case that got before the Supreme Court?
HARTOCOLLIS: That was an anti-white discrimination case. (TAPE OF NEWS REPORTERS): We have had a decision just handed down in what was billed as the landmark affirmative action case of this term. The Court ruled that universities may consider race in student admissions. Affirmative action in higher education is constitutional in a 4-3 ruling handed down Thursday morning, a divided Supreme Court upheld racial preferences in university admissions. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, argued for American education’s need to reconcile the pursuit of diversity with the constitutional promise of equal treatment and dignity.
BLUM: It was a very painful day for all of us who labor for the elimination of race in higher education. HARTOCOLLIS: One of the dissenting justices, [Samuel] Alito, did mention Asian-Americans as a troubling example of how affirmative action might do something wrong. At that time I remember talking to Lee Bollinger, now head of Columbia University, who was then at the University of Michigan Law School when it was the target of an affirmative action lawsuit, and he said just wait and see; Asian Americans are going to be next.
BLUM: And that’s exactly what we did. In November 2014 we
sued Harvard, arguing that Harvard has a quota that limits the number of Asians it will accept.
BARBARO: Did you go out and specifically recruit Asian plaintiffs?
BLUM: Yes. I had to make a lot of phone calls. I had to launch a website called HarvardNotFair. org.
BARBARO: It looks like you … went to the Supreme Court with a white plaintiff in the affirmative action case in Texas, and lost that case, then went and sought to find an Asian student in the Harvard case. Why did you make that turn?
BLUM: It’s not like we abandoned representing white kids. It’s just that that’s the group that is most harmed by Harvard’s quota system.
BARBARO: Why do you do this work?
BLUM: I guess that this is something that I just grew up with,
the lessons that my mother and father, and frankly maybe liberal Judaism taught me. The foundation of civil rights is that your race and your ethnicity should not be something that is used to help you, nor should it be used to harm you. And all that I am trying to do is restore that original civil rights vision.
BARBARO: What do you say to those who conclude that your goal is to undo the advances of the civil rights movement?
BLUM: I am not trying to undo the advancements. I am trying to restore the original vision, but you cannot cure past racial discrimination with new racial discrimination. That’s the bottom line.
BARBARO: Edward, what did you think when you heard that President Trump has called for lawyers inside the Department of Justice to investigate race-based admissions and the possibility of discrimination in those admissions policies?
BLUM: I would have welcomed any administration to look fully at this issue, hold these universities’ feet to the fire, and make sure that they are complying with Supreme Court jurisprudence in this.
BARBARO: Nikole Hannah-Jones covers race and education for the Times.
HANNAH-JONES: I interviewed Edward Blum, and he will readily admit that we have a fundamentally unequal and segregated K through 12 system, but then he would like to pretend that once we get to college admissions, we are a meritocracy and every child and every student should be treated as if they came from the same place.
BARBARO: So given this scope of Edward Blum’s work and what you know about him, both from his track records with lawsuits and from your conversations with him, do you believe that this lawsuit that he helped file against Harvard is about discrimination against Asian-Americans or is it about something else?
HANNAH-JONES: I think Edward Blum is using Asian-Americans the way that many white Americans have used Asian-Americans since the myth of the model minority began. The myth starts to come about in the 1960s and is a direct reaction to the push for civil rights by black Americans. It begins to hold up Asian-Americans as a racial minority who came to this country and worked hard and were able to succeed … you are able to use Asian-Americans
to show that America really doesn’t have a race problem; it is black people who have a problem. BARBARO: So they become a foil? HANNAH-JONES: Exactly. The lawsuit is just the most current reiteration of that, which is to say, black Americans, Latinos are complaining that they need help to get into college because of the unfair system. Well, look at this minority group over here. If we were really an unfair racist country, how could Asian-Americans be doing so well?
BARBARO: How did we arrive at the affirmative action system in the first place?
HANNAH-JONES: If we understand the roots of affirmative action, Lyndon B. Johnson is the first politician who talks about affirmative action in a 1965 speech … .
VOICE OF LBJ: “You do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bringing him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”
HANNAH-JONES: It is not saying that they didn’t work hard or they are not qualified. It’s saying that they have not had the same advantages. I think what is lost is colleges are looking at a bunch of different things at all times to determine who they are going to accept. Colleges admit students because they want geographic diversity. White women outscore white men on test scores, but colleges want gender balance. It is only when it comes to race that we have a problem even though black students are only 5 percent of all students enrolled at flagship universities. So even with so-called affirmative action, you cannot argue that black students are taking the slots of white students because they are still underrepresented at any of the flagship universities.
BARBARO: Is affirmative action doing what it set out to do, especially in college admissions now?
HANNAH-JONES: No. I think the fact that only 5 percent of the students at flagship universities are black with affirmative action shows that it hasn’t done a great job of catching students up. It is not opening up the opportunities for black students to get into the best universities, and what we do know is that white women have been the greatest benefactors of affirmative action, because in order to get affirmative action policies passed, they had to include white women as a historically oppressed minority group. So what we have isn’t great, but if we don’t have it, it is going to be a lot worse.
“The foundation of civil rights is that your race and your ethnicity should not be something that is used to help you, nor should it be used to harm you. And all that I am trying to do is restore that original civil rights vision.”
EDWARD BLUM