Are all students equally represented?
With lawsuit against Harvard, Affirmative Action battle has new focus
By most standards, Austin Jia holds an enviable position. A rising sophomore at Duke, Jia attends one of the top universities in the country, setting him up for success.
But with his high GPA, nearly perfect SAT score and activities — debate team, tennis captain and state orchestra — Jia believes he should have had a fair shot at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania. Those Ivy League colleges rejected him after he applied in the fall of 2015.
It was particularly disturbing, Jia said, when classmates with lower scores than his — but who were not Asian-american, like him — were admitted to those Ivy League institutions.
“My gut reaction was that I was super disillusioned by how the whole system was set up,” Jia, 19, said.
Students like Jia are now the subject of a lawsuit accusing Harvard of discriminating against Asian-americans in admissions by imposing a penalty for their high achievement and giving preferences to other racial minorities.
The case, which is clearly aimed for the Supreme Court, puts Asian-americans front and center in the latest stage of the affirmative action debate. The issue is whether there has been discrimination against Asian-americans in the name of creating a diverse student body.
The Justice Department, which has signaled that it is looking to investigate “intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions,” may well focus on Harvard.
The Harvard case asserts that the university’s admissions process amounts to an illegal quota system, in which roughly the same percentage of African-americans, Hispanics, whites and Asian-americans have been admitted year after year, despite fluctuations in application rates and qualifications.
“It falls afoul of our most basic civil rights principles, and those principles are that your race and your ethnicity should not be something to be used to harm you in life nor help you in life,” said Edward Blum, the president of Students for Fair Admissions, the organization that is suing Harvard.
His group, a conservative-leaning nonprofit based in Virginia, has filed similar suits against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Texas at Austin, asserting that white students are at a Edward Blum, president of Students for Fair Admissions, the organization that is suing Harvard