Tag: Harvard University

I have long been following this lawsuit here at the ROK Drop and now the lawsuit has forced Harvard to release how they select their applicants.  The way the admissions process is set up it makes it harder for Asian-Americans to be accepted to the prestigious university:

In an intense legal battle over the role of race in Harvard University’s admissions policies, a group that is suing the school says Harvard lowers the rankings of Asian-American applicants in a way that is unconstitutional.

Harvard says that its admissions process is legal — and it notes that the plaintiff group, the Students for Fair Admissions, is backed by the same activist who previously challenged the University of Texas’ affirmative action policy.

The SFFA says Harvard uses “racial balancing” as part of its formula for admitting students and that the practice is illegal. In response, Harvard says the group is misinterpreting data that the highly competitive school shared about how it chooses students.

Citing a 2013 analysis by Harvard’s Office of Institutional Research, the SFFA said in a federal court filing on Friday that if academics were the only criterion, Asian-American students would have made up more than 43 percent of students who were admitted, rather than the actual 18.7 percent.

Even if other criteria — such as legacy students, athletic recruiting and extracurricular and personal attributes — are included, the plaintiffs say, the number of Asian-Americans at Harvard would still have risen to more than 26 percent.

Saying that the admission rate for whites outpaced that of Asian-Americans over a 10-year period — despite outperforming them in only the “personal” ratings — the plaintiffs allege that “being Asian American actually decreases the chances of admissions.”  [NPR]

So how does Harvard justify not admitting Asian-Americans based on their academic performance? By penalizing them for their “personalities”:

Harvard consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than others on traits like “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected,” according to an analysis of more than 160,000 student records filed Friday by a group representing Asian-American students in a lawsuit against the university.

Asian-Americans scored higher than applicants of any other racial or ethnic group on admissions measures like test scores, grades and extracurricular activities, according to the analysis commissioned by a group that opposes all race-based admissions criteria. But the students’ personal ratings significantly dragged down their chances of being admitted, the analysis found.  [New York Times]

I am not sure how an admission personnel can make an accurate determination about someones “courage” or “liability” from an application packet.  I think it is arguable that the personality scores are being used as a way to manipulate the stupid body to reflect what the university wants it to look like.

Could you imagine what the uproar would be if a university for example in the South was using personality scores to limit the number of African-American students?  I do find it interesting that since it is Asian-Americans being affected by Harvard’s policies that the usual race hustlers we see in the spotlight for issues like this are no where to be found.

For UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is returning soon to South Korea.  It will be interesting to see if in five years he will attempt to run for President again:

Former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will begin his tenure as distinguished professor and emeritus director of the Institute for Global Engagement at Yonsei University from July.

“The Institute for Global Engagement was established in April at the university to coordinate among students and professors activities including global and domestic missions and volunteer programs,” said Nam So-hyeon, a PR official at Yonsei University in western Seoul.

“It’s not yet decided what Ban will be teaching at the university.”

The university is also planning to open a sustainable growth center once Ban begins his tenure.

“Ban is known for his initiatives and engagement to combat climate change,” said Yonsei University President Kim Yong-hak.

“His participation at the center will bring about advances in its climate change research.”

Ban has been teaching at Harvard University as the Angelopoulos Global Public Leaders Fellow since April.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.

A group of prospective Harvard students has filed a lawsuit against the university for discriminating against one minority in favor of another:

The Supreme Court declined to draw a clear line on racial discrimination in university admissions in last year’s Fisher v. University of Texas decision. Now new lawsuits are moving to challenge how far colleges can go in using racial preferences.

A group called Students for Fair Admissions filed lawsuits Monday against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina in federal court. The suits argue that the schools use race preferences to reach a specific racial balance on campus and have failed to abide by the strict scrutiny of racial preferences required by the Supreme Court.

The Harvard challenge concerns what the lawsuit calls a de facto quota on the number of Asian students the school admits. The suit compares its current racial admissions to Harvard’s quotas limiting Jewish students in an earlier era. In both cases, Harvard kept out minorities who would have been admitted based on academic merit.

Over the last eight years Asian students have comprised between 17.6% and 20.7% of students admitted to Harvard. Though the number of Asians applying for admission has increased, the percentage of offers has barely budged. In 1992, 19.1% of Harvard’s admissions offers went to Asian applicants, compared to 25.2% who were admitted to the California Institute of Technology, a school that doesn’t use racial preferences. In 2013 Harvard made 18% of its offers to Asians, while CalTech admitted 42.5% Asian students.

Similar admissions percentages at Harvard have held steady for other racial groups with remarkably little variance. In other words, while schools like Harvard say the goal of racial preferences is to achieve a “critical mass” of minority students, the admissions evidence suggests that the school is reserving pre-rationed pie slices for racial groups.  [Wall Street Journal]

You can read more at the link, but people should be able to get ahead based on merit, but as we all know life is not fair and this situation with Harvard admissions is just another example of this.