Source | ANew Shin Dae
On June 29, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 6 in favor and 3 against that public and private universities must stop considering race in admissions, ruling that Harvard and the University of North Carolina's "affirmative action" admissions plans were unconstitutional.
The lawsuit against Harvard University has been taking 8 years.
Back in 2014, an organization called the Fair Admissions of Students (SFFA) filed a lawsuit against Harvard University in federal district court in Boston, accusing it of discriminating against Asian-Americans in undergraduate admissions and violating the Civil Rights Act. Harvard hired the best team of lawyers and won the case twice in 2019 and 2020, but the plaintiff SFFA repeatedly lost the battle and insisted on taking the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In the annual entrance examination, Asian-Americans, especially Chinese-Americans, are ranked at the top of various academic tests, including the SAT, the International Cooperative Authority's PISA (International Assessment of Student Abilities), and the TIMSS for the single test of mathematics and science. However, Harvard University does not pay attention to grades and politics in admissions, and gives preference to black and Hispanic students who are inferior to Asians, which is extremely unfair to Asian students.
01 Review of the affirmative action movement
The institutional roots of this phenomenon lie in the long-standing "affirmative action movement" in the United States and the accompanying implementation of "racial quotas."
Blacks have been enslaved and persecuted throughout American history. After World War II, ethnic minorities represented by blacks launched affirmative action movements in various ways to enjoy the same rights as whites. After all efforts, in 1964, the United States promulgated the famous "Affirmative Action Act", requiring any university, enterprise and institution receiving federal funding to prohibit racial discrimination, in order to help disadvantaged minorities, the bill provides for special consideration and compensatory preferences for minorities in education and employment.
In this context, in order to obtain more political resources and moral legitimacy, American universities began to adjust their admissions policies, taking racial diversity as an important factor and core indicator, resulting in the emergence of the so-called "racial quota" system, that is, by reserving fixed places for students of specific ethnic groups, to ensure that minority students, especially blacks, can enter universities, especially first-class universities.
In the 60s of the 20th century, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other prestigious universities announced that as long as there were qualified students, the number of black students admitted would not be less than a fixed minimum percentage, such as 8% or 12%. As a direct result, more and more blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Indians are entering world-renowned universities such as Harvard University and are given the best possible education.
Supporters believe that because blacks and other minorities are disadvantaged in American society, their children do not have access to the same high-quality educational resources as white children, and this support policy helps to improve their competitiveness in higher education resources, so that they do not lose at the starting line and do not allow the injustices of the previous generation to be passed on to the next generation.
Opponents argue that the inequality between white and black Americans is a historic and comprehensive problem that should not be solved by tilting access to higher education. From the perspective of educational equity, higher education resources should be allocated according to criteria such as the quality and ability of students, not on the basis of race and color.
Imposing some kind of "racial quota" in college admissions not only does not make black and other minority children more independent and self-reliant, but also causes "reverse discrimination", constituting another form of racial inequality.
Whites first challenged the "first anti-affirmative action movement," the Regents of University of California v. Bakke in 1978. Bucky, a white student who was rejected for two years in a row from applying to the University of California, Davis School of Medicine, found that there was a 16 percent black quota in medical school admissions, and that the black students who were admitted based on it performed far worse than himself.
According to this, Bucky claimed to be a victim of "reverse discrimination." In this case, the Supreme Court's decision is a bit slippery: it first found that it was legitimate for universities to consider race in admissions, but at the same time found that "racial quotas" were unconstitutional, requiring the University of California to admit Bucky.
02 Forty years of Asian resistance
In the beginning, Asian Americans were also beneficiaries of the affirmative action movement. Asians have long been excluded from higher education in the United States, and because of the affirmative action movement, top universities have opened their doors to Asian-American students since the 60s, and the proportion of Asian-American students admitted to universities such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown and Dartmouth has increased.
However, the honeymoon period for Asian Americans and college came to an abrupt end after the mid-80s. After the promulgation of the new Immigration Act in 1965, the number of Asian immigrants in the United States skyrocketed, and Asian immigrants were hardworking, intelligent, and law-abiding, and soon became a "model minority" in American society.
In the field of education, Asian students are diligent and self-motivated, and they are excellent students in all kinds of examinations. However, it soon became clear that for Asians, studying well and getting good exams did not mean going to college well, because the "racial quota" system in college admissions was more attentive and preferential to "poor students."
On the one hand, the number of Asian-American students is growing, and the average grades are rising, while on the other hand, the proportion and probability of being admitted to universities, especially first-class universities, are getting lower and lower, not only far lower than other minorities such as blacks and Latinos, but even lower than the national average acceptance rate.
Since the 80s of the 20th century, allegations of discrimination against Asians in American college admissions have been frear. The case of "Student Fair Admissions Organization v. Harvard University" is the most concentrated and fierce embodiment.
Studies by plaintiffs and other social organizations have shown that Harvard University has a secret, "racial quota" or "Asian discrimination" against Asians in admissions, and they set a fixed enrollment ratio or quota for Asian Americans, but this ratio is seriously inconsistent with the number, status, achievements, and growth trends of Asian Americans in American society.
The final admitted Asian students at Harvard scored 140, 270 and 450 points higher than the white, Hispanic, and African American SAT scores, respectively. At the same time, admissions officers also have negative stereotypes about Asian-American students, making more and more demanding of them.
03After Harvard lost the case
Against this backdrop, some states in the Midwest have taken the lead in challenging the affirmative action movement. In 1996, the California Legislature passed Bill 209 prohibiting discrimination or preferential treatment to any individual or group in California in public employment, public education, or public contracting based on race, sex, color, national origin, or national origin. It is equivalent to abolishing affirmative action measures. Soon, Washington and Michigan passed similar bills, canceling affirmative action measures in higher education.
Given that the ratio of conservatives to liberals in the Supreme Court is 6:3, the Supreme Court lost Harvard this time to stop this "diversity" in admissions.
The majority, represented by Chief Justice John Roberts, said affirmative action programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina "use racial issues in a negative way"; Ultimately, by majority, the Admissions Affirmative Action Act violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
Roberts also pointed out in his judgment that this ruling cannot be interpreted as completely prohibiting universities from considering applicants and stating in papers how their lives are affected by racial background, but that universities cannot privately select by ethnicity through essays.
Fitzgerald, president of the University of San Francisco, has said that if they are asked to remove the option to disclose their ethnicity on the application form, they will ask applicants to write a short essay informing them of their ethnicity.
And Shannon Gundy, the University of Maryland's director of undergraduate admissions, said in a speech sponsored by the American Council on Education long before the ruling that students should adjust their essays to describe how their racial background affects their lives, in addition to writing about everyday events such as football practice and the death of a grandparent.
Gandi also said that starting this fall, some universities may start collecting information about students' backgrounds through essays, even if they fear that this may violate the high court's ruling.
Some opponents of the ruling in the Chinese community said that the consequences of the ruling will make more and more American universities abandon SAT standardized entrance test scores. Skin color is no longer a plaintext factor, but American universities have enough non-skin admissions factors to maintain student diversity. Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne has issued a statement reaffirming the importance of "diversity of ideas, backgrounds, identities and experiences" to the university's mission. Like other private universities in California, LaVine said Stanford will continue to enroll diverse students as permitted by law.
Opponents point to California's 1996 Act 209 as a deterioration in government employment, government project contracting, and the environment for public schools, and public university officials have been admitting the best students in each high school by considering factors such as students' life experience and academic performance, increasing the weight of family financial status and the high school district of candidates. Affirmative action colleges and colleges have higher Asian-American enrollment rates than schools that do not. The increasing rate of Asian residents in the United States is actually decreasing, and the increase in the number of Asian students on campus is mainly due to international students.
04 White people are the biggest winners?
The Washington Post notes that in nine states that have banned affirmative enrollment at public universities within the state, data from the past 30 years show that banning affirmative enrollment benefits white and Asian students. How can this be interpreted?
According to the report, according to 2021 data, Arizona, California, Florida, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Washington and other places that have banned affirmative enrollment at universities have a low proportion of Hispanic students and Native American students in the college student population, while the proportion of white students and Asian students is high.
In California, for example, the university affirmative enrollment ban plummeted by 50 percent in the University of California at Berkeley after the ban on affirmative admissions was introduced in 1998. The analysis shows that lost Hispanic and African-American students may transfer to other, less competitive public universities.
Zachary Bleemer, an associate professor of economics at Yale University who studies the long-term effects of California's ban on affirmative admissions, said Hispanic and African-American students who transfer to less competitive public universities have lower graduation rates, fewer rates going on to graduate school and slightly lower post-graduation earnings.
If these students attend the more competitive top-schools, Blimer said, they may have the opportunity to create connections that aren't available elsewhere, absorbing information that isn't available in high school, and those relationships eventually translate into high-paying packages in the workplace.
In contrast, the salary level of Asian American students and white students remained roughly unchanged before and after California's affirmative admissions ban was launched.
The Wall Street Journal reported that judging from the effectiveness of the above-mentioned Kyushu universities in not directly linking races but still committed to diversifying admissions, these schools have consistently failed to achieve their goals.
For example, substituting race for socioeconomic status — because low-income students tend to overlap significantly with minorities — is a flawed alternative, with census data showing that the number of white households earning less than $50,000 in 2021 was more than three times that of African-American and Hispanic families. Another approach is to have top African-American and Hispanic graduates from each high school guaranteed enrollment, but this is only possible in schools that are predominantly ethnic.
Gail Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, pointed out that if certain indicators are selected and reversed to find specific races, such as first-generation college students in Hispanic single-parent families (parents without college degrees), and setting different income thresholds for certain ethnic groups, it may cause legal disputes.
There are also attempts by universities to consider applicants' zip codes or whether to join the free lunch program in high school, but this may end up being "socioeconomic diverse" rather than racially diverse admissions.
The University of Michigan said it has struggled to maintain enough diversity since voters banned preferential treatment based on race, gender and other factors in 2006, with measures including tutoring and preparatory programs for low-income students in the state starting in seventh grade, full scholarships and more, but no substantial progress has been made. The fewer such students, the more isolated they feel, which in turn leads to hesitation among other applicants, leading to a further lack of diversity.
In the words of a Chinese activist who opposed the High Court's ruling, based on past experience, those who benefited from the ban on affirmative enrollment were first and foremost white students in rural areas and poor school districts, not Asians or other minorities.
05Abolition of "Inheritance of Life"
Coupled with the fact that Harvard and other Ivy League schools have opened the door to the children of whites and rich people through the "inheritance student" policy, it is inevitable that some people are worried that in the future, such famous schools will become campuses where whites eat all.
In this regard, the next admission qualification battle has begun. The Associated Press reported that universities are under pressure to end "inheritance student preference," in which alumni's children apply for extra points. If universities are going to enroll more African-American, Hispanic, and Indigenous students, abolishing the legacy preference should be an easy first step.
Viet Nguyen, chief executive of the nonprofit Ed Mobilizer, said there is no excuse for inheritance preference to continue, and that no other country in the world pays attention to it, and now is a great opportunity for the United States to catch up with the rest of the world.
Ed Mobilizer called on alumni of top schools to put pressure on their alma mater. Their goal is to get graduates of the top 30 universities to stop donating until the policy of inheritance preference is repealed. These include Harvard, the University of North Carolina, other Ivy League schools, and the University of Southern California.
A campus that can increase the proportion of Asians enrolled while protecting the interests of black, Hispanic and other minority students - banning equal enrollment and maintaining diversity requires whites to give away some substantial privileges.
The trip, as in the past, was not an easy one. Zhao Yukong, president of the Asian American Education Alliance (AACE), one of the groups leading the Asian American v. Harvard case, said that the current victory is not the end of the Asian American rights protest. He said the AACE will also oversee the implementation of the Supreme Court ruling in the admissions process at all colleges across the country and challenge U.S. universities to eliminate standardized tests.
American-style "gaokao": standardized tests and meritocracy in American society
By Nicholas Lehmann, translated by Dai Yifei and Li Lifeng
Peking University Press April 2018
The book is an illuminating and detailed overview of the ins and outs of the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test), a fascinating and dramatic experience: from the pioneers who created the test to the students who benefited from it, the roles are in full swing, and the fierce battle between standardized testing and affirmative action is like a grand finale. This book is not only the history of ETS (Educational Testing Service), the author not only tells the story of how ETS rose to dominate the field of college entrance examinations, but also describes the changes that have occurred in American society with the rise of this test-taking culture.