Harvard University faces class action for 'discriminating' Asian-Americans in admission

The Harvard University is a facing a class action for allegedly discriminating against Asian-Americans in admissions by imposing a penalty for their high achievement and giving preferences to other racial minorities.

News Deskbdnews24.com
Published : 3 August 2017, 07:53 PM
Updated : 3 August 2017, 09:20 PM

The case with the Supreme Court, puts Asian-Americans front and centre in the latest stage of the affirmative action debate, according to a New York Times report.

It will look into the issue whether there has been discrimination against Asian-Americans in the name of creating a diverse student body.

The Justice Department, which has signalled that it would investigate “intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions,” may well focus on Harvard, the report added.

“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 or 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 non-profit 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 disadvantage at those colleges because of their admissions policies.

The case against Harvard, highlighted one Austin Jia, an American student of Asian origin who holds his high GPA, nearly perfect SAT score, and involved in other activities including debate team, tennis captain and state orchestra. But he did not get a place in Harvard.

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, according to NYT.

The US federal government potentially has the ability to influence university admissions policies by withholding federal funds under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids racial discrimination in programs that receive federal money.

In many ways, the system the lawsuit is attacking is one Harvard points to with pride.

The university has a long and pioneering history of support for affirmative action, going back at least to when Derek Bok, appointed president of Harvard in 1971, embraced policies that became a national model.

The lawsuit, however, cites Harvard’s Asian-American enrolment at 18 percent in 2013 and notes very similar numbers ranging from 14 to 18 percent at other Ivy League colleges, like Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton and Yale.