Harvard University is one of the latest universities to come under fire for their admissions policies. A legal defense group, the Project on Fair Representation (POFR), led a lawsuit against Harvard last November, alleging race-based discrimination in Harvard’s admissions processes.
According to the lawsuit, Harvard has been strictly limiting the number of Asian American students it admits and engaging in “racial balancing” of its student body. The lawsuit says that the number of Asian American students admitted each year rarely fluctuates, allegedly indicating that Harvard has a “quota” for the number of Asian American students it will admit.
POFR led a similar lawsuit against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-Chapel Hill), claiming unfair admission practices.
To reverse the negative effects that holistic admissions policies have on Asian American students, the lawsuit says that Harvard should use race-neutral admissions policies first. Under current admissions procedures, the lawsuit says, Asian Americans must compete with each other for a supposedly fixed number of spots. That means they are held to a higher academic standard than applicants from other racial or ethnic groups and legacy and student-athlete admits.
Harvard’s critics
The lawsuit is not the first time that doubt has been cast upon admissions policies at Harvard — and for that matter, elite colleges and universities in general. Critics of Harvard’s admissions policies note that the number of Asian American students admitted to Harvard has stayed the same year by year, at roughly 20 percent, even as the number of college-aged Asian Americans has doubled.
According to the demographic statistics of Harvard College’s class of 2018, available on the institution’s website, the class will be 20 percent Asian. Asians make up about 5 percent of the U.S. population overall.
