ATLANTA — A decision around affirmative action efficacy in higher education admissions still looms amid the U.S. Department of Justice’s announcement this year that it will investigate pending claims that Ivy League and elite institutions place quotas on the number of Asian American students they admit.
In an Education Writers Association higher ed session Tuesday, key figures debated whether the implementation of affirmative action results in Asian American students being used as a wedge to advance the anti-affirmative action agenda, and if affirmative action policies are even discriminatory at all against Asian American students.
“If there is some discrimination going on against Asians, it is not due to affirmative action,” said Nicole Gon Ochi, supervising attorney at Advancing Justice-LA’s Impact Litigation unit, during a session titled “Affirmative Action’s Next Big Test.”
Ochi cited findings showing that when affirmative action was eliminated at UCLA, Asian student enrollment actually declined. “Asians are discriminated against by privileged Whites,” she said.
A rebuttal by Yukong Zhao, president and co-founder of the Asian American Coalition for Education (AACE), insisted that institutions consider merit, the “human factor,” and eliminate racial quotas or “racial balancing.” The premise for AACE’s accusations of bias by elite schools stem from arguments that Asian American students admitted each year do not reflect the increasing Asian American population in the U.S.
“It’s very difficult to speculate why” discrimination against Asian American students is happening, he said.
In May 2015, Zhao and other Asian American leaders unified 64 Chinese, Indian, Pakistani and Korean-American organizations, which then filed a civil rights complaint with the federal government against Harvard University. And last year, Zhao’s organization and 132 other Asian American organizations jointly filed another civil rights complaint against Yale University, Brown University and Dartmouth College citing discrimination against Asian American applicants.
