Harvard Admissions

Blog readers will remember our coverage of the 2018 Harvard admissions case in which the allegation of the plaintiffs was that the screening methodology discriminated against Asian Americans. The plaintiffs lost at the lower court level, but the case is under appeal and might be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court. (You can find our coverage by typing "Harvard admissions" into the search option on this blog.)

The Court does not have to take the Harvard matter up, however, and it could decide not to do so - even if it wants to take up the issue of affirmative action - due to the fact that the plaintiffs at Harvard did not include an Asian American who claimed discrimination. That is, the Court might choose some "better" case for review.

Nonetheless, Harvard is obviously a high profile university, so the Court could choose the case for review on that basis. In any event, the NY Times had an article yesterday whose main theme was that the dropping of the SAT by some universities (including UC) and other factors related to the protests last year produced a rise in applications and admissions by underrepresented groups.

Buried in that article we find this information on Harvard admissions:

At Harvard, the proportion of admitted students who are Black jumped to 18 percent from 14.8 percent  last year.  If all of them enrolled, there would be about 63 more Black students in this year’s freshman class than if they were admitted at last year’s rate. Asian-Americans saw the second biggest increase, to 27.2 percent from 24.5 percent, which could be meaningful if a lawsuit accusing Harvard of systematically discriminating against Asian-Americans is taken up by the Supreme Court.

One interpretation is that Harvard is preparing for the possibility of a (conservative) Supreme Court review. If the Supreme Court does take up the Harvard case, and if it were to curtail or eliminate affirmative action-type programs - two big "ifs" - the impact on UC's admission practices might still turn out to be slight since California voters rejected repeal of Prop 209 last November. So, in principle, California doesn't have affirmative action admissions and thus would not be within the purview of some hypothetical Supreme Court decision. We will see.

The NY Times article is at:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/17/us/minority-acceptance-ivy-league-cornell.html