Dueling Economists: Rival Analyses of Harvard’s Admissions Process Emerge at Trial

David Card didn’t mince words. In testimony here in federal court on Tuesday, the economist from the University of California at Berkeley answered technical questions about his analysis of Harvard University’s admissions process and used words like “nonsensical” to describe another economist’s analysis.

A day after current and former students shared personal stories to explain why campus diversity mattered to them, the trial once again turned into a discussion of two data sets. Each offers a different answer to the same question: Is Harvard’s admissions process biased against Asian-American applicants?

“The statistical evidence,” Card said, “does not support the claim.”

That conclusion contradicted the recent testimony of the plaintiff’s star witness. Peter S. Arcidiacono, an economist at Duke University, testified last week that Harvard’s admissions process favors black and Latino applicants over white and Asian-American ones. He reached that conclusion after the plaintiff, Students for Fair Admissions, hired him to analyze six years of Harvard’s admissions data. The organization, which opposes affirmative action, filed a 2014 lawsuit alleging that the university discriminates against Asian-Americans, and the trial is now in its third week.

Arcidiacono delivered a blunt assessment in court. Though they consistently outperform other subgroups of applicants in academic and extracurricular metrics, he said, “there is a penalty against Asian-American applicants.”

But Card has rejected that finding. “The purported penalty against Asian Americans …,” he wrote in his own analysis, “does not actually exist.”

In his testimony on Tuesday, Card elaborated on his conclusion. Arcidiacono’s analysis, he said, revealed a misunderstanding of Harvard’s admissions process. How? By focusing too much on academic achievement, and failing to account for many other factors the university considers when evaluating hordes of applicants with stellar grades and test scores.

“There’s an overwhelming abundance of excellence,” Card said.

To emphasize that point, a lawyer for Harvard asked the economist to comment on several charts revealing the competitiveness of the university’s applicant pool. Of the 37,000 applicants for admission to the Class of 2019, for instance, 8,200 had perfect grade-point averages, and more than 2,700 had perfect scores on the verbal section of the SAT.

But Harvard had only about 1,700 spots to offer. Even if the university wished to consider only grades and test scores, it would be hard-pressed to select a freshman class using those variables alone.

Harvard’s admissions staff rates applicants in four categories: academic achievement, extracurricular activities, personal qualities, and athletic abilities. Each applicant also gets an overall rating. “Even among academic superstars, additional strengths matter greatly,” Card said.

Asian-American applicants at Harvard had stronger academic ratings than white students did. “There’s no doubt about that,” Card said. Asian-Americans also had slightly higher extracurricular ratings. Yet white applicants had stronger ratings in the other two nonacademic measures, and were more likely to be “multidimensional,” with top ratings in three of the four categories.

Applicants’ multidimensionality, Card said, “is really the defining feature of the admissions process” at Harvard. And that, he has suggested, is perhaps one reason white applicants had a higher acceptance rate than Asian-Americans did. “The disparity Prof. Arcidiacono labels ‘bias,’” he wrote in a report filed in court last summer, “may very well be explained by factors other than race.”

‘Completely Nonsensical’

The two economists’ analyses vary in several ways. Perhaps most significant, their respective models include different kinds of applicants. Arcidiacono excludes recruited athletes, the children of alumni, the children of Harvard faculty and staff members, and students on a special list that includes children of donors.

Harvard on Trial

Detailed background on the lawsuit over the university’s race-conscious admissions policy, the case’s implications for selective colleges, and coverage of the trial as it unfolded, in a federal court in Boston.

• Harvard Doesn’t Discriminate Against Asian American Applicants, U.S. Appeals Court Rules
• 3 Takeaways From the Appeal of the Harvard Admissions Lawsuit
• A Judge Advised Harvard to Give Its Admissions Officers Training to Stop Bias. Will That Help?

Card includes them. Though the total number of students who fit those descriptions represents a small fraction of the applicant pool (5 percent), they account for a large proportion of accepted students (29 percent). That high acceptance rate, Arcidiacono said, made those applicants difficult to compare with others.

Card seemed perplexed by the decision to omit a sizable chunk of the pool. “Ignoring this highly competitive group seems completely nonsensical to me,” he said. “If you’re throwing away a third of the people who are going to be admitted, it just is not going to work, because you would not be able to look at who’s being admitted compared to who’s in that process.”

And that, Card suggested, made his counterpart’s findings of racial bias less reliable.

Arcidiacono last week seemed relaxed on the stand, sitting back in his chair and gesturing with his hands. Card, leaning forward, answered questions precisely, rarely changing his tone of voice. At one point, when he stood up and wrote on a whiteboard while explaining his statistical methods, the courtroom got a lesson in “average marginal effects” and the importance of multivariate models. That passed for legal drama on Tuesday.

Harvard admissions officials have vigorously denied that they discriminate against Asian-American applicants. An applicant’s race, they said, can help, but not hurt, his or her chances of admission.

Oddly, in a trial about whether some students are harmed by Harvard’s admissions process, there will be no testimony from students who believe they have been harmed. Instead there is testimony from two highly regarded economists who have become the unlikely stars of the show. Both have dug into Harvard’s data. Both have said the other’s conclusions are way off.

Card’s testimony will continue on Wednesday. Lawyers for Students for Fair Admissions have yet to cross-examine him.

Earlier on Tuesday, Ruth J. Simmons, president of Prairie View A&M University, in Texas, described the educational benefits of campus diversity, which can expose students to unfamiliar perspectives.

Simmons, who was the first black president of an Ivy League university, recalled taking a philosophy course at Wellesley College in which apartheid was a frequent topic of discussion. She recalled her surprise when one young woman identified herself as South African. “I was forced to listen to a different opinion,” she said. “Today I remember no one in that class, but I remember her.”

Though Simmons is an outspoken advocate for campus diversity, she also expressed support for controversial admissions practices that are often described as acting against minority applicants. A lawyer for Harvard asked Simmons, a former president of Brown University and of Smith College, whether admissions offices should give an advantage to legacies — the children of alumni — during the admissions process.

Yes, she replied. Though colleges should never admit an unqualified applicant, she said, “it is appropriate to give a tip to legacies, and that is in keeping with the tradition that we have as institutions, where there’s a strong identity alumni have with their institutions.” The same goes for the children of donors, she said, but only in rare cases and only if there is no quid pro quo.

Yet at what point do all those institutional priorities undermine a college’s more-noble goals, such as fostering academic excellence or socioeconomic mobility, especially at highly selective colleges where seats are scarce? Many observers of the admissions process have asked that question.

Judge Allison D. Burroughs of the Federal District Court echoed it in a remark to Simmons. If most legacies are white, most donors’ children are white, and those applicants take a large number of spots, she said, “it seems to me that can be a way to tamp down your diversity.”

Eric Hoover writes about admissions trends, enrollment-management challenges, and the meaning of Animal House, among other issues. He’s on Twitter @erichoov, and his email address is eric.hoover@chronicle.com.