In Court Battle Over Harvard Admissions, Plaintiffs Allege University Ignored ‘Negative Effects’ on Asian-Americans

Harvard University intentionally discriminates against Asian-American applicants and engages in racial balancing when choosing its undergraduate classes, according to legal documents filed in federal court on Friday by a nonprofit organization challenging the institution’s admissions policies. The group also said Harvard has ignored evidence that its admissions practices had “negative effects” on Asian-American students.

In a filing of their own on Friday, Harvard’s lawyers forcefully rejected the organization’s allegations, saying they had been based on “gerrymandered statistics” and facts stripped of context. The group suing the university, they wrote, had produced “no legally sufficient evidence to support its speculation that Harvard has engaged in years-long, intentional discounting of Asian-Americans’ applications.”

Yet, if nothing else, the group — Students for Fair Admissions — has disclosed hundreds of pages of documents that shed some light on Harvard’s highly elaborate selection process, including how admissions officers consider an applicant’s race. Portions of the documents describe previously confidential findings by the university’s Office of Institutional Research, which recently sought to determine whether Harvard’s admissions practices put Asian-American students at a disadvantage.

That inquiry, which led to a series of internal reports, came about after a Harvard alumnus alleged in a 2012 article in The American Conservative that the university had an “anti-Asian admissions bias,” according to the court filings. The following year, one report projected the demographic breakdowns of classes admitted under three different admission models.

If Harvard were to evaluate applicants using only standardized-test scores, high-school grades, and an academic rating, the research indicated, the proportion of Asian-American students in the first-year class would more than double, to 43 percent. Yet under models giving more weight to personal characteristics, extracurricular activities, and racial or ethnic backgrounds, the share of Asian-American students would be smaller.

Another report found that Asian-American applicants outperformed their white peers who were not the children of alumni in nine out of 10 categories influencing admissions decisions. The only category in which white students fared better: subjective ratings of applicants’ personal qualities. The report also found that high-achieving Asian-American applicants were admitted at lower rates than white applicants with comparable academic qualities and SAT scores, according to legal documents.

High Stakes

Whether the vast trove of information reveals that the university’s admissions practices are, in fact, illegal or unconstitutional is a question that will soon be decided in court. For now, this much is clear: After years of intrigue and anticipation, the legal battle over Harvard’s admissions policies has reached a crucial stage. Though both sides filed motions for summary judgment on Friday, asking a judge to resolve the case on the basis of court filings alone, seemingly everyone expects it to go to trial, in October, in the U.S. District Court in Boston. And then a high-profile showdown will begin.

The stakes are high. Many Asian-American students believe that they are unfairly held to a higher standard at the nation’s most-selective colleges. Meanwhile, lawyers for the plaintiffs have said they want the case to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, which, they hope, would topple race-conscious admissions policies once and for all.

Members of Students for Fair Admissions, which filed its lawsuit in 2014, include Asian-American applicants denied by Harvard. The group is led by Edward Blum, a conservative advocate who helped devise a recent lawsuit that challenged the University of Texas at Austin’s admissions practices. That lawsuit ended when the Supreme Court upheld the consideration of race as one of many factors in admissions, affirming a previous ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger.

The group’s lawyers on Friday submitted a mix of statistics, expert analysis, and testimony relating to Harvard’s consideration of race and ethnicity. The information is based on six years of admissions data and includes the records of about 200,000 applicants. The group’s filings also include the testimony of a former Harvard employee who worked on the university’s internal reports on alleged bias against Asian-American applicants. He said he believed the reports showed that Harvard’s admissions process disadvantaged such students.

“Do you have any explanation,” he was asked, “other than intentional discrimination for your conclusion regarding the negative association between Asians and the Harvard admissions process?”

“I don’t,” he said.

The plaintiffs also contend that Harvard’s admissions officers tend to see race as a positive factor for black and Hispanic applicants, but not for Asian-American ones, while disproportionately applying terms, such as “standard strong,” to high-achieving Asian-American students who don’t warrant admission. The group also alleges that the university has failed to give “serious, good-faith consideration” to race-neutral means of achieving diversity — something the Supreme Court said was important.

“Today’s court filing exposes the startling magnitude of Harvard’s discrimination against Asian-American applicants,” Blum said in a written statement. “This filing definitively proves that Harvard engages in racial balancing, uses race as far more than a ‘plus’ factor, and has no interest in exploring race-neutral alternatives.”

‘An Unfamiliar and Inaccurate Picture’

Harvard has adamantly contested the plaintiffs’ claims, In an email to Harvard’s campus this week, Drew Gilpin Faust, the university’s departing president, said Students for Fair Admissions had sought to “paint an unfamiliar and inaccurate image of our community and our admissions processes.” Harvard, she said, would “vigorously defend” its admissions practices, through which it seeks to achieve educational goals relating to diversity. A committee convened to determine whether Harvard could meet such goals without considering applicants’ race found that such an alternative wasn’t feasible.

In their court filing on Friday, the university’s lawyers disputed Students for Fair Admissions’ rendering of the internal research. “The analysis in those documents was not designed to evaluate whether Harvard was intentionally discriminating and reached no such conclusion,” they wrote. “The analysis was incomplete, preliminary, and based on limited inputs. In particular, the documents make clear that the analysis did not control for much information that is central to the Harvard admissions process, which takes account of any available information that might bear on the qualities that a student would bring to Harvard.”

Race-Conscious Admissions Returns to the Spotlight

Barely a year after the U.S. Supreme Court appeared to issue its final word on this form of affirmative action, the issue is back, following a Justice Department memo that seemed to promise Trump-administration investigations of colleges. Here’s all of The Chronicle’s coverage.

• 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?
• The Nation’s Students Have Grown More Diverse. Has Harvard’s Enrollment Kept Pace?

Harvard disclosed the results of a statistical analysis by an economist who concluded that to gain admission to the university, applicants must have “multiple areas of strength.” Because other factors carry more weight, the university’s lawyers wrote in their filing, “it is not possible to offer any meaningful prediction of whether an applicant will be admitted based solely on his or her race.”

Harvard admitted 4.6 percent of nearly 43,000 applicants for this fall’s first-year class. Twenty-two percent of those admitted students are Asian-American, 15 percent are black, and 11 percent are Hispanic.

Over the last decade, Harvard officials say, there has been a steady increase in applications from students of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. During that time, the proportion of incoming students who are Asian-American has risen from 17.6 percent. In its individualized evaluations of applicants, Harvard says, race plays a role — but not an outsize one.

“Thorough and comprehensive analysis of the data and evidence makes clear that Harvard College does not discriminate against applicants from any group, including Asian-Americans, whose rate of admission has grown 29 percent over the last decade,” Harvard said in a written statement on Friday. “Mr. Blum and his organization’s incomplete and misleading data analysis paints a dangerously inaccurate picture of Harvard College’s whole-person admissions process by omitting critical data and information factors, such as personal essays and teacher recommendations, that directly counter his arguments.”

A glimpse at applicants’ credentials suggests the difficulty of choosing among so many high-achieving students who are competing for fewer than 2,000 seats. More than 8,000 domestic applicants had perfect grade-point averages, the university says. More than 3,400 had perfect mathematics scores on standardized tests. And more than 2,700 had perfect SAT scores.

“Where, as here, the vast majority of applicants are highly qualified and the admissions process attempts to discern factors that make out the exceptional case,” Harvard’s lawyers wrote, “any consideration present in the application file could determine the outcome.”

And that’s exactly why so many Americans inevitably find the process fascinating, frustrating, and, yes, unfair.

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.