The Lawsuit Against Harvard Admissions Turns Into a Courtroom Battle of Economists

Harvard College’s admissions process favors African-American, Latino, and Latina students at the expense of white and Asian-American applicants, a Duke University economist, Peter S. Arcidiacono, testified here in federal court on Thursday. He had been hired to analyze six years of Harvard’s admissions data by Students for Fair Admissions, an anti-affirmative-action organization that sued the college in 2014, claiming it discriminates against Asian-Americans.

Students for Fair Admissions does not plan to call any Asian-American students who were rejected by Harvard to testify, so Arcidiacono is the organization’s key witness. He laid out the crux of the case against Harvard, relying on his analysis of the data to show that Asian-American applicants are treated unfairly.

Though they consistently perform better on academic and extracurricular metrics, he said, “there is a penalty against Asian-American applicants” at Harvard.

While Asian-Americans lose out, applicants in other racial groups benefit, according to his analysis. He testified that “two-thirds of African-American admits are admitted as a result of racial preferences and roughly half of Hispanics.”

Harvard officials adamantly deny that admissions officials discriminate against Asian-American applicants. They say that while they do consider race in their admissions process, it can only help an applicant.

David Card, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, will testify for Harvard either on Friday or next week. His analysis of the same data found no evidence of discrimination. According to Card, Arcidiacono’s analysis is based on “misunderstandings about how Harvard’s process works, what factors Harvard values in the admissions process, and how candidates are admitted.”

As part of Harvard’s process, admissions officials rate applicants in four categories: academic achievement, extracurricular activities, athletic abilities, and personal qualities. They also give each applicant an overall rating.

Arcidiacono’s central claim is that Harvard admissions officials discriminate against Asian-American applicants in two places: the personal rating and the overall score. Harvard admissions officials testified earlier in the trial that they consider an applicant’s race only in the overall score. They also said the scores are preliminary, given early in the monthslong process.

But Arcidiacono said he had found that the applicants who are admitted tend to be the ones who earn high scores on the personal and overall ratings.

“You see the same systematic patterns,” Arcidiacono said, “with African-Americans scoring the highest, followed by Hispanics, then whites, then Asian-Americans.”

The Excluded List

A main difference between the two economists’ analyses is which types of applicants they included. Arcidiacono excluded recruited athletes, the children of alumni, the children of Harvard faculty and staff members, and students on a “Dean’s List” made up partly of children of donors. Those applicants — about 7,000 out of the roughly 150,000 students in the six-year data set — are admitted at a much higher rate than the rest of the pool, which Arcidiacono said made them difficult to compare with the other applicants.

The judge, Allison D. Burroughs of the Federal District Court, had some questions about the decision to omit that group. She wondered how many Asian-American applicants in those excluded categories are admitted. As it turned out, they are admitted at higher rates than the white applicants.

“It looks to me like what you’re arguing is you have an admissions office that’s discriminating against Asians, but they only do it in certain places,” she said. Arcidiacono agreed.

“If you’re discriminating against a group, wouldn’t you expect them to discriminate across the board?” she asked. Arcidiacono disagreed with that one.

For most of the day, J. Scott McBride, a lawyer for Students for Fair Admissions, walked Arcidiacono through dozens of slides depicting graphs and simplified equations showing how he had conducted his analysis. Arcidiacono appeared relaxed and almost gleeful on the stand. He sat back in his chair, gestured with his hands, and took frequent sips of water and coffee. He said he doesn’t usually get to work with such a rich and detailed data set.

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?

“This data is fantastic,” he said. “That’s part of the reason I was interested in this.”

He also testified that he had been paid $450 an hour for his work leading up to the trial. He charged a flat rate of $5,000 for the trial itself.

During his cross-examination, William F. Lee, a lawyer for Harvard, drew out more of Arcidiacono’s background, including a controversial paper he wrote about affirmative action. In 2012 he concluded in the paper that African-American students’ grades improve as they progress through college in part because they tend to switch out of tough majors. He acknowledged during questioning from McBride that at Duke, “African- American students felt singled out” because of the paper. He said that for him, the experience was “frightening.”

Lee noted that Students for Fair Admissions and Arcidiacono himself had received funding from the same source, the Searle Freedom Trust, a libertarian-leaning foundation that supports conservative causes. Lee asked Arcidiacono if he could name a single member of Students for Fair Admissions who had been rejected by Harvard.

“I guess not,” he said.

Arcidiacono’s testimony will continue on Friday.

Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.