But Harvard's push to broaden the diversity of its student ranks comes as the Trump administration intensifies its focus on affirmative action policies and suggests it will investigate how colleges shape the racial makeup of their campuses.
The US Justice Department is preparing to redirect resources from its civil rights division toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants, The New York Times reported this week.
On Wednesday, the Trump administration said it had no broad plans to investigate whether college and university admissions programs discriminate against students based on race and that it was looking into a single complaint from a coalition of Asian-American groups filed in 2015. The coalition filed an administrative complaint against Harvard University, alleging that the school and other Ivy League institutions are using racial quotas that shut out high-scoring Asians.
Still, news about the administration's interest in affirmative action policies caught colleges off-guard and raised worries in academia and among civil rights advocates.
On Wednesday, several universities in Massachusetts defended their admissions practices and said they meet legal requirements. They stressed that building a campus of students from different races, places, and a variety of experiences was crucial to their academic mission.
Comment: More crucial than accepting applicants based on their academic achievements, it seems.
"To become leaders in our diverse society, students must have the ability to work with people from different backgrounds, life experiences, and perspectives. Harvard remains committed to enrolling diverse classes of students," said Rachael Dane, a spokeswoman for the university. "Harvard's admissions process considers each applicant as a whole person, and we review many factors, consistent with the legal standards established by the US Supreme Court."
Comment: Harvard is an academic institution. The factors considered should be academic. Accepting or rejecting people based on their race sounds quite racist.
Of the freshmen students admitted to Harvard this year, 50.8 percent are from minority groups, including African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, Native Americans, and Native Hawaiians. That's up from 47.3 percent last year, according to the university.
Harvard recruiters fanned out across the country, visiting 150 communities in the United States, meeting with students and parents at night and with high school counselors for breakfast, according to the school.
Harvard admitted 22.2 percent of students who identified as Asians, about the same as last year.
Many top schools also conduct robust recruiting efforts to attract minorities.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst, where the freshmen minority enrollment has climbed from 21 percent in 2010 to nearly 30 percent in 2016, has made greater efforts to recruit students from high schools in cities such as Springfield and Boston, said James Roche, the school's associate provost of enrollment management.
At UMass Amherst a student's race and ethnicity are part of the admissions process, but not the defining factor, Roche said.
Comment: Consider how sinister that statement actually is. In any other context, it would be seen for what it is.
The school stands by its admissions policy and doesn't plan any changes based on the Justice Department's stepped up interest in affirmative action, he said.
"As we've learned with this administration, we need to let things shake out and see where they fall," Roche said. "What we're doing fits the legal standards."
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is also monitoring how the Justice Department will proceed.
"A diverse student body is critical to the educational mission of MIT," said Kimberly Allen, a spokeswoman for the university.
Comment: Suggestion for actual academic diversity: don't exclude high achievers based on their race. It's pretty simple.
Edward Blum, the president of Students for Fair Admissions, which brought the lawsuit against Harvard claiming its admissions policy discriminates against Asian students, said he was surprised by the Justice Department's interest in the case.
"I am truthfully befuddled by it," Blum said. "No one has reached out to us."
The Washington Post on Wednesday reported that the Justice Department's call for lawyers to review the complaint from Asian coalitions came after career staffers who specialize in education issues refused to work on the investigation out of concerns that it was contrary to the division's longstanding approach to civil rights in education.
Blum has a similar case pending against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
And he also pushed a case brought by Abigail Fisher, a student who said the University of Texas rejected her because she is white. Last year, the US Supreme Court, in a 4-to-3 vote, decided that college admissions officers could continue to use race as one of several factors in deciding who gets into a school. The decision surprised university officials and disappointed those who had hoped to end race-based admissions.
But the ruling does require universities, if they are challenged, to show that they had no choice but to use race to create diversity on campus and that other factors alone, such as family income or an advantage to first-generation college students, couldn't create a similar mix of students, said Vinay Harpalani, a law professor at the Savannah Law School, who specializes in affirmative action.
A more active Justice Department on this front could push schools to demonstrate that they are looking at other factors before race, Harpalani said.
"The fact that the Trump [administration] may investigate this may make universities more wary about using race in their admissions policies," he said. "Universities typically don't like to make details on their race-conscious policies public, because the line between legal and illegal policies is not fully clear . . . and because there are always potential lawsuits out there, and also because this is such a politically charged issue."
Universities aren't likely to entirely stop considering race as a factor in admissions, but having the Justice Department watching every move could have a chilling effect, said Anthony P. Carnevale, the director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, which has studied college racial and economic diversity.
"They're nervous, and this will make them more nervous," Carnevale said.
Reader Comments
People should read Thomas Sowell's "Affirmative Action Around the World - An Empirical Study" which includes an analysis of 30 years of affirmative action policies in the United States and around the world.
Lets talk objective reality, not ideals...
If admissions to places like harvard only favoured academic achievements (purely) i.e. grade on an exam... the following would happen
- academic achievement is higher amongst children from richer/stable families so the majority will be admitted from this group. Bear in mind, grades by themselves don't equate to intelligence... a child born in a poorer unstable home who doesn't have the support required to reach their potential will fall short in a system that doesn't look to counter this.
- As a result of the above, wealth in the society will gradually over time become controlled by said group above (who'll filter out of these institutions to take up positions in the upper echelons of society) who in turn will represent only a fraction of the demographic in society (i.e. in reality, it'll tend to result in generational socio-economic lack of mobility which in simple language is 'where you were born, in whatever bracket that is where you will be most likely to spend the rest of your life' I.e. the rich are rich and the poor are poor)
- as a result of the above, over the long term, civil unrest will ensue... Why? People will cry discrimination and when they realise they have nothing to lose, they will become disruptive in society.
- as a result, the ruling elites will have a choice... concede some ground or hold their ground.
- either way, the fight is on.
So no.... it's not just about academic achievement alone. Stop living in a fantasy world that doesn't exist anywhere else other than in your mind.
So yeah, no doubt some private school students will be rejected because they have to get in an x amount of state school students in.
Unfair?
The better solution is to have more learning institutions that operate on the level of Oxford or Harvard so that you don't have a disproportionate amount of students clamouring for severely limited spaces.
Same logic can be applied in employment... more better jobs in the economy rather that have a quadrillion applicants per job which results in situations that can be construed as highly unfair which in turn leak on to society in the way citizens interact with each other.
This article only concentrates on race which doesn't create a clear enough image... it should also be talking about socio economic backgrounds.
White poor kids are being let into universities in place of white rich kids (i.e. the deciding factor is their 'poorness' in order to satisfy a quota).... unfair?
:barf:
A common complaint about Americans is how oblivious of the rest of the world we are. Or maybe better to say isolated from the rest of the world... Where else will Americans meet foreigners other than at university?
I don't care for the modern social justice types, but I suspect many of their detractors are equally full of crap. How many who support ending Harvard's "racist" policies also support a business owner being able to choose his or her clientele? The classic case of the baker who did not want to make a cake for a gay wedding comes to mind. Many would say, "I might disagree with the baker, but I support his right to make that choice."
If one is going to support the baker, then one has to support Harvard, a private university, in having the right to make such a policy. Of course, that certainly does not stop us from being critical of the policy.
Many Social Justice detractors fall into the trap of defining themselves with respect to their opposition. If I define myself as being in opposition to something, eventually I can argue myself into violating my personal values so long as my actions are in opposition of X group or Y ideas.
Pardon me... A fair amount of words just to say that I am still not sure about this one...