The Justice Department of the Trump Administration recently announced its intention to investigate a complaint against Harvard University by 64 Asian-American organizations in May 2015. The complaint alleges the university discriminates against Asian-American college applicants through the use of racial quotas.
For decades, when people talk about Affirmative Action and race-based admission policies, the focus has often been black or Hispanic Americans. Unfair treatment of Asian-Americans in college admission is an open secret: everybody knows it; colleges and universities try to hide it; the governing class ignores it.
Examples of bias are abundant and well documented. For instance, At Harvard, the number of Asian-Americans has been close to 1/5 of the freshman class over more than two decades. The number of Asian-American college-age (18-21) students has grown from 2.5 percent of the student population in the United States in 1995 to 5.1 percent in 2011. However, the percentage of Asian-Americans at most Ivy League colleges has flatlined or even declined during the same time frame.
We also know how well Asian-American students can do without racial quotas. In California, Proposition 209 in 1996 banned the state from considering race or ethnicity in public education. As a result, nowadays 1 out of 3 students in the University of California systems is Asian-American. At super-selective Caltech, 42 percent of the 2016 freshman class was Asian-American, more than 3 times their share in California’s population (13 percent in 2014). Research done by sociologist Thomas Espenshade also indicated if affirmative action were to be eliminated, the acceptance rate for Asian-American applicants would increase substantially.
