By Randall Yip, AsAmNews Executive Editor
Sally Chen sighed and took a long pause. Today’s Supreme Court ruling against the use of race in college admissions hit her hard.
“I am both disappointed and frustrated to see the court’s ruling to overturn race-conscious admissions,” the 2019 Harvard grad and Education Equity Program manager at Chinese for Affirmative Action told AsAmNews. “The content of the opinion goes against our history, facts and precedent.” Chen had testified in defense of Harvard during earlier stages of the case.
Jing Li Yu is a litigator in New York and has taken part in race discrimination cases in support of plaintiffs.
“I think today’s decision makes it harder for colleges to use diversity as a smoke screen against Asian Americans, he said. “Colleges have a lot of ways to disguise racial discrimination.”
Their opposing views represent a divide in the Asian American community on this controversial issue. A recent poll by Pew found Asian Americans support affirmative action, but not the consideration of race in university applications.
Most Asian American civil rights groups have long supported this decades-long practice of factoring in race and diversity. Most people we spoke gave a thumbs down to today’s ruling.
Those who support the decision cite evidence that Harvard rated Asian Americans lower on personality scores and that Asian students scored 75-100 points higher on the SAT than Hispanic and Black students and 13 points higher than the average White student admitted to Harvard.
Those opposed say test scores are only one factor to consider. Others include extra-curricular activities, intellectual curiosity, overall ambition as well as diversity.
Art Chang was admitted to Yale in 1981. He said at the time his high school’s director of college admission told him he had taken a seat from more deserving students.
“People of color are taking seats from White people and that’s the underlying message of this ruling,” said Chang who is board chair of the Coalition for Asian Children and Families. “This is not a victory for Asian Americans. This is a loss.”
Chang has served on the Alumni Admissions Committee at Yale for 25 years.
The case ruled by the Supreme Court today was filed by Students for Fair Admissions which had lost every case it had filed until today. Previous rulings by both the District Court and Appellate Court had gone against the group as have earlier decisions by the Supreme Court.
However, the high court has been dominated by conservatives since the presidency of Donald Trump
“The decision upends decades of legal precedent,” said Mike Nguyen, a professor of Education at New York University who wrote a brief against Students for Fair Admissions on behalf of 1200 social scientists. “It reverses what the court has been ruling over time. It also uses claims about Asian Americans that are inaccurate to advance a political agenda.”
SB Woo is president of 80-20 and has long fought the consideration of one’s ethnicity on school applications.
Asian Americans make up more than 25 percent of the current admits at Harvard despite being less than 7 percent of the overall population. Woo believes on meritocracy alone, the number of Asian Americans admitted should be much higher.
“The way to eliminate racial discrimination is to not racially discriminate. Asian Americans are obviously discriminated against at Harvard and other Ivy League schools. If the standard is merit, it has nothing to do with the percentage of the population. If we have so many people who have merit, they should be admitted,” he said.
Marita Etcubañez, the Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at Asian Americans Advancing Justice, AAJC called today’s decision a “low.”
Affirmative action and the consideration of race have been outlawed in California since the passage of Proposition 209 in 1996. Etcubanez says it took the University of California 25 years to increase its diversity pool post-209. In 2021, 43 percent of its student body came from underrepresented groups.
“They have been able to build back because of their proactive efforts,: she said. “It didn’t just happen by itself. It took proactive outreach to minority students in high schools and community colleges. Many different things over the years.
Chinese for Affirmative Action has launched a petition drive urging colleges and universities to reaffirm their commitment to diversity. It calls for the elimination of standardized testing, financial barriers and special considerations; the increase of outreach and recruitment and partnerships with community colleges and other institutions.
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Sadly, evidently there are a whole lot of Asian Americans who are not aware of how this case came to be. In the 1990s when Elaine Chow was on the admittance board of Harvard she had discovered and reported that time and time again in spite of Asian Americans qualifying for admittance based on academic performance and merit they were NOT admitted while far lesser qualified students were admitted. The California legislature at the time responded to her legal suit stating that if Americn institutions of higher education based their admittance policies on merit than Asian Americans would dominate enrollment throughout America. Let that thought sink in and think about what such “thinking” is really saying.
I started law school in 1978, the year Regents of University of California v. Bakke was decided by the U S Supreme Court which rejected race based “quotas” but upheld “affirmative action.” While Bakke involved admission to the Medical School, Asians were at that time under-represented in American law schools and in the practice of law. Even today, according to the American Bar Association, 2% of all American lawyers are Asian (while Asians comprise 5.9% of the American population) – up slightly from 1.6% 10 years earlier – while the U.S. population is 5.9% Asian. Why so few Asian American lawyers? Are law schools still discriminating against admission of Asians? Or are Asians still fixated on STEM? Is it because tiger mom’s dream is for her children to get a STEM B.S. and then go on for the M.D. and become doctors just a Bakke did. But law school – NOO. Even by father who was a Professor in Chemical Engineering told me “don’t you dare to to law school because Asians cannot succeed as lawyers!” I ignored his advice and went to law school anyway and became a happy practicing lawyer. While the FAIR v. Harvard and University of North Carolina involved general university admissions (where ACT and SAT scores shall rule) and not professional school admissions (no mention of MCAT or LSAT – the only mention of MCAT was in the context of discussing Bakke). Of the twin Bollinger (University of Michican) decisions (2003) only Grutter concerned admission to law school while Gratz concerned undergraduate admission. The Fisher (University of Texas) cases 2013 and 2016, SCOTUS narrowly upheld affirmative action but warned universities to seek “workable race neutral alternatives.” A few days ago, SCOTUS finally sounded the end of affirmative action first upheld in the year I started law school. But my question remains – why in 2023 only 2% of American lawyers are Asians?!