The end of affirmative action has triggered a reconsideration of legacy admissions. When universities extend advantages to the families of donors and alums, they discriminate against others, especially lower-income and Black students.

Legacy admissions began to get more attention after the Department of Education initiated a civil rights investigation in July 2023 into Harvard’s legacy practice. That was a good beginning, but donors and alums are also responsible for legacy preferences.

Let’s be clear: If it is wrong for universities to give preference to alums and donors, it is wrong for alums and donors to seek those privileges.

When donations to a university are followed by preferential admissions, donors are complicit in the discrimination, inequality and injustice that follow. When donors give with an eye toward future privileges for themselves or for their offspring, they may be engaging in moral licensing: doing good to do bad. Their generosity does not entitle them to advantages that deprive others of opportunities.

It is not surprising that many elite institutions still offer legacy advantages. The policy is a win-win — for donors, alums and the receiving institutions.

Related: PROOF POINTS: Why elite colleges won’t give up legacy admissions

But there are losses for the students not admitted, for our sense of justice and for other universities that might have received the donations.

To be fair, not all donors are looking for a win-win. Some are guided by a moral compass. They give to colleges and universities that promote diversity and equality, with a focus on Black students and middle- and lower-income students.

In 2020 for example, MacKenzie Scott donated $560 million to 23 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).

If it is wrong for universities to give preference to alums and donors, it is wrong for alums and donors to seek those privileges.

In August of that year, Jack Dorsey donated $10 million to Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research — even though Dorsey didn’t finish college and didn’t attend Boston University.

In the fall of 2022, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave $100 million to the United Negro College Fund and to other institutions that promote higher education as a means to equality for lower income, Black, Latinx and Indigenous students.

This fall, Blue Meridian Partners’ gave $124 million to 40 HBCUs.

All of this hints at a change in giving norms.

Simply put: There are people in the world who will give generously to support racial equality in higher education. Their giving doesn’t target their alma mater. They don’t anticipate legacy advantages. Their gifts promote the right to education, and do so without deepening inequality.

When donors choose this path, their donations will have a positive impact on a greater number of students, many of whom have endured bias and discrimination. Although these donations cannot compensate for past wrongs, they can promote future good.

Philanthropy is an important mechanism for achieving justice. It gives those who have benefited from collective efforts an opportunity to give back, and some donors agree. As MacKenzie Scott said, “There’s no question in my mind that anyone’s personal wealth is the product of a collective effort, and of social structures which present opportunities to some people, and obstacles to countless others.”

This is not to say that it is always wrong to benefit from one’s charitable actions. Certainly, the warm glow of generosity is a reward in and of itself. But that is very different from a pay-to-play scenario in which giving entails a benefit to the donor at a cost to others.

It is true, however, that legacy preferences can build a sense of community and generate the donations universities need to do the work they want to do. Some donors might not give but for legacy advantages.

Also, an “all in the family” approach to admissions creates a community, one that enhances college life. But who is excluded from that community? And what are the consequences for those left out?

In other contexts, when a donation is linked to a wrong, or a human rights violation, the donor is seen as complicit in that wrong. Donors who give to anti-LGBTQ+ nonprofits are complicit in discrimination against members of the queer community, and those who give to the NRA share responsibility for gun violence.

In the case of legacy admissions, elite universities are effectively discriminating against less privileged students for the benefit of the wealthy — and some donors are enabling them.

Related: OPINION: The Supreme Court just revealed what we already know — Meritocracy is a myth

Fortunately, some universities have already taken legacy preferences off the table. MIT and Wesleyan, for example.

Their actions and the recent donations to HBCUs signal an important change in giving norms and perhaps a bandwagon effect. Hopefully, others will follow the money and legacy practices will soon be a thing of the past. Donors are the engine that drive legacy admissions. They can end them swiftly. Why wait for universities to end legacy admissions, when donors have the power to do so?

Patricia Illingworth is a professor of philosophy at Northeastern University and a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Her most recent book, “Giving Now: Accelerating Human Rights for All,” argues that philanthropy can and should protect human rights.

This story about donors and legacy admissions was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

The post OPINION: Legacy admissions are unnecessary, raise moral concerns and exclude deserving students appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Ever since the Supreme Court announced last year that it would rule on two cases involving affirmative action in college admissions, the world of higher education has been anxiously awaiting a decision. Most experts predicted the court would eventually forbid the use of race as a factor in admissions decisions, and colleges and advocates have been scrambling to prepare for that new world.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court met those expectations, ruling that the consideration of race in college admissions is unconstitutional.

The court adjudicated two cases simultaneously, Students for Fair Admissions v. the University of North Carolina and Students for Fair Admissions v. President & Fellows of Harvard College – the first case involving a public university, the second a private one. Both cases considered only undergraduate admissions policies.

But there is a lot to understand that’s just beneath the headlines.

Black Americans have been falling even farther behind white Americans in holding college and university degrees, with recent trends suggesting this is only likely to get worse, regardless of the court’s decision. Taxpayer-funded flagship universities have been failing to enroll Black and Latino students in the same proportions as Black and Latino graduates from their states’ high schools. And one of the Asian American students who helped publicize the lawsuit that ended up before the high court now has some regrets.

These and other stories have been among The Hechinger Report’s coverage of this issue, coverage that gives important context to the historic ruling.

Our recent reporting included an exploration of the history of affirmative action in a 13-minute documentary film, released last fall. A column by our editor in chief, Liz Willen, introduced the film, which was produced by our partners WCNY and Retro Report, with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Hechinger’s higher education editor Jon Marcus reported and wrote a troubling story showing that the college degree gap between Black and white Americans is getting worse. Black student enrollment dropped by 22 percent between 2010 and 2020 and has dropped by another 7 percent in the years since, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics and the National Student Clearinghouse.

Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Jon that, “in a way, we’re almost in the worst of all possible worlds for civil rights, because people think a lot of problems have been solved.”

Our senior reporter Meredith Kolodner and data reporter Fazil Khan published an interactive story that shows how the flagship universities in each state fail to enroll proportionate numbers of Black and Latino students from their own states’ high schools. The graphics and maps make it clear how pervasive the disparities are and where they are most extreme.

For example, the University of California at Berkeley’s freshman class in 2021 was 20 percent Latino, in a state where 54 percent of high school graduates are Latino.  In Mississippi, 48 percent of high school graduates were Black in 2021, but only 8 percent of the next fall’s freshmen class at Ole Miss, the flagship, was Black.

My own reporting included a look at the experience of Michael Wang, who was once the “poster child” of the movement to ban affirmative action. After listening to him describe his current views on the subject, I pursued him for an interview, and learned that he has decidedly mixed feelings about the movement he gave momentum to.  

Affirmative action is supposed to help students from racial minority groups, but Wang believes it harms Asian Americans, who he said are held to unfair standards. He never wanted affirmative action to be done away with altogether, he said – just reformed.

The U.N.C. and Harvard cases are not the first challenges to the consideration of race in college admissions. Opponents to affirmative action started to challenge policies meant to add racial and gender diversity shortly after they began being implemented in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that colleges could use race as a factor in admissions, but could not use racial quota systems. Since then, there have been several high-profile lawsuits that have modified the Supreme Court’s position on affirmative action in limited ways.

Proponents of affirmative action believe that these policies are essential to creating a racially just world and giving campuses a diverse mix of students from many backgrounds.  Race and ethnicity can have profound effects on housing location, school district, family earning potential and connections to power – factors that can hold students back from – or set them up for – college success.

Opponents of affirmative action believe that college applicants should be judged by their academic merits and other accomplishments alone. Some believe that giving students from underrepresented racial groups an edge in the admissions process disadvantages white students. Edward Blum, the founder of Students For Fair Admissions, has said that past discrimination cannot be remedied with new discrimination.

This story about the affirmative action case was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

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Back in 2013, as a senior in high school, Michael Wang sent a series of emails to admissions offices at the colleges that had rejected him. He asked how race played into their decisions, specifically for Asian American students like him. With near-perfect test scores, stellar grades and a pages-long resumé of extracurricular activities, he wanted to know why he had been rejected from the nation’s most prestigious universities. Finding their boilerplate responses insufficient, he filed discrimination complaints against three universities with the federal Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

Unknowingly, Wang helped set in motion the latest movement to end affirmative action on college campuses. Now, he said, “a part of me regrets what I’ve put forward.”

In the 10 years since he sent the emails and filed the complaints, he’s come to feel that the issue is much bigger than just whether he got to attend Harvard College. He’s concluded, he said, that “affirmative action is a Band-Aid to the cancer of systemic racism.”  

Even after more than five decades of affirmative action in college admissions, dramatic inequities by race in college enrollment and degree attainment persist. Between Black and White Americans, the college enrollment gap has been growing wider since 2010, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics and the National Student Clearinghouse.

With the potential end of race-conscious admissions looming, Wang isn’t sure if a world without affirmative action is better or worse than the world we live in now. 

“Where we are now is not great, but I’m scared to see what’s going to happen in the future,” Wang, now 27, said in an interview with The Hechinger Report.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule on two affirmative action cases next month. One alleges discrimination against Asian American applicants at Harvard, and another alleges discrimination against white and Asian American applicants at the University of North Carolina at  Chapel Hill. 

Wang, who graduated from Williams College in 2017, is not named in either lawsuit. And although he became a poster child for opposition to affirmative action, Wang’s concern was always more nuanced.  Yes, he filed those complaints; yes, he met with Edward Blum, the driving force behind opposition to race-based admissions, and agreed to speak publicly about his own situation, over and over and over again. 

Every time Wang spoke out, however, he talked about remedying unfairness to Asian American students – not eliminating all racial considerations in admissions. He believes colleges have unfairly used affirmative action to hold Asian Americans to higher standards than other applicants, and that policies that help some historically marginalized students but disadvantage others aren’t fair. 

“I’m not anti-affirmative action,” he said. “I just want it reformed.”

Yet Wang’s willingness to share his disillusionment at his own college-admissions experience has helped push the already existing movement to where it is today.

Colleges began enacting affirmative action policies in the 1960s and 1970s, aiming to add racial and gender diversity to college campuses, and opponents began challenging them shortly thereafter. In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that colleges could use race as a factor in admissions, but could not use racial quota systems. Since then, there have been several high-profile lawsuits that have modified the Supreme Court’s position on affirmative action in limited ways.

Related: Beyond the Rankings: The College Welcome Guide

Proponents of affirmative action say that ending the practice will hurt historically underrepresented people in higher education and will reinforce inequities that left these communities underrepresented in the first place. They also argue that diversity on campuses improves the educational experience of all students.

“The purpose here of these cases before the Supreme Court is to suggest that something like a diverse community isn’t something that’s important and valuable, and that race should not be a part of the kind of conversation we’re having, and that’s the part that is really dangerous,” said Anurima Bhargava, who led federal civil rights enforcement in schools and higher education institutions at the Department of Justice during the Obama administration and now leads the advising and consulting firm Anthem of Us, which promotes equity in schools, workplaces and communities.

She added, “It doesn’t account for the fact that so much of the way in which our education systems are set up is privileging some to the detriment of many others.”

Affirmative action critics believe that if colleges give preference to Black and Latino students, that will raise the bar for Asian and white students, who will then be fighting for a reduced number of seats.

“You can’t preference someone into a class without preferencing someone out,” said Gail L. Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego and a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, who opposes affirmative action policies. 

That’s what Wang felt had happened when he was denied entry to Harvard, despite the resumé he had spent years working tirelessly to build.

The responses to his emails and to the discrimination complaints Wang filed with the Department of Education didn’t prompt the action he’d hoped for. He got in touch with Blum, who was then representing a white student, Abigail Fisher, who had been rejected from the University of Texas in an affirmative action case before the Supreme Court. (The court ultimately ruled against her.)

Blum, who is white, founded the nonprofit Students for Fair Admissions, the group that brought both cases now before the Supreme Court. Because Blum was looking for plaintiffs who were still in the college application process, it was too late for Wang to join either case. But he said he solved a significant problem for Blum: None of the students the lawyer was then representing was willing to speak out or be named, fearing retaliation. And so Wang became the public face of his campaign.

Back in the fall of 2013, Wang had moved to Massachusetts to start classes at Williams, a prestigious liberal arts school where about 10 percent of students were Asian, 7 percent were Black, 12 percent were Hispanic and 42 percent were white.

“How can we contribute to the leadership of tomorrow? That leadership has got to be diverse.”

Natasha Warikoo, sociology professor, Tufts University

When he found himself one of two Asian American students in a political science class, it was difficult to keep the affirmative action questions out of his head, he said, and he began to wonder what the lack of racial diversity meant for the diversity of opinion.

“Diversity is still crucially important to the learning experience, but at what cost do we achieve that diversity?” he wondered.

Being part of this movement for a decade has prompted Wang to think deeply about how college applicants are judged, he said. 

“Let’s say you have an African American student whose family is barely above the poverty line, but has tried hard to go to debate tournaments, attend school, working their butt off trying to get to the end of the day,” Wang said. “A 3.7 GPA. Pretty impressive, solid exam scores, but a really inspiring lifestyle. Compared to an Asian American student who comes in with everything off the charts, A’s in everything, 4-point-whatever GPA, super high test scores.

“How do you decide at that point? I don’t know.” 

In an interview for a documentary film produced by WCNY and Retro Report, in partnership with The Hechinger Report, Wang said, “I think affirmative action is still very necessary in helping minorities who actually need it.”

Related: Culture wars on campus start to affect students’ choices for college

And he said the pervasive “model minority” myth, which suggests that all Asian American students are high-performing and successful, works to erase the history of discrimination against Asian Americans.

Wang said he did not understand the magnitude of the situation – and the change that could be coming – until the Supreme Court shifted to a conservative majority over the past few years. 

By then, Wang was finishing up his political science degree at Williams, working as a paralegal, and then moving through law school at Santa Clara University in California. He said he was in part inspired to pursue the law because of his experience with college admissions and his belief that the ways race was being considered were unfair. (Though that was his motivation, Wang is now interested in intellectual property law.)

But as he was learning the law, the way the highest court was interpreting the law was changing.

“You can’t preference someone into a class without preferencing someone out.”

Gail L. Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego

Wang pointed to two examples: a 2018 Supreme Court ruling in favor of a Colorado baker who refused to make a cake for a same-sex couple’s wedding, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which dramatically altered abortion access in the country.

“This Court has done a lot of things that we didn’t think would ever be possible,” Wang said.  “The things I learned in my constitutional law class now don’t matter, just because the recent Supreme Court has overturned them.”

Now more than ever, he said, he has no idea what to expect.

“Affirmative action might get completely tossed and I don’t fully agree with that,” Wang said in the documentary. “Maybe there is a problem with implementation, that doesn’t mean we toss affirmative action out the door. There is a middle ground.”

Related: Why elite colleges won’t give up legacy admissions

But it’s unclear what that middle ground could be, and if there is any chance of finding it this late in the game.

Natasha Warikoo, a sociology professor at Tufts University in Massachusetts who has written several books on race in college admissions, said that lessons can be learned from the eight states that currently ban affirmative action.

Those states often struggle to recruit the same proportions of students from historically marginalized groups, Warikoo said. Instead, those students end up going to “lower status” colleges with lower graduation rates, and therefore become less likely to graduate and reap the benefits of a bachelor’s degree. She said it results in fewer Black, Latino and Asian American leaders.

“How can we contribute to the leadership of tomorrow? That leadership has got to be diverse,” Warikoo said during a recent panel discussion on affirmative action. “We’ve got to get students who are going to go back to their community, contribute to that community and address issues that they can understand.”

Bhargava believes race and ethnicity are a central part of many people’s identity that should not be erased during the college admissions process. In many cases, she said, they also profoundly affect housing location, school district, family earning potential and connections to power – factors that can hold many students back from college success. 

“All I wanted was an answer. Instead of an answer, all I got was 10 years of more questions.”

Michael Wang

“The ways in which a lot of our systems are set up, kids who are Black and brown have a bunch of things stacked against them,” she said.

Bhargava also worries that, whatever the Supreme Court decides on these cases, the blame will extend beyond Michael Wang to Asian American students all over the country.

Wang expects the same thing, which he finds disappointing, but not surprising.

If the court rules against raced-based affirmative action, he said he expects to hear, “Asian Americans probably don’t deserve this. Look at what they’ve done.” And if the court upholds affirmative action, he expects to hear, “There was nothing wrong with this to begin with. What are Asian Americans complaining about? They already get into college.”

“This issue has just become too politicized, and caused so much racial tension, I think it’s just hard not for it to end up that way,” Wang said.

Though he is wary from the decade-long journey he’s been on with this issue, he said he doesn’t regret it. He would encourage his 17-year-old self to send the emails, he said, and to take all of the same steps, if for no other reason than to help future generations of Asian American students.

“All I wanted was an answer,” Wang said of his teenage self. “Instead of an answer, all I got was 10 years of more questions.”

This story about Michael Wang was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

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The U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina this week.

The rhetoric surrounding these cases perpetuates the belief that Asian American and white students face reduced opportunities for admission to highly selective institutions primarily because of affirmative action for Black and Hispanic students.

This is a belief shared by many in the general population, both liberal and conservative, despite data showing that the main barrier for Asian American and white students’ admission to elite institutions isnot the relatively small proportion of the student population that is Black or Hispanic — or the even smaller proportion of these students who receive preferential treatment.

Instead, the main barrier is affirmative action for affluent white students, which uses up a significant number of admissions slots at many highly selective institutions. This preferential treatment constitutes a major obstacle for everyone else — including white students who are not in privileged categories.

Consider how affirmative action played out for Harvard’s class of 2023. More than 43 percent of admitted white students were in one of four categories that received preferential treatment: legacies, recruited athletes, applicants on the dean’s interest list and children of faculty and staff.

An analysis of this class shows that three-quarters of these students would not have been admitted if their applications had not received preferential treatment.

More important, that preferential treatment resulted in far fewer slots for other applicants.

Related: College admissions is already broken. What will happen if affirmative action is banned?

In addition to the four preferential track categories, applicants who attend private high schools also have an inside track that disproportionately benefits affluent white students. About one-third of Harvard’s students attended private high schools, compared with the national average of less than 10 percent.

The most elite of these private high schools, with tuitions as high as $60,000, serve as “feeder” schools to Harvard and other highly selective institutions and provide access that is unavailable to the general population.

Some of these elite schools report sending as many as 30 percent or even 40 percent of their graduating classes to Ivy League colleges. That too uses a lot of slots.

As many studies have shown, the underrepresentation of Black and Hispanic students does not reflect a lack of high-achieving students, but the barriers these students face in applying to highly selective institutions — costs, insufficient counseling and the recruitment policies of the institutions themselves, for starters.

While the Students for Fair Admissions case has prompted a unique analysis of Harvard’s admissions practices, the practices themselves are not unique and are consistent with practices at many other highly selective institutions, where a substantial number of white applicants receive preferential treatment.

At the same time, Black and Hispanic students continue to be substantially underrepresented at highly selective institutions. A 2017 New York Times analysis of elite colleges and universities, for example, found that Black students, who account for 15 percent of the college-age population, averaged only 9 percent of freshman enrollment at the eight Ivy League institutions; Hispanic students accounted for 22 percent of the student-age population, but averaged 15 percent of freshman enrollment.

In addition, Black and Hispanic enrollment rates are even lower when the list of institutions is expanded to include the top 100 elite colleges and universities. Black students comprised 6 percent of student enrollment and Hispanic students 13 percent at those schools.

As many studies have shown, the underrepresentation of Black and Hispanic students does not reflect a lack of high-achieving students, but the barriers these students face in applying to highly selective institutions — costs, insufficient counseling and the recruitment policies of the institutions themselves, for starters.

None of these facts has lessened the general assumption that affirmative action for Black and Hispanic students presents the greatest barrier for other applicants to elite institutions.

As we ignore the major sources of preferential treatment, the enrollment gap between affluent students and everyone else at selective institutions continues to grow.

The institutions have a choice. They can continue their current preferential admissions practices that mirror the growing economic disparities across the country, or they can begin to counteract the national trend by modifying admissions policies that disproportionately advantage affluent and white applicants.

Modifying these policies would only begin to address the factors that contribute to unequal access. Still, it is one of the few opportunities available to higher education leaders to increase access without waiting for broader societal advances to materialize.

Selective institutions have long argued in favor of strengthening racial and ethnic diversity and now are also beginning to focus on the underrepresentation of low-income students. Major efforts to address these inequities, however, are hamstrung in many institutions by the loss of admissions slots resulting from preferential admissions.

It is only by modifying these admissions practices that a significant number of previously unavailable slots can open to a broader student population.

Iris C. Rotberg is a research professor of Education Policy at the Graduate School of Education and Human Development, George Washington University.

This story about affirmative action cases was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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Universities around the country will be watching carefully as the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments in two college admissions cases on Oct. 31, 2022. Many legal pundits predict that affirmative action, a practice that gives preferences to groups that have been discriminated against, will be abolished when the court issues its decision next spring. That could prevent both private and public universities from considering a student’s race or ethnicity as one of many factors in admissions, along with grades, test scores and extracurricular activities. 

Colleges that still want to build a diverse student body that reflects the country’s demographics are looking for alternatives. Two states could provide valuable information. Researchers have studied what has happened at public universities in Texas and California, which have banned the use of affirmative action since 1996.

Texas moved to a Top Ten Percent policy in 1998 under which public universities accept the cream of the crop at every high school in both wealthy and poor neighborhoods. (In practice, students now need to be in the top 6 percent of their high school class for admission to the University of Texas at Austin.)  But that didn’t help increase the percentage of Black and Hispanic students all that much. Immediately after the affirmative action ban, the percentage of Black and Hispanic students at the state’s two flagship campuses, UT-Austin and Texas A&M, fell from 18 percent to 13 percent. Four years after the Top Ten Percent policy started, the percentage of Black and Hispanic students increased by only 1.6 percentage points at the flagship campuses. Researchers say that tiny increase was probably due to demographic changes in the state and not because the plan was working well.

Thousands of high-achieving students at low-income high schools weren’t taking advantage of the Top Ten Percent policy. Even though they would have been automatically admitted to UT-Austin and Texas A&M, they didn’t bother to apply. Nearly half of the state’s high schools never or rarely sent students to the flagships for 18 years after the Top Ten Percent policy went into effect. Higher income high schools that originally funneled kids to Texas’s flagships continued to be the main suppliers of students.

California had a similar experience. After voters eliminated affirmative action in a 1996 referendum, the University of California system tried outreach programs and an automatic acceptance policy for students in the top 9 percent of their high school classes. In 2001, the UC system moved to “holistic” admissions, looking at many factors beyond test scores and grades. Beginning in 2020, the system eliminated SAT and ACT tests altogether. But UC says its efforts haven’t been enough to keep up with changing demographics in the state. The state’s high school seniors in 2021 were 54 percent Latino and 5.4 percent Black. But that fall, the University of California’s incoming freshmen were 26 percent Latino, and 4.4 percent Black. It was worse at the most selective campuses. (Enrollment data for 2022 isn’t yet available.)

The University of California’s decision to scrap SAT or ACT scores is unusual, but more than 1,700 universities and colleges have adopted test-optional admissions. Many hoped that it would level the playing field with applicants who can’t afford expensive SAT tutors. But research shows that it has failed to substantially raise the share of low-income students or students of color. One study published in 2021 found that the share of Black, Hispanic and Native American students increased by only 1 percentage point at about 100 colleges and universities that adopted the policy between 2005-06 and 2015-16. A separate study of a group of selective liberal arts colleges that adopted test-optional policies before 2011 didn’t find any didn’t find any improvement in diversity on those campuses.

Another research team is interviewing college admissions officers to understand why. In preliminary findings, the researchers learned that colleges were replacing standardized tests with metrics that were even more biased toward wealthier and white students, such as letters of recommendation and expensive extracurricular activities. Admissions officers admitted that it was difficult to weigh an applicant with test scores against one without, and the one with test scores often won.

Meanwhile, other researchers are finding evidence that it might not be Black and Hispanic students who are getting the biggest preferences in the admissions office, but rather privileged white students. More than 43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard between 2009 and 2014 fell into four preferential categories: athletes, legacies (the children of alumni), the children of big donors or faculty and staff children.

Alumni children are up to eight times more likely to be accepted at elite colleges, according to one estimate. Another study at an unnamed elite Northeastern college found that so many legacy students had been admitted that they outnumbered the number of Hispanic students. It will be a tough habit to break because legacy students matriculate and donate in much higher numbers, helping colleges meet enrollment and fundraising targets. In the study, a whopping 42 percent of legacy graduates were flagged as potential top donors. Only 6 percent of non-legacy graduates were flagged as potential top donors.

Based on this research evidence, there don’t seem to be easy substitutes for affirmative action that can help foster diversity. One small ray of hope comes from a financial aid study at the University of Michigan. It found that upfront guarantees of free tuition were effective in getting more disadvantaged students to apply and enroll. However, this experiment was conducted in rural areas and largely affected low-income white students. It’s unclear if it would be equally effective with students of color. 

This story about college admissions was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post PROOF POINTS: Research on increasing diversity in college admissions appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Elite colleges and universities say they want to diversify their student bodies, and yet they continue to favor white students with certain credentials and fail to keep up with the changing demographics in our country. Despite affirmative action, Black and Hispanic students were more underrepresented at top colleges in 2015 than they were in 1980, though their numbers improved at some elite schools during the pandemic. 

One reason: children of alumni. Known as legacy students, these students are up to eight  times more likely to be accepted at elite colleges, according to one estimate. In the affirmative action cases currently before the Supreme Court, rarely seen admissions data has been made public and it shows that children of Harvard alumni were accepted at a rate of 33.6 percent in the classes of 2014–19, compared with 5.9 percent for non-legacies, according to a 2021 report in the Boston Globe. As more and more high schoolers apply to top schools, their chances tumble while the acceptance rate for legacies remains constant. The unfairness of it all only seems to grow. And because so few parents of color have graduated from these colleges, legacy admissions remain overwhelmingly white. 

To find out why elite colleges love legacies, two business school professors were granted access to 16 years of admissions data at one elite Northeastern college. The upshot: it’s in this school’s clear self-interest to take them. Alumni children who received offers matriculated at much higher rates, giving the school more certainty in their future enrollment numbers. And these loyal families with multi-generational ties to the college were far more likely to donate funds, money that the school needs, in part, to offer scholarships to others.

“We see evidence that the use of legacy admissions comes at the cost of diversity in the student body,” said Ethan Poskanzer, a co-author of the study and an assistant professor at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado, Boulder.  “Colleges have different goals in the admissions process, which are to get qualified students, to get students who will be materially supportive, and to increase diversity. Those can be in competition. Legacy admissions is a case where those goals come into conflict with one another.”

Poskanzer’s study, “Through the Front Door: Why Do Organizations (Still) Prefer Legacy Applicants?” was written with Emilio Castilla at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and published in the October 2022 issue of the American Sociological Review. 

Poskanzer and Castilla promised to keep the identity of the elite college they studied a secret in order to publish their findings. But they described it as a Northeastern private college that is “representative” of the top 25 schools ranked by U.S. News & World Report.  As at other elite schools, the student body is wealthy. Half of the students hail from ZIP codes with mean household incomes over $100,000, a threshold that only 6 percent of ZIP codes in America met during the study period.

More than a third of the legacy students who applied were accepted, compared with only 14 percent of non-legacy students. That added up to almost 3,300 children of alumni accepted during the 16 years that the researchers studied. Legacy students are a major category, rivaling the total number of students of other races and ethnicities. Approximately, 3,500 Black students, 3,100 Hispanic students and 7,300 Asian students were given offers of admission during the time period studied. (There is some overlap between legacy and students of color, but nearly three-quarters of the legacies were white.)

Legacies were much more likely to attend. Of the accepted legacy students, nearly three quarters – 74 percent – agreed to come and enrolled. Fewer than half of the non-legacy students – just 47 percent – matriculated. That’s a giant 27 percentage point difference. The more predictable, better yield that legacies offer allows the college to plan each admissions cycle with more certainty and anticipate future tuition revenues, the authors explained.

Donations, of course, are the other big bonus that legacy students bring. At this college, the alumni engagement office assigned each alumni a score based on how graduates contribute after graduating. It’s unclear exactly how many dollars each point translates to, but legacies had an average “give” score of 48 points, 50 percent higher than the 32 point average of non-legacies. 

It’s not that legacy students earned higher wages after graduation. Both groups – legacy and non-legacy – had an average income of roughly $85,000 a year. 

Even more potent was the propensity to be a big donor.  A whopping 42 percent of legacy graduates were flagged as potential top donors, which could include their whole family. Only 6 percent of non-legacy graduates were flagged as potential top donors.

“Legacies make better alumni after graduation and have wealthier parents who are materially positioned to be more generous donors than non-legacy parents,” the authors wrote.

Academically, legacy applicants tended to have slightly lower high school grades. But the lower achieving legacy applicants were generally rejected. Among the admitted legacies, grades and test scores were indistinguishable from non-legacy students. Both groups had an average SAT score that surpassed 1430. Once on campus, legacy students tended to have slightly higher college grades, but their involvement in campus activities, merit awards, academic recognition and on-time graduation rates were indistinguishable from non-legacy students. In sum, legacy students, on average, were about as academically strong as non-legacy students, neither superior nor inferior.

Of course, there is a downside to legacies. As Poskanzer put it, college admissions is a “zero-sum” game and for every legacy applicant who is admitted, there is one less seat for everyone else. Graduating from these elite colleges can open doors to jobs and change lives.

Admissions officers are not intentionally opting for white students over students of color, but they have conflicting pressures. One goal is to pick a diverse class, but they are also tasked with selecting students who will come and who will support the school financially thereafter. Legacy students fill those latter two demands.

This story about legacy students was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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One college admissions officer at a large public university described how test-optional admissions had spurred more disagreements in his office. A third reader on an application was often called in to break a tie when one staffer said ‘yes’ and another said ‘no.’ Without SAT and ACT scores, he explained, the job of admitting students had become more subjective and more time-consuming. “I feel like everyone who reviews applications has their own perspective or opinion,” he said.

This sobering anecdote comes from a research project led by Kelly Slay, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University, who has been conducting in-depth interviews with admissions officers in 2022 to understand how the elimination of SAT and ACT testing requirements has been playing out inside colleges and universities. According to Slay, admissions officers often described a “chaotic” and “stressful” process where they lacked clear guidance on how to select students without test scores. Admissions officers at selective colleges were also “overwhelmed” by the volume of applicants that test-optional policies had unleashed.

“One of our key findings were the tensions that were emerging around these test optional policies,” said Slay. “There’s a struggle on how to implement them.”

Slay’s work gives us a rare, unvarnished glimpse inside college admissions offices. It’s especially significant now because a college admissions case is currently before the Supreme Court that could strike down affirmative action, a practice that gives preferences to groups that have been discriminated against. As colleges experiment with alternative solutions, these interviews help shed light on why test-optional policies haven’t been helpful for increasing diversity on college campuses. 

Earlier quantitative studies found that the test-optional movement, which has spread to over 1,700 colleges, failed to substantially raise the share of low-income students or students of color. For example, one study published in 2021 found that the share of Black, Latino and Native American students increased by only 1 percentage point at about 100 colleges and universities that adopted the policy between 2005-06 and 2015-16. A separate study of a group of selective liberal arts colleges that adopted test-optional policies before 2011 didn’t find any didn’t find any diversity improvements on those campuses.

Before the pandemic, the move to test-optional admissions was already gathering steam as concerns mounted over the fact that wealthier students could hire tutors, take the tests multiple times and post higher scores. Other critics said that the paperwork to waive testing fees was a barrier for many low-income students. Then, during the pandemic, it became nearly impossible for students to sit for exams and the vast majority of colleges eliminated testing requirements. Some have since restored them, but many haven’t.

Slay’s research is still ongoing, and she presented her preliminary findings at the 2022 annual conference of the Association For Education Finance & Policy. When I interviewed her in October 2022, she and her research team had interviewed 22 admissions officers from 16 colleges and universities. All were four-year institutions, but they ranged from public to private, large to small, and religious to nonreligious. Four of the colleges had dropped testing requirements in the years before the pandemic with the remaining 12 doing so during the pandemic. 

It’s not surprising that colleges that went test-optional during the pandemic were suddenly scrambling to decide how to review applications without standardized tests. But the researchers learned that even colleges who had years of experience with test-optional admissions were still working out the details of how to implement it.

Admissions officers worried that their colleges were replacing standardized tests with metrics that were even more biased toward wealthier and white students, such as letters of recommendation and expensive extracurricular activities. One college purchased a data service that ranked high schools and factored those high school rankings into each application. Students from underserved high schools received a lower ranking, an admissions officer explained. It wasn’t a fair process. 

Many admissions officers said that they were struggling with how to select candidates fairly and didn’t know how to weigh an application with test scores against one without. “I think the students that do have the strong test scores still do have that advantage, especially when you have a student that has strong test scores versus a student who doesn’t have test scores and everything else on the academics is more or less the same,” an admissions officer told Slay.

“It’s really hard to ignore test scores if that’s the way you were trained to review applications and think about merit,” said Slay. “If the standardized test is there in the file, it might still bias you in ways that you’re not aware of. It’s an anchoring bias.”

Admissions officers also described how they struggled to answer a frequent, but basic question: are you really test optional? Students wanted to know if they would have an advantage if they did submit a test score. Slay said admissions officers wished they had better guidance on how to answer this question. Since college entrance exam scores could also be used for certain scholarships and determining course placements once admitted, it was difficult for admissions officers to say that the test wasn’t still important.

Larger workloads were a common complaint. College admissions officers said they were spending more time on each application in an effort to be diligent. Plus, the volume of applications had increased “a lot” at selective schools, Slay said. Meanwhile, many offices lost staff during COVID. Some employees resigned amid the strong job market. Budget cuts at some schools led to layoffs and furloughs. Slay said that some admissions offices were operating with a “skeletal” staff. 

The stress and pressure of being short-staffed and confused could affect anyone’s decision making. The conditions were ripe for amplifying implicit biases – exactly the opposite of the intent of the test-optional policy.

Slay is hearing from colleges that test-optional policies have increased the diversity of the applicant pool, but it may not translate into a more diverse student body.

“One of the things we concluded is that test optional does not mean an increase in diversity – racial diversity or socio-economic diversity,” said Slay. “If we haven’t figured out how to review students who come from diverse backgrounds who come from schools where they may not have the same access to AP or IB courses, then that could mean that these students still aren’t going to be admitted.”

This story about test optional admissions was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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It’s crunch time for thousands of high school seniors seeking spots at selective U.S. colleges, an annual ritual that appears to get more competitive every year, inviting hysteria, hair pulling and enormous anxiety.

And just wait: College admissions is about to get even more complicated, with a major shake-up on the horizon that could forever change who gets in and why.

A Supreme Court dominated by conservatives could disrupt more than 40 years of legal precedent in how race and ethnicity are considered in college admissions. Oral arguments in the cases, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions and v. University of North Carolina, are set to begin October 31, with a ruling anticipated in June.

The idea that race could be tossed out when considering applicants is a prospect that angers some Harvard University students, including social activist Muskaan Arshad, who is Asian American. “My race was essential in every part of my application and who I am,” says Arshad, in a film produced by our partners WCNY and Retro Report, with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. “Without mentioning my race and how it was part of my life, I could not have painted a picture of who I was and maybe not gotten into Harvard.”

Her views reminded me of what Swathi Kella, now a senior at Harvard, told me earlier this year, shortly after learning that the Supreme Court had agreed to hear new challenges to race-conscious admissions. “If affirmative action goes away, opportunities to learn from different perspectives and world views will be limited, and that does an injustice to students,” Kella, who identifies as South Asian American, said. “It’s kind of shocking when you think about what this will mean concretely for the student body.”

The film is a straightforward history lesson and explainer, and a great way to understand this highly fraught debate over fairness and meritocracy. Affirmative action (in states that allow it — eight do not) has long boosted chances for Hispanic, Black and Native American students to attend highly competitive elite colleges, including flagship institutions like UNC-Chapel Hill, which once banned Black students. The film also provides a clear picture of the arguments and history behind the specific lawsuits the court will soon hear, and shows how they have divided Asian American and other communities.

Some context for the debate is important: While research shows many benefits of affirmative action, Americans remain conflicted over its value; a 2019 Pew survey found that most Americans (73 percent) do not believe colleges should consider race or ethnicity in admissions. Other surveys suggest that while Americans are broadly supportive of affirmative action, they oppose preferential treatment for minority students in college admissions.

Related: After varsity blues scandal, lots of talk about overhauling college admissions: Will there be action?

The film explores whether colleges should give an edge to underrepresented minority students, a question central to the national conversation about equity and diversity on college campuses kicked off in recent years by conservative activist Edward Blum. Blum orchestrated not only the Harvard case but also Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, the last affirmative action case to reach the Supreme Court.

“Kids check which race they belong to and then they are judged, either affirmatively or negatively by competitive admissions offices based upon the box that they checked,” Blum said in an interview for the film. “That is inherently unfair, that is inherently polarizing and inherently illegal and unconstitutional.”

In 2014, Blum began the suit against Harvard for allegedly discriminating against Asian American applicants like Michael Wang, a one-time high schooler from California who began raising awareness about what he saw as discrimination against Asian Americans in the college admissions process after he was rejected by Harvard the previous year.

“My race was essential in every part of my application and who I am. Without mentioning my race and how it was part of my life I could not have painted a picture of who I was and maybe not gotten into Harvard.”

Muskaan Arshad, Harvard student and social activist

A brief in the cases against Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill says the universities “award mammoth racial preferences” to African American and Hispanic applicants to the detriment of white and Asian American applicants, which amounts to “basic and blatant” violations of civil rights law.

In the film, Wang describes being shocked after he was turned down after years of “grinding away … really trying to put together the best resume.” He says he wrote to Harvard asking if his race had something to do with it.

“All I wanted to see is if me being Asian American was a disadvantage in my application,” Wang said, noting that he never got an answer. Blum insists that Wang’s race was a factor and believes Asian students are unfairly rejected because Harvard uses racial quotas that discriminate against them.

Two lower courts disagreed, however, finding that Harvard does not discriminate against Asian American applicants, engage in “racial balancing” or use race as anything other than one consideration when selecting its incoming class.

Related: Operation varsity blues proves we need affirmative action

The Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of affirmative action programs three times since 1978, but Blum is undeterred. “You cannot remedy past discrimination with new discrimination,” he says in the film. “Harvard systematically raises the bar for Asian Americans and systematically lowers it for whites, African Americans and Hispanics.”

The film is a great introduction to why this issue is so important in higher education – and so divisive. So, too, is a new book by Tufts University sociology professor Natasha Warikoo, “Is Affirmative Action Fair? The Myth of Equity in College Admissions.”

“Kids check which race they belong to and then they are judged either affirmatively or negatively by competitive admissions offices based on the box that they checked…that is inherently unfair, that is inherently polarizing and inherently illegal and unconstitutional.”

Edward Blum, Students for Fair Admissions

She poses an excellent question at the beginning of the book: “Should a college prioritize teaching the most academically accomplished students or the ones who have had limited opportunities but show the most potential to learn quickly?” Warikoo asks. “Or the ones who are furthest behind?”

Later in the book, Warikoo summarizes the power elite colleges hold, noting that they  “have a sacred quality, they symbolize the American dream” — one that too often eludes underrepresented students.

Our recent reporting at the Hechinger Report has found that many competitive colleges, particularly state public flagship institutions, have a long way to go when it comes to recruiting a racially diverse class.

 At the University of Georgia, for example, just 6 percent of freshmen were Black in 2020, compared with 36 percent of the state’s public high school graduates that year. With our partners at NBCNews.com, we also found underrepresentation of Latino students at flagship universities; at the University of Colorado at Boulder, only 14 percent of freshmen were Latino compared with 31 percent of the state’s high school graduates.

Such gaps could widen if the Supreme Court sides with Blum. That’s a prospect Angel Pérez, chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, told me earlier this year that he’s deeply worried about. 

“What will our institutions look like if we don’t take race into consideration?” he asked.

It is not hard to imagine the answer. If the Supreme Court rules out using race and ethnicity, we can expect campuses that may already be largely white to become even more so, and we may see a higher education system that gives Black and Latino students less of a shot – and even Wang is concerned about it.

“I think I may have set in motions things that might get out of control,” he said during an interview in the film. “I think affirmative action is still very necessary in helping minorities who actually need it.”.

This story about affirmative action was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our weekly newsletters.

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After the pandemic forced classes online, Harvard University junior Swathi Kella watched classmates from an array of backgrounds and races pop onto her screen, their names and faces far more diverse than those of her New Jersey high school.  Now, she worries that the variety she values in her education could disappear for generations to come.

“If affirmative action goes away, opportunities to learn from different perspectives and world views will be limited, and that does an injustice to students,” Kella told me during a break from her classes in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Monday, after a conservative-dominated Supreme Court agreed to hear challenges to race-conscious admissions. “It’s kind of shocking when you think about what this will mean concretely for the student body.”

For 40 years, the Supreme Court has protected affirmative action that helps colleges open doors for racial minorities. It’s a concept many say is more urgent than ever, with racial gaps in higher education widening, threatening years of progress for underrepresented students.  Such gaps could grow even larger once the nation’s highest court considers two lawsuits, one arguing that Harvard actively discriminates against Asian American applicants, the other that the University of North Carolina discriminates against Asians and whites.

If the court agrees and eliminates consideration of race, the decision could upend college admissions, leaving minorities who are vastly underrepresented at many selective schools and flagship universities even further behind, despite an ongoing racial reckoning aimed at making college campuses more inclusive. The contrast isn’t lost on Angel Pérez, chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

“There is a real fear of moving backwards on the college access agenda,” Pérez told me, adding that many admissions professionals and college presidents he’s spoken with are alarmed about what the court could decide, at a moment when they are pushing for changes based on equity. “What will our institutions look like if we don’t take race into consideration?”

Colleges, of course, are also deeply worried – as they should be, said Jerome Lucido, an expert on college admissions and the executive director of the USC Center for Enrollment Research, Policy and Practice. So are “industry leaders, the military and social service agencies who count on and believe in a diverse and educated workforce,” Lucido told me.

Related: Racial gaps in college degrees are widening just when states need them to narrow

The cases the Supreme Court has agreed to hear when its next term begins in October stem from a contention that race and ethnicity should play no part in college admissions, an argument brought by Students for Fair Admissions, a nonprofit.  Not surprisingly,  Edward Blum, the activist at the helm of the lawsuits, was elated that the suits will be heard.

“Harvard and the University of North Carolina have racially gerrymandered their freshman classes in order to achieve prescribed racial quotas,” Blum wrote in a statement Monday. “Every college applicant should be judged as a unique individual, not as some representative of a racial or ethnic group.”

Asian-American students who were denied admission to Harvard allege that the university uses racial quotas that discriminate against them, something Harvard president Lawrence Bacow denies. On Monday, Bacow proclaimed that Harvard will stand by “40 years of legal precedent granting colleges and universities the freedom and flexibility to create diverse campus communities,” adding that “our practices are consistent with Supreme Court precedent; there is no persuasive, credible evidence warranting a different outcome.”

“If affirmative action goes away, opportunities to learn from different perspectives and world views will be limited, and that does an injustice to students.”

Swathi Kella, Harvard University junior

UNC spokeswoman Beth Keith promised that the nation’s oldest public university will also defend the way students are admitted. “As the trial court held, our process is consistent with long-standing Supreme Court precedent and allows for an evaluation of each student in a deliberate and thoughtful way,” Keith’s statement said.

Many others I heard from on Monday were angry at the court’s continued involvement in a case they believe was already settled: The Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of affirmative action programs three times since 1978. Two lower courts found Harvard does not discriminate against Asian Americans, engage in racial balancing or use race as anything other than one consideration when selecting its incoming class.

“The goal of these suits — to end the consideration of race in college admissions — is extreme, ignores the history of race discrimination, and threatens diversity and inclusion on campuses,” said Sarah Hinger, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s racial justice program. “Affirmative action helps to create a diverse student body and enriches the educational experience of all students, and it must remain protected by the Supreme Court.”

“What will our institutions look like if we don’t take race into consideration?”

Angel Pérez, chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling

Niyati Shah, director of litigation for the nonprofit group Asian Americans Advancing Justice, also defended race-conscious admissions policies for giving students “the chance to tell their whole story, inclusive of their race, ethnicity and lived experiences, in addition to their academic achievements.”

There were others, though, who welcomed the news that the Supreme Court will hear the case, including Sasha Ramani, a critic of affirmative action and the associate director of strategy for MPOWER Financing, a public benefit corporation that provides loans to students around the world. Ramani said that “using race as a proxy for disadvantage has proven to be both inefficient and problematic,” and said colleges should come up with other ways to reach out to disadvantaged students.

The Supreme Court will be hearing the case at a time of deepening cynicism about admissions offices at selective colleges, after the so-called Varsity Blues scandal showcased ways they give a leg up to donors, athletes and legacies that by some estimates double or quadruple an applicant’s chances of admission. “White people were being ushered in on the basis of privilege, not necessarily fairness or merit,” Hechinger Report columnist Andre Perry observed.

Related: Student voice: Essential diversity will be pushed aside if affirmative action goes away

Harvard has consistently maintained that race is one only piece of a much larger pictureat a student body so competitive that only 1,962 students out of a record-high 57,435 applicants were admitted for the class of 2025 – the lowest admissions rate ever for what Harvard calls the most diverse class in its history. Asian Americans make up 25.3 percent of incoming students, compared with 14.2 percent who are Black and 11.7 percent who identify as Latino.

Speculation about what could happen if affirmative action disappears has been discussed, debated and opined upon for years. For her part, Kella worries about what campuses like hers will look like for coming generations if race is no longer a part of admissions decisions.

“It will really do an injustice to students,” said Kella, who is a member of the Harvard South Asian Association, a client of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in the case. “A lot of us have been very fortunate to learn from different world views.”

This story about affirmative action in college admissions was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our weekly newsletters.

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When Harvard University reopened this fall, I was eager to re-immerse myself in its ecosystem. Zoom fatigue was swiftly replaced by Zoom intrigue. It had been months since I had last seen so many of my classmates, now scattered across the world.

And I would be making new friends, too. I would soon learn from our short introductions that we had Indigenous, Black, white, Latinx and Asian American students on the same Zoom call. These distinct identities came with a number of perspectives. This diversity — in interests, experiences and backgrounds — is a testament to Harvard’s complex and multilayered admissions process.

However, a core element of the admissions process that brought us together has come under threat by a lawsuit, brought forth by Students for Fair Admissions. The suit, which casts Asian Americans as the victims of racial balancing, aims to gradually eliminate any consideration of race or ethnicity in decisions of who gets into top colleges.

Despite efforts to overturn the policy, affirmative action remains an essential element of higher education. For more than 50 years, affirmative action has opened academic doors to those who have been historically excluded. This has enriched the academic experience of all students.

After U.S. District Court Judge Allison Burroughs rejected claims that Harvard discriminated against Asian American applicants in 2019, Students for Fair Admissions took the matter to the court of appeals. Earlier this month, Harvard lawyers delivered oral arguments before a three-judge panel, asserting the importance of a diverse academic environment. Many legal experts believe the case will ultimately land before the Supreme Court, which may put an end to affirmative action at Harvard and many of its peer institutions.

If that happens, we will lose what makes the curricular environment of higher education so unique. And we’ll omit essential voices pushed to the margins throughout our history.  

I believe my race helps create a flourishing environment, one where students bring as much to the conversation as they take away.   

As a South Asian American student, I moved to the United States at the age of 5, after hopping around a series of towns in the United Kingdom.  I moved again to different places in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and spent most of my childhood in a small Garden State town. My family’s roving came with numerous difficulties, the kind that often get brushed over by the monochrome gloss of the model minority myth. 

When filling out the Common Application, I proudly shaded the small bubble next to “Asian,” knowing that my race would factor into the admissions process. I was gratified that colleges would consider my background, which has informed much of my experience and my contributions to this academic space, alongside the other components of my application. I believe my race helps create a flourishing environment, one where students bring as much to the conversation as they take away.   

Related: Varsity blues provies we need affirmative action

When asked what the best part of Harvard is, my answer, resoundingly, is the people. You will be making a mistake, a professor once told my packed 400-person lecture, if you do not spend every day learning from the people around you. He was right. Encounters with different perspectives and ideas have imbued my work with purpose as much as any class discussion.

A study by Nicholas Bowman in the Review of Educational Research found that experiences encountering diversity strengthen one’s civic attitudes and behavioral intentions. This is especially true of interpersonal experiences. We learn from one another, not from textbooks.

When students are exposed to people of various cultural and racial backgrounds, we gain an understanding of the world unparalleled by anything we could glean from within a classroom.

As I attend my Zoom classes, I am aware that the fate of my experience rests on the decisions of judges and lawyers, as opposed to students and professors. I am gratified that Harvard’s lawyers defend the diversity that makes our academic biome thrive.

Swathi Kella is a sophomore at Harvard University studying social studies. She is also a member of the Harvard South Asian Association, a client of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in this case.

This story about affirmative action was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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