Does Harvard Discriminate Against Asians?

Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), which is arguing in a lawsuit that it does, are pointing to findings from Harvard’s own Office of Institutional Research (OIR) which calculate that based on grades alone, Asian-Americans could make up nearly half the student body at the Ivy League institution. “Using 10 years of admissions demographic data and logistic regression models, OIR created a model that estimated the probability of admission for individuals based on certain characteristics,” Delano R. Franklin and Samuel W. Zwickel reported in The Harvard Crimson. “This model included estimated demographic breakdowns of classes admitted given different weighting of various characteristics used to evaluate applicants.”

“One of the breakdowns considered the demographics of a class that would be admitted if Harvard judged only by rankings and ratings of academics success. Under this scenario, ‘the percentage of Asians would more than double to 43 percent,’ according to SFFA’s Friday filings.” The OIR findings are closely held, and, as you might guess, downplayed by the administration at Harvard.

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