As a Pending Trial Will Make Clear, Asian-American Students Are the Victims of a System of Racial Balancing Practiced by Harvard and Other Elite Colleges.
18th October 2018
The publicly available material is often stunning in its cynicism, and makes clear that Harvard admission officers employ stereotypes of Asian-Americans as conformist, obedient, and indistinguishable—or, as one applicant was described, as “busy and bright,” but “need[ing] to fight it out with many similar to [him or her].” The memo also describes Harvard’s initial identification of prospective students through the “lop list,” a measure by which the university “fine-tunes” the racial composition of its class once early acceptances start pouring in. One striking piece of evidence is the annual meeting of admissions officers of 17 elite and Ivy League colleges, at which they sit in a room and, one-by-one, read the percentage of admitted students from each of seven racial categories and then discuss (without taking notes). Harvard officials describe this process as “educational”; to the eye untrained in the finer points of holistic review, it looks an awful lot like collusion.