{"id":2456,"date":"2018-11-17T21:22:16","date_gmt":"2018-11-17T21:22:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/live-journal-of-law-and-public-policy.pantheonsite.io\/?p=2456"},"modified":"2018-11-17T21:22:16","modified_gmt":"2018-11-17T21:22:16","slug":"on-the-basis-of-personality-how-harvards-admissions-policy-hurts-asian-americans-and-the-future-of-affirmative-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/2018\/11\/17\/on-the-basis-of-personality-how-harvards-admissions-policy-hurts-asian-americans-and-the-future-of-affirmative-action\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Basis of Personality: How Harvard’s Admissions Policy Hurts Asian Americans and the Future of Affirmative Action"},"content":{"rendered":"The future of affirmative action for higher education institutions across the United States may hinge on the impending decision of Judge Allison D. Burroughs in the District of Massachusetts on a lawsuit filed against Harvard University by Students for Fair Admission (\u201cSFFA\u201d). After a lengthy trial that included arguments regarding standing, racial balancing and the good-faith consideration of race-neutral alternatives, the closing statement of SFFA focused on one critical assertion<\/a><\/em>\u2014that Harvard intentionally discriminated against Asian American applicants by disproportionately assigning them lower personality rating scores than applicants of other racial groups.\n\nSFFA alleges that Harvard\u2019s admissions policy violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in part by consistently assigning Asian American applicants low personality ratings despite the applicants\u2019 higher standardized test scores, better grades, and stronger extracurricular resumes<\/a> <\/em>than applicants of any other racial group. In their evaluation of each applicant, Harvard\u2019s admissions office gives each student a personality score, academic score, extracurricular score, athletic score, and overall score. For the personality rating, each applicant is scored from 1 to 4<\/a><\/em>, with 1 indicating an applicant with \u201ctruly outstanding qualities of character\u201d and 4 indicating an applicant with \u201cquestionable or worrisome qualities of character.\u201d Based on his statistical analysis of over 160,000 Harvard applications, SFFA\u2019s expert Dr. Peter Arcidiacono of Duke University concluded that the school\u2019s admissions officers consistently assigned Asian American applicants lower personality scores than white, African American and Hispanic applicants. Harvard\u2019s admissions officers, who evaluate an applicant merely by reading a file of documents, assign lower personality rating scores than the scores given by the school\u2019s alumni interviewers, who meet and question the students in person. In fact, alumni interviewers tend to give Asian American applicants personality scores comparable to those of white applicants and higher than the personality scores of African American and Hispanic applicants.<\/a> <\/em>It is clear that the evaluations based on personal interactions with the applicants reflect higher personality rating scores than the evaluations based on the impersonal reading of application materials.\n\nHarvard\u2019s explanation, evident in Dean of Admissions William Fitzsimmons\u2019 statements during the trial<\/a><\/em>, is that admissions officers give low personality scores to Asian American applicants in part because recommendations given by the applicants\u2019 guidance counselors and high school teachers are typically weaker than recommendations submitted on behalf of white applicants. However, SFFA\u2019s expert Dr. Arcidiacono determined<\/a> that Asian American applicants received strong overall scores from their teachers and counselors, directly contradicting Harvard\u2019s claim. Moreover, it is highly unlikely that every <\/em>single Asian American applicant has weak recommendations from teachers and guidance counselors. While neither party asserts this particular argument, it is plausible that \u201cweak\u201d recommendations for Asian American applicants by their guidance counselors and teachers are a result of the same implicit bias and stereotyping of students that Harvard\u2019s admissions officers are allegedly engaging in. Moreover, Dean Fitzsimmons\u2019 contention fails to address the unlikelihood that high-performing Asian American students are receiving weak recommendations from the very teachers who gave them those high grades.\n\nIn order to give more guidance to its admissions officers on the ways to consider race in their evaluation of applicants, Harvard added new instructions to the Reading Procedures<\/a> <\/em>released by the school in early October of this year. Specifically, the procedures instruct admissions officers to consider \u201ccharacteristics not always synonymous with extroversion\u201d and that \u201cparticularly reflective\u201d or \u201cinsightful\u201d applicants should earn higher personal ratings. Although the admissions office releases a new set of reading procedures each year, the particular addition of this instruction on eliminating race from the personality rating score may be in response to the ongoing litigation. Prior to this year\u2019s reading procedures, no guidelines contained explicit instructions on using race, and previous versions of the reading procedures offered significantly shorter explanations as to Harvard\u2019s methodology for determining personality scores.\n\nDespite Harvard\u2019s new policy of removing race as a factor in the personality score, the school continues to encourage admissions officers to consider race or ethnicity as a factor in the evaluation of a student\u2019s overall application. The school\u2019s policy reads<\/a> that \u201cthe consideration of race should be in connection with the applicant\u2019s discussion of the effect an applicant\u2019s race or ethnicity has had on the applicant, not simply the fact alone that an applicant has identified as a member of a particular race or ethnicity.\u201d This instruction to Harvard\u2019s admissions officers aligns with the Supreme Court\u2019s accepted views on student body diversity. In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke<\/a><\/em>, the Court recognized that the attainment of a diverse student body is a constitutionally permissible goal for an institution of higher education. If Harvard\u2019s admissions officers only take race into account for the overall score rating, then the university\u2019s affirmative action policy also meets the Supreme Court\u2019s holding in Grutter v. Bollinger<\/a><\/em>. In that 2003 case, the Court stated that racial preference must be limited as a \u201cplus factor,\u201d which ensures that each student is evaluated as an individual, without race or ethnicity as the defining feature of the student\u2019s application. By now encouraging admissions officers to consider race only for the overall score, instead of specifically in the personality score, Harvard has effectively recalibrated its affirmative action policy.\n\nIn her majority opinion in Grutter<\/em>, Justice O\u2019Connor noted the Court\u2019s expectation that \u201c25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.\u201d In one respect, student body diversity in higher education institutions serves the compelling government interest of remedying past discrimination against African American and Hispanic people. Lost in that discussion, however, is the past discrimination against Asian people in the U.S., albeit a level of systemic discrimination less severe than that historically experienced by African Americans. In another respect, affirmative action policies based on race also ensure that public institutions, including higher education institutions, are open and available to people of all races and ethnicities in American society. However, SFFA has likely provided enough evidence to show that Harvard\u2019s affirmative action policy deprives Asian American applicants from admission into the school due to the biased rating of their personality scores.\n\nWhile Justice O\u2019Connor expressed an optimism that the vestiges of historical racial discrimination would fade by 2028, the current dialogue surrounding race and education indicates that this may have been premature. On numerous occasions, the Trump administration has already voiced their opposition against using race as a factor to diversify schools. In July of this year, the Department of Education and Department of Justice rescinded seven Obama-era policy guidelines<\/a> <\/em>that encourage the use of affirmative action to increase racial diversity in colleges, high schools, and elementary schools. In addition, the Department of Justice filed an amicus brief<\/a><\/em> in support of SFFA\u2019s motion for summary judgment in the recent trial, demonstrating the current administration\u2019s position on Harvard\u2019s particular admissions policy and race-based affirmative action policies in general. Given these indicators, the current executive branch does not share Justice O\u2019Connor\u2019s vision.\n\nIn Grutter<\/em>, the Court recognized that race-conscious affirmative action policies must only be used to achieve a critical mass of student body diversity. The Court, by necessity, kept vague its definition of a critical mass because the intended impact of diverse college classes on general American society is unclear. From one perspective, affirmative action is needed in order to expose students in their young adult years to peers of different races and ethnicities. If being surrounded by diverse peers allows students to learn early on to purge themselves of implicit biases and avoid stereotyping their peers based on race or ethnicity, then the need for such race-based policies in college admissions is clear. Affirmative action\u2019s goal of ensuring the advancement of minorities inherently includes the goal of removing biases against them in the professional world. This goal is especially relevant to Asian Americans, who are less likely than both African Americans and Hispanics to be promoted into management roles in the workforce.<\/a><\/em> The value of a \u201cdiverse\u201d education is diminished if affirmative action policies fail to reduce the false notion of Asian Americans inherently lacking leadership skills. More pressingly, affirmative action policies will fail Asian American graduates if they are not allowed in the classroom in the first place.\n\n \n\nSuggested citation: Ferdinand G. Suba Jr., On the Basis of Personality: How Harvard’s Admissions Policy Hurts Asian Americans and the Future of Affirmative Action<\/em>, <\/span>Cornell J.L. & Pub. Pol\u2019y, The Issue Spotter<\/span>, (Nov. 17, 2018), https:\/\/live-journal-of-law-and-public-policy.pantheonsite.io\/on-the-basis-of-personality-how-harvards-admissions-policy-hurts-asian-americans-and-the-future-of-affirmative-action\/.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If being surrounded by diverse peers allows students to learn early on to purge themselves of implicit biases and avoid stereotyping their peers based on race or ethnicity, then the need for such race-based policies in college admissions is clear. Affirmative action\u2019s goal of ensuring the advancement of minorities inherently includes the goal of removing biases against them in the professional world. This goal is especially relevant to Asian Americans, who are less likely than both African Americans and Hispanics to be promoted into management roles in the workforce. The value of a \u201cdiverse\u201d education is diminished if affirmative action policies fail to reduce the false notion of Asian Americans inherently lacking leadership skills. More pressingly, affirmative action policies will fail Asian American graduates if they are not allowed in the classroom in the first place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2457,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,15,16,17,27,28],"tags":[100,165,484,487,759,1184,1468],"class_list":["post-2456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives","category-authors","category-blog-news","category-certified-review","category-recent-stories","category-student-blogs","tag-affirmative-action","tag-asian-americans","tag-discrimination","tag-diversity","tag-harvard-university","tag-personality-scores","tag-students-for-fair-admission"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2456\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}