The equality dilemma over admissions quotas

KIM SEUNG-JUNG
The author is a professor of archaeology at the University of Toronto.

“Admissions Granted,” a documentary directed by Miao Wang, my long-time friend from New York, opened last week. It covers the controversy over affirmative action, beginning with the constitutional petition by Asian applicants filed against Harvard University for discrimination in admissions in 2013 and ending with the Supreme Court ruling on June 29, 2023.

According to statistics from 2023, almost 30 percent of Harvard’s undergraduate students are Asian Americans, twice more than in 2010. The root of the issue lies in how the system takes race into account. Affirmative action favors certain races, including African Americans and Latino, and results in disadvantages to Asian applicants who show higher scores on objective evaluation standards. Data shows that Asian applicants have far higher SAT scores, but get lower scores in “personal rating,” resulting in about a 20 percent disadvantage compared to other races in getting admitted to Harvard. It stands in contrast to state universities in California, where affirmative action was ruled illegal since the 1990s. As a result, a whopping 43 percent of the students at UC Berkeley are Asian.

Due to the long historical burden of racism, the United States has introduced active affirmative policies across society through decades of efforts to resolve social inequality, but the Supreme Court’s decision critically hurt these efforts. In the process of the trial, Harvard’s anti-Semitic history of implementing a quota in response to the increasing admissions of Jewish students in the 1920s was mentioned.

When asked about the ruling that found affirmative action unconstitutional, many critics claim that white conservatives attained their goal by putting Asians in the front, while the Asian community has mixed opinions. There are many obstacles to overcome for humanity to achieve an equal society.