Ahead of Supreme Court affirmative action case ruling: Do Harvard, UNC discriminate?

The Supreme Court’s forthcoming rulings on cases challenging the affirmative action programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina could have significant implications for the hundreds of colleges across the country that consider race in admissions and scholarship decisions. Many are already strategizing how to retain or improve their diversity with limited information on students’ backgrounds.

The plaintiffs accuse the Ivy League institution’s admissions officers of discriminating against Asian American students in a subjective component of the application review process, deducting points over stereotyped assumptions about the applicants’ personalities. (The UNC lawsuit, also filed by the group Students for Fair Admissions, makes similar, though broader, claims.)

A data analysis shared exclusively with USA TODAY challenges the notion that Asian Americans as a racial group have been systematically penalized by affirmative action.

Growth in Asian American populations at Harvard, UNC

The analysis, by the college-search website College Rover, shows increasing Asian American student numbers at Harvard and UNC:

In fall 2021, the most recent year for which comparable data is available, Asian Americans made up 18.3% of Harvard’s undergraduates, compared with 14.1% in 2010. At UNC, they went from a share of 5.8% in 2010 to 12.6% in 2021.

Asian Americans are far better represented at Harvard than elsewhere. For example, they made up just 6.7% of all U.S. four-year college students, according to College Rover’s analysis, and 6.1% of the U.S. population in 2021. In other words, Asian Americans were roughly three times as prevalent in Harvard’s undergraduate body.

Biases may make their way into individual admissions decisions. “Just because the numbers are growing doesn’t mean there’s no discrimination,” said Natasha Warikoo, a sociologist and affirmative action scholar at Tufts University whose most recent book examines the education dynamics in suburbs with growing Asian populations.

But elite college admissions “is a strange place to address racial discrimination towards Asian Americans,” she said. Higher education “is not the first place I would be worried about” when it comes to anti-Asian bias.

Discrimination is far more evident in the workplace and in public spaces, where Americans of Asian descent have increasingly been the targets of hate and violence.

Harvard’s share of Asian American undergraduates is similar to that at other Ivy League institutions, where they accounted for 20.5% of undergraduates, according to the College Rover analysis. At the University of Pennsylvania, Asian Americans made up about a quarter of the undergraduate population in 2021; at Dartmouth College, it was 14.1%.

Breaking down a myth:Affirmative action critics paint Asian Americans as the ‘model minority.’ Why that’s false.

Diversity and enrollment trends at Harvard, UNC

The trends are different for other groups of color. Despite growing shares of students of color at highly selective institutions, most groups have yet to match the demographics at other American colleges and universities, and of the country as a whole.

Here what the rest of Harvard’s undergraduate student body looked like in 2021, compared with the group’s share of the country’s overall population and of the nation’s public or private nonprofit four-year colleges:

8.1% of Harvard’s undergraduates are Black or African American, compared with 13.6% of the country’s overall population and 11.1% at all four-year public or nonprofit colleges;
Hispanic: 11.2% at Harvard vs. 18.9% (nation) and 17.9% (all four-year colleges);
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander: 0.1% at Harvard vs. 0.3% (nation) and 0.2% (all four-year colleges);
White: 34.3% at Harvard vs. 59.3% (nation) and 51% (all four-year colleges);
Two or more races: 6.6% at Harvard vs. 2.9% (nation) and 4% (all four-year colleges);
American Indian/Alaska Native: 0.2% at Harvard vs. 1.3% (nation) and 0.6% (all four-year colleges);
Race/ethnicity unknown: 7.7% at Harvard vs. 4.4% (all four-year colleges); and
International: 13.5% at Harvard vs. 4.2% (all four-year colleges).

These discrepancies, according to Warikoo, underscore the ongoing need for not only diversity-minded admissions but also policies that enable the consideration of race.

Falling short of their mission:Many flagship universities don’t reflect their state’s Black or Latino high school grads

What do student demographics look like in states where affirmative action is banned?

To contextualize the trends at UNC, College Rover also analyzed statistics out of other highly selective public institutions.

They include the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, Los Angeles; and the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor. These colleges are in two of the eight states that currently ban affirmative action at public universities.

While the percentages of Asian American undergraduates at UC Berkeley and UCLA are relatively high – more than a third (34.9%) at the former and 29% at the latter – they’re extremely low for certain other groups of color and in some cases have declined. Just 3% or fewer undergraduates at the schools, for example, are African American/Black. Almost none are Native American.

At the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, more than half of undergraduate students are white. Fewer than 12% are Black or Hispanic.

A study published in 2020 shows “persistent declines” in the share of underrepresented minorities at flagship public universities in states where affirmative action has been banned.

What about international students?

Bill Townsend, who founded College Rover two years ago as a father frustrated with the piecemeal information on colleges available online, said increases in international student numbers deserve more attention in the affirmative action debates.

At the three aforementioned state schools, the share of international students has grown significantly in the past decade or so. It more than doubled at UCLA and UC Berkeley, for example.

Warikoo said the data collection on these students, who often pay full tuition, is inconsistent. Sometimes, the numbers are conflated with those for domestic undergraduate students and can make it seem like a school has more Americans of color than it does in reality.