Ending affirmative action will not result in more Asian Americans getting into elite universities.
Since the 1980s, there have been suspicions that elite institutions have discriminated against Asian American applicants in favor of white applicants. There is currently no credible evidence that such discrimination exists. However, even if discrimination is happening, getting rid of affirmative action, which permits the consideration of race among many factors and usually benefits people of color (including Asian Americans), will not eliminate any discrimination against Asian American students in favor of their white counterparts, which is the overwhelming source of any disparities that Asian Americans face.
A new study finds that the supposed "Asian penalty" is due to white admissions advantage, not affirmative action. White admissions advantage includes legacy and wealth admissions, which disproportionately benefit white students and significantly impact the admissions process at elite schools, as well as early admission programs, which tend to benefit white, well-off applicants. In addition, there are innumerable advantages that white students accrue since birth that disproportionately give them access to more educational resources and opportunities.
Some quick statistics on legacy admissions:
- Legacy students are predominantly wealthy and white and disproportionately represented at the college level.
- About three-quarters of U.S. News & World Report’s top 100 universities give a boost in admissions to the relatives of alumni, which research finds tends to benefit white and wealthy applicants.
- In 2011, research on 30 elite schools from the higher-education expert Michael Hurwitz found that the children of alumni saw a 45 percentage-point increase in their chances of admission compared to otherwise equally qualified candidates who were not legacies.
(Here’s the real kicker: Legacy admissions actually have little to no effect on alumni giving.)
On early admissions:
- Harvard admitted 14.5% of early-action applicants and only about 3.3% of regular-decision applicants in the 2017-2018 application cycle.
- Dartmouth expects almost half of its incoming class to be made up of early-decision admits.
- Early-decision applicants make up over 50% of the freshman classes at Northwestern University and Vanderbilt University.
Wealthy white students are overrepresented at elite schools. At 38 colleges in America, including five in the Ivy Leagues, more students came from the richest one percent of the U.S. population than the entire bottom 60 percent. Even beyond legacy and early-decision admissions, wealthy white applicants can rely on hefty donations and family connections to get them in.
Therefore, if opponents of affirmative action are truly concerned about fairness to Asian Americans, they should be targeting the factors that give white students an advantage, like legacy admissions, wealth preferences, early decisions, and athletic recruitment, not a program that has opened university doors since the 1970s for many Asian Americans and that continues to benefit them today.
