What did we learn at the Supreme Court?

This post is not about affirmative action.

First, two preliminary points:

1.    This post is not about my views of affirmative action. We’re focusing on what else we can learn about admission, so we can give your kid the best shot. I know this is a sensitive subject.

2.    I have a new subscriber with an email address from a very highly ranked university. Hi there! If you showed this post to your admissions office, asked for their views, and then emailed me what you learned, I wouldn’t complain.

Before I started this business, I read all the expert reports, depositions, exhibits, and trial testimony that I could get my hands on. Lawsuits against Harvard and UNC forced them to pry open their admission files and practices. That material, along with books and academic articles, formed the views I now share with clients in Zoom seminars and which I translate for a kid’s particular circumstances in one-on-one consultations.

Now those lawsuits are at the Supreme Court. It’s important to check and update hypotheses as new information becomes available, so let’s see what the Supreme Court transcripts teach us. This post got quite long, so I’ve split the takeaways into two posts. Here is the first batch.

Religion can be a selling point or not, depending on scarcity.

I’m starting with this one because it was new to me.

UNC’s lawyer said “We still have some struggles particularly with Jewish and Muslim students feeling like they belong on campus.” To me, this is code for: “We need more Jewish and Muslim students.” So Jewish and Muslim families—put UNC on your list!

Harvard’s lawyer, though, said “nobody has suggested that Harvard has any need to provide a tip for religious diversity because the Harvard undergraduate population is so religiously diverse.”

If you belong to a religion with few adherents in, say, the Midwest or South, maybe put some schools there on your list. Unfortunately, Jewish students considering Tulane and Vanderbilt have missed their shot.

Colleges want rich kids.

This judgment is not a new one. Here we’ll just examine some snippets from these Supreme Court transcripts.

The justices reminded us that Harvard’s undergraduate population is “82 percent wealthy.”

Are those the kids who just happened to get in? No. The plaintiff’s lawyer reminded us that Harvard rejected an income-based affirmative action scheme that the plaintiffs suggested, which would increase minority enrollment and make the incoming class just half rich kids. Of course, such a plan would decrease the share of students who could pay full tuition, which would run counter to Harvard’s goal of making money.

What about UNC, which gets money directly from a state government?

We learned that “the average median income in North Carolina is about $53,000 a year, but the average UNC student comes from a family making $153,000 a year.”

But UNC is probably trying to change that, right?

Well…

“At trial there was testimony from the Director of Admissions that the percentage of first-generation college students and the students who were receiving scholarships under the Carolina Covenant, which is a socioeconomic benefit, had declined in recent years.”

To learn how we can harness colleges’ aim to earn money for your kid’s benefit, please take a look at the end of this post.

Nasty stereotypes against Asian-American applicants persist.

Justice Alito noted the “statistically significant and negative relationship between Asian-American identity and the personal rating assigned by Harvard admissions officers.” Harvard’s personal score measures “traits such as integrity, courage, kindness, and empathy.”

This is evil. I’m not Asian-American, so I’m sure I don’t understand how wounding this is. I will give a little space here to a 2011 piece by Wesley Yang, which seems to capture the thoughts of the Harvard admissions officers who think Asian-American kids are less brave and kind.

“Here is what I sometimes suspect my face signifies to other Americans: an invisible person, barely distinguishable from a mass of faces that resemble it. A conspicuous person standing apart from the crowd and yet devoid of any individuality. An icon of so much that the culture pretends to honor but that it in fact patronizes and exploits. Not just people ‘who are good at math’ and play the violin, but a mass of stifled, repressed, abused, conformist quasi-robots who simply do not matter, socially or culturally.”

How do we give Asian-American applicants the fairest chance possible in the face of this prejudice? It makes me feel uncomfortable to say this, but I discuss some answers in the recurring seminar called What Asian-American Families Need to Know.

Colleges that practice race-based affirmative action have racial quotas.

It is a little surreal to read how the colleges’ lawyers argue that there are no racial quotas in admission. Over and over again, they assured the justices that there are no numbers the colleges are aiming for. For example: “We do not have some sort of racial target or a target for other diversity metrics.”

If you will permit me a grim and somewhat overwrought analogy, it’s a little like reading the headlines of the state-owned daily in a hungry authoritarian country. “Millet harvests break records!” “Grain quotas overfulfilled in all inland provinces!” They protest too much.

Of course colleges that use race-based affirmative action use quotas, targets, metrics, whatever you want to call it. Otherwise, what numbers would they be aiming for? If colleges wanted to admit a different ethnic distribution, they would (unless constrained by state law, as some are). Sure, maybe the quotas vary a few percentage points from year to year, but the general proportions persist and reveal colleges’ preferences.

We can know this for ourselves by looking at enrollment statistics, since colleges must report their millet harvest to the federal government. Please note that this chart does not show Native and Pacific Islander enrollment because the numbers are too small for those lines to show up.

Nearly all those lines don’t cross. The only exception is the red wiggle there for students who aren’t US citizens and to whom affirmative action doesn’t apply. That lockstep looks and quacks like a quota. As Justice Gorsuch put it, “this manifest steadiness speaks for itself.”

Harvard might retort that this pattern does just emerge naturally. We might ask in turn, “Then why do you need to use race-based affirmative action?”

What do these quotas mean for your child? Effectively, he or she is not competing against the entire applicant pool but rather against others of the same race. So, he or she must find ways to stand out within that smaller pool.

Would you like to talk in detail about what these takeaways mean for your son or daughter? You can book a one-on-one consultation here. I’ll also incorporate some of this new evidence in my Zoom seminars. I look forward to working with your family!