Is the Ivy League Fair to Asian Americans?

Conor Friedersdorf:

Are Ivy League institutions discriminating against Asian Americans by limiting how many are admitted? That's the subject of a debate published this week in the New York Times. Let's start with the folks who believe that there's effectively a race-based quota limiting Asian Americans.

Ron Unz makes the most powerful argument for that proposition. "After the Justice Department closed an investigation in the early 1990s into charges that Harvard University discriminated against Asian-American applicants, Harvard's reported enrollment of Asian-Americans began gradually declining, falling from 20.6 percent in 1993 to about 16.5 percent over most of the last decade," he writes. "This decline might seem small. But these same years brought a huge increase in America's college-age Asian population, which roughly doubled between 1992 and 2011, while non-Hispanic white numbers remained almost unchanged. Thus, according to official statistics, the percentage of Asian-Americans enrolled at Harvard fell by more than 50 percent over the last two decades, while the percentage of whites changed little. This decline in relative Asian-American enrollment was actually larger than the impact of Harvard's 1925 Jewish quota, which reduced Jewish freshmen from 27.6 percent to 15 percent."

Posted by Jim Zellmer at December 25, 2012 4:31 AM
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