The organization that successfully challenged the practice of affirmative action in university admissions at Harvard last year is now looking into the possibility of making sure schools are following the law and, if there’s cause, suing them. The group, Students for Fair Admissions, has targeted Princeton, Yale and Duke universities. All these three have recorded a drop in Asian American enrollment this academic year compared to last year, which the group says was unexpected.
The group, Students for Fair Admissions, served notices to the three universities on Tuesday asking them to return students to compliance with the rules on affirmative action provided by the Supreme Court. Princeton, Duke and Yale also noticed some small changes in the composition of black and Hispanic students admitted to the first race neutral class since the destruction of affirmative action policies of admission.
This organization is made up of individuals, some of whom participated in a lawsuit against Harvard university on behalf of Asian students, opposing the idea of considering race when admitting students to universities which is why they further claimed that they were going to make themselves the police of the new rules being promulgated. “It is not confusing and certainly not unreasonable to state what we admit to you – that based on S.F.F.A.’s vast experience in such assessments, your racial numbers cannot be attained under true neutrality,” the letters, which were authored by Edward Blum, President of Students for Fair Admissions, said.
This was a significant warning to the universities which were making all efforts to follow the edict of the court and yet have a varied enrolment and showed that the battle for race-based affirmative action in admissions did not die with the SC’s verdict. The from-the-hip correspondence also helped universities’ admissions offices – who’ve been deathly silent on these matters – to make themselves even more opaque than they ever were.
OiYan Poon, who investigates college admissions structures and has written a book on the affirmative action controversy, claimed that Blum was overly premature with his letters. She indicated that admissions variable from year to year and one year is too scant to generalize. Among the factors that characterize the present-day figures, was the increase in the number of applicants who indicated that they will not wish to identify their races and ethnicity on the application form. That at Princeton for instance stood at an increase of 7.7% this year from only 1.8% standing last year. “We have respected the provisions put by the SC and painstakingly followed them, ” the spokesman of Princeton said. There were no statements issued by Yale and Duke.
The proportion of Asian American students dropped from 35% to 29% at Duke; from 30% to 24% at Yale; and from 26% to 23.8% at Princeton University. Black students increased their participation at Duke from 12% to 13%; remained stable at 14% at Yale; and decreased in number from 9% to 8.9% at Princeton.
In the court case, Harvard together with Yale, Princeton, and Duke conveyed challenges that the use of race as merely one of these many elements, rather than the only deciding factor, was the right approach towards ensuring that diversity in Columbia’s student body was upheld. The SC’s stance was, quite simply, that race-based positive discrimination was discriminatory on a racially-neutral basis and was therefore inconsistent with the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. As a result of the court’s ruling, schools told admissions officers not to look at the race or ethnicity boxes until after the students were accepted.
