The Harvard University admissions trial comes to a close on Friday. At the heart of this controversial federal lawsuit is the question of just how much a school can consider race in admissions.
The plaintiff, a group called Students for Fair Admissions, has accused Harvard of discriminating against Asian-American applicants. It argues the school considers race too much, forcing Asian-Americans to meet a higher bar to get in.
Because affirmative action is at the center of this debate, the 15 days of court proceedings attracted a large audience. The public benches in the Boston courthouse were regularly filled to capacity with students, parents, school officials and community members.
But the judge's findings in this case will likely be followed even closer. There is no set timeline for those findings; however, court watchers believe U.S. District Court Judge Allison Burroughs may release her opinion in early 2019. Both sides say they plan to appeal, which means the fate of affirmative action policies could once again end up in the hands of the Supreme Court.
For supporters of affirmative action, diversity on college campuses is on the line. Leaders in the higher education world say taking away race-conscious admissions would result in homogeneous classes. But others, like the plaintiff, say that is an overreaction. They argue that considering someone's race opens the door to racial bias.
What each side has argued
Like many discrimination lawsuits, this case was largely made with statistics. Early in the trial, the plaintiff's attorneys pointed to recruitment numbers and a Harvard program that sends recruitment letters to high school students based on standardized test scores. According to school policy, Asian-American males living in rural states need to score a 1370 on the PSAT to get a letter. White males, however, only need a 1310.
"That's race discrimination plain and simple," argued attorney John Hughes.
Harvard Dean of Admissions William Fitzsimmons pushed back, saying that the college uses that tactic to attract people in rural areas who historically may not have considered the school and that those standards are not used once students enter the applicant pool.
The plaintiff also argued that Harvard officials should be considering race-blind admissions tactics. According to the plaintiff, it's possible to still get a diverse class without considering race, especially if Harvard increased its "tip" for applicants of low socioeconomic status. Harvard officials say doing that would lead to an unacceptable drop in the academic quality of an incoming class.
But it was Harvard's application rating system that took center stage in the trial. The plaintiff's analysis shows Asian-Americans routinely perform better in academic and extracurricular ratings in this system, but they consistently fall behind other ethnic groups in what is known as a "personal score."
When plaintiff's experts limited their analysis to only include top academic performers, the differences in personal ratings became wider.
"The magnitude of racial preferences is quite large," said Peter Arcidiacono, the Duke University economist who conducted the plaintiff's analysis.
Harvard denies the allegations, and the school's attorneys presented their own set of statistics.
According to David Card — a University of California, Berkeley economist and an expert witness for Harvard — it's misleading to focus so heavily on academic performance. In his analysis, he explains that the school receives several thousand applications with perfect GPAs and standardized test scores. But Harvard only has room for about 2,000 students in its freshman class each year, and school officials argue it takes high scores in multiple fields to get in.
Contrary to the plaintiff's findings, Card's analysis shows that being Asian-American did not impact an applicant's likelihood of getting accepted in a statistically significant way.
So why are these two analyses so different? That was another hotly debated topic. While both Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions were given the same set of application data to prepare for trial, SFFA excluded a group of students that includes recruited athletes, children of alumni and children of faculty. SFFA argued those students have higher admission rates than the general population and would have an outsized influence on the results. But Harvard said conclusions about admission biases cannot be made without looking at the entire applicant pool.