Federal Judge Upholds Harvard's Race-Conscious Admissions Process
So a couple of disclaimers. I used to work at Harvard as an institutional research analyst (this was about 3ish years ago). My group worked closely with collecting and analyzing institutional data to advise senior leaders in strategic decision making and policy. Our group provided some of due diligence analysis when the lawsuit first surfaced. I personally didn&#x27;t work directly with the lawsuit, but I was around those conversations.I also did work on the preliminary demographic analysis for the Inclusion and Belonging Taskforce (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;inclusionandbelongingtaskforce.harvard.edu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;inclusionandbelongingtaskforce.harvard.edu&#x2F;</a>), which emerged around the same time as the lawsuit was gaining traction.<p>I just wanted to offer some observations from my time there.<p>1. Admissions at Harvard is actually more competitive than most folks realize. There was a running joke that Harvard was moving towards a 0% acceptance rate. With the common app, Harvard has seen an increase in applications every year but the amount of seats available is fixed (~2,000). This year it was about 43,000 applications. That number of available seats is not quite that. The Dean of College has a reserved set of seats that he use at his discretion. There&#x27;s a set of reserved seats for athletic scholarships. So the actual number smaller of available seats is smaller.<p>2. Each application is looked at least twice. The entire admissions department locks itself away for about 2 weeks and reviews all the applications. Each officier is responsible for a geographic area and each application is reviewed by 2-3 different officers and scored using an internal rubric. The rubric counts many factors (some of which is discussed in the lawsuit). After meeting a few of the admissions officiers, I have a lot of empathy and respect for them. They were all kind, considerate and very patient folks.<p>3. I can&#x27;t speak too much what goes into the admission selection (confidentiality) but there are many factors that play into it outside of just grades and scores. It&#x27;s worth noting that exceptional candidates are easier to identify (Olympic athletes, students doing groundbreaking research, students with amazing life stories), but they make up small portion of the applicants. Most of the applicants are highly qualified (high test scores, gpa, extra-curriculars) and if there wasn&#x27;t a limited number of seats, would have been admitted.<p>4. The troubling narrative that surrounds around race-conscious admissions policies is the implication that under-represented minorities would not meet admissions standards. This is simply not true. Nearly all the students considered for admissions (under represented minority or otherwise) were in in atleast the 98% if not higher. They also had high GPAs and other factors. All the students were very qualified and accomplished. I often wondered if you had a lottery system, would that be better?<p>5. The variation in SAT score at the upper end corresponds to very tiny percentile differences. The difference between say a 1400 (95%) student and 1600 (99.9826%)is small and honestly (my view) meaningless.<p>6. One of the interesting things I had to do was review the original case literature on affirmative action. A theme that folks don&#x27;t talk about is the diversity is not just race&#x2F;ethnicy that was actually considered in the case law. Geographic diversity and social location do play into Harvard assemement. And the underlying literature is fascinating. Cognitive development literature shows college-age young adults are still developing their world views and college is space where they will run into uncomfortable situations. When faced with the choice of challenging their views or retreating to saftey of thier lived experiences, diversity places a critical role. But not in the way might think. Having others who different from you (not just race, but geography, lived experiences and other factors) plays a significant role. So say you have a student that goes to a local college with the same geographic makeup and lived experiences as their highschool but is otherwise racially diverse, that student is less likely to exposed to experiences that challenge thier world views and help them develop.<p>7. Harvard and really all other elite college&#x27;s admissions policies are based on scaricity and it seems outdated. I know the common argument is that scarcity is what drives prestige but Harvard Business School literally allows outsiders to buy their into its network. HBS has like 3 day executive education programs that allow you to say you&#x27;re an HBS grad and have access to their alumni network for the small cost of 80k (yeah 80k for 3 days!).<p>Now Harvard&#x27;s campus is pretty tiny and there is limited space, so that makes sense from the on-campus perspective. But it also has the infrastructure to allow students to attend remotely through its DCE program and Harvard X courses. The stigma of continuing education aside (which is complicated and often unfair), the university should open its traditional programs up. There is precedent for this in the UK at top universities like Oxford, Cambridge, and ICL all of which offer thier main degrees to remote students (of course at price). And there&#x27;s many problems with this suggestion (who gets access to on-campus vs remote, pricing, fairness, etc) but it&#x27;s something Harvard and others like it should consider.<p>Sorry ended up being so long. Hopefully it provides some other views to consider as you think about college admissions.