In different countries and for different reasons, university admissions policies are under attack. In a Boston courtroom on Monday, a judge will begin hearing a lawsuit claiming that Harvard's admission process discriminates against Asian-Americans. In the United Kingdom, lawmaker David Lammy described Oxford and Cambridge as "fiefdoms of entrenched privilege" because of the many students they admit from private schools. In Japan, Tokyo Medical University has apologized for manipulating female applicants' entrance exam scores in order to cap the proportion of women admitted at 30 percent.
Let's look at each of these controversies in turn. It has long been apparent that the proportion of Asian-Americans admitted to America's top private universities is significantly lower than that admitted by top public universities, where consideration of race is prohibited. In 2013, for example, Asian-American enrollment was 14 to 18 percent at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Cornell and Columbia. At the two leading campuses of the University of California, Los Angeles and Berkeley, the range was 32 to 35 percent. Nor can the discrepancy be fully explained by California's demographics, because at Stanford, California's top private university, the Asian-American enrolment is, at 23 percent, still much lower than at California's leading state institutions. (By contrast, of those enrolled at the private California Institute of Technology, 43 percent were Asian-American.)
Although Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Cornell and Columbia are private universities, each receives millions of dollars in public funds, which brings with it requirements that prohibit "unlawful" racial discrimination. Students for Fair Admissions, the organization suing Harvard, has submitted to the court a document showing that a review from Harvard's own Office of Institutional Research found that in 2013 Asian-Americans were less likely to be admitted than whites who performed comparably well on all measures except a subjective "personal" rating. If admission had been based solely on academic performance, Harvard's intake would have been 43 percent Asian-American. Instead, it was 19 percent.