Punishing Achievement While Rewarding Mediocrity

Today’s Wall Street Journal posted an editorial about an area of discrimination we rarely hear about. It seems that our elite universities have been discriminating against Asian-American students.

The editorial reports:

The percentage of Asian-American students at Harvard and other elite universities has held suspiciously steady for two decades at about 18%, while the number of college-age Asian-Americans has increased rapidly. In May the coalition (a coaltion of sixty-four organizations) asked the civil-rights arms of the Education and Justice Departments to investigate why Asian-Americans, who make up about 5% of the population but earn an estimated 30% of National Merit semifinalist honors, aren’t accepted to Harvard in numbers that reflect these qualifications.

Sixty-four organizations filed a complaint with the Education Department. The Education Department dismissed the complaint, stating that there is pending litigation on the matter. (One suit was filed by Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard and the University of North Carolina).

The editorial further points out:

A similarly narrow ruling next year could give Harvard and other top schools license to maintain de facto quotas. Asian-Americans need to score 140 points higher on the SAT than white students to be considered equal applicants on paper, and 450 points higher than African-Americans, according to independent research cited in the complaint.

Why are we preventing our best and brightest from entering our best schools simply because of their race? I thought there were laws against discrimination based on race. This kind of activity does not help anyone. Students with the lower scores may not be equipped to handle the academic workload at these elite schools.This really must be discouraging to the students who have achieved the high scores.

The editorial concludes:

Meantime, the Asian-American coalition says it will continue to push back, potentially broadening the complaint. Quota-like admissions also seem to exist at Yale, Princeton and elsewhere, and the feds won’t have litigation as an excuse to look the other way. But if the Obama Administration finds another excuse, as it probably will, Asian-Americans will need the Supreme Court to end their exclusion.

Racial discrimination should never be acceptable regardless of who it is aimed at. I hope the Asian-American students sue the pants off the schools that are doing this and then use the money to provide scholarships to Asian-American students in their communities.