By Kevin Mahnken, Photo: Glen Cooper/Getty Images, The 74, July 24, 2022
With the Supreme Court poised to reduce or even eliminate affirmative action in college admissions, a recent study has offered a unique window into the magnitude of racial preferences in America’s elite colleges.
The paper, part of a series of studies conducted in the wake of high-profile litigation against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, shows that Hispanic and African American applicants to both colleges enjoy substantial advantages relative to whites and Asian Americans. Their chances of acceptance are drastically higher than they would be in the absence of affirmative action, but with a somewhat counterintuitive addendum: preferential treatment is relatively weaker for minority applicants from poor and working-class backgrounds than it is for their peers from more affluent families.
Those findings, and those of the preceding papers, are built on data that was made publicly available during the discovery phase of two lawsuits — Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina — that were consolidated for oral argument before the court. Peter Arcidiacono, an economist at Duke University and the studies’ lead author, has provided expert testimony on behalf of the plaintiffs, who claim that the storied institutions have systematically discriminated against Asian applicants. In an interview with The 74, he said he hoped his work would help clarify the public debate over one of the most divisive issues in American politics.
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