Professor of Sociology David Karen, whose dissertation focused on Harvard admissions, wrote a piece for Inside Higher Ed on the lawsuit against Harvard by the group Students for Fair Admissions. The suit claims that Harvard discriminates against Asian applicants and some fear the suit may endanger the use of race as a factor in college admissions.
From the article:
By claiming that Asian Americans are being evaluated differently for admission than are white applicants, opponents of affirmative action attempted to highlight that it’s not minority students who aren’t meritorious — it’s those minorities, primarily African Americans and Latinx. It’s those minority students who don’t perform well on standardized tests, implicitly held as the only legitimate benchmark of merit. In now launching a similar suit, SFFA’s goal is the same: to ensure that groups that have experiences, skills, talents and dispositions that don’t align with these traditional conceptions of merit should not be admitted to Harvard and, by extension, to other selective institutions.
Read the full article at Inside Higher Ed.