How Affirmative Action Hurts Asian-Americans in College Admissions

Michael Wang stared at the letter in dismay.

It marked the sixth Ivy League university he had been rejected by, out of the seven he had applied to. In addition to his perfect ACT score and grade-point average, he was ranked third nationally in piano, sang at President Barack Obama’s inauguration, and had received accolades in many debate competitions.

When Wang realized that people with lesser qualifications than his were getting accepted by the Ivies, he suspected that something else was afoot: It wasn’t his qualifications keeping him from his dream, it was his Asian last name.

That explains why in May 2015, he, along with 64 Asian groups, filed a complaint with the federal Department of Education against Harvard University, which is now under investigation for its affirmative action policy.

Article VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits educational institutions that receive federal aid from discriminating based on race. Owing to allegations of discrimination advanced by Asian-Americans, the Justice Department has asked Harvard to produce documents that will help shed light on its admissions process.

Racial preferences in university admissions first arose in the late 1960s, when its supporters said they were needed to remedy a history of discrimination against African-Americans. In 1978, in California Board of Regents v. Bakke, the Supreme Court used twisted reasoning, rejecting racial quotas as unconstitutional, while affirming the permissibility of considering race in admissions.

Since then, the high court has edged closer and closer to banning racial preferences as distasteful and un-American, but hasn’t brought itself to completely eradicate them.

But now we are seeing how racial preferences also can hurt a minority group; namely, Asian-Americans. That’s why a number of Asian-American special-interest groups filed suit in federal court in May 2015, complaining that Harvard and other selective institutions of higher education employ veiled racial quotas in their admissions procedures.

These groups point to the fact that, on average, it is much more difficult for Asian-Americans to gain admission to elite schools than it is for their Hispanic, black, or white counterparts.

Asian-Americans must score 140 points higher on their SATs than white students, 270 points higher than Hispanic students, and 450 points higher than black students.

One study measured the considerable difference in SAT and ACT scores within highly selective universities and examined what factors allow certain low-scoring applicants to get into those colleges.

Findings revealed that it is equally likely that a black student who scored 27 on the ACT and a white student who scored 30.8 would get accepted. By contrast, they found that an Asian scoring 27 on the ACT would have as much chance of acceptance as white student who scored 23.6.

Since the ACT is measured on a 36-point scale, the difference in points is considerable. For example, a score of 27 places a student in the 86th percentile nationally, while a score of 23 bumps a student down to the 69th percentile. Especially in a competitive admissions process, such a difference can greatly affect a student’s chance of acceptance.

Among all racial groups, Asian-Americans are most “underrepresented relative to their application numbers,” according to the Asian American Coalition for Education. Although in 2008, Asians comprised more than half of “highly qualified” applicants to Harvard, only 17 percent received acceptance letters. Despite their rise in population, the percentage of Asians at Ivy League institutions has stagnated at about 18 percent.

Absent racial preferences, the Hispanic acceptance rate at elite institutions would drop to half its current rate, while black acceptance would plummet by two-thirds. By contrast, the number of Asian acceptances would rise from 17.6 percent to 24.3 percent.

 Given these statistics, Asian interest groups fear that race amounts to more than just “one factor among many” in admissions processes. The Supreme Court has explicitly prohibited the practice of considering a student’s race to be a “defining feature of his or her application.” Instead, the court found that race must remain merely one consideration in a “holistic” evaluation of the individual applicant.

The Justice Department intends to discover whether the admissions difficulties Asian-Americans face result from a policy at Harvard that is “indistinguishable from racial quotas.” To do so, Justice has asked for access to documents that reveal the details of Harvard’s admissions procedures.

Harvard has been wary of producing records that contain information about students’ test scores and demographics.

However, under the threat of being sued by the Justice Department, Harvard proposed a plan to reveal the admissions information that the department requested. The school will require the Justice Department to limit viewing of the documents to Harvard lawyers’ offices.

The Justice Department indicated that Harvard’s proposal is promising, but it is still reviewing whether the university’s proposal complies with Article VI access requirements.

If proven that Harvard and other elite schools use policies that disproportionately consider race, these institutions should not continue to receive federal funds.

We will never eliminate discrimination by enacting policies that limit the opportunities of one race in favor of another.

As Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts once put it, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

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The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone

I have been in school for more than 40 years. First preschool, kindergarten, elementary school, junior high, and high school. Then a bachelor’s degree at UC Berkeley, followed by a doctoral program at Princeton. The next step was what you could call my first “real” job—as an economics professor at George Mason University.

Thanks to tenure, I have a dream job for life. Personally, I have no reason to lash out at our system of higher education. Yet a lifetime of experience, plus a quarter century of reading and reflection, has convinced me that it is a big waste of time and money. When politicians vow to send more Americans to college, I can’t help gasping, “Why? You want us to waste even more?”

How, you may ask, can anyone call higher education wasteful in an age when its financial payoff is greater than ever? The earnings premium for college graduates has rocketed to 73 percent—that is, those with a bachelor’s degree earn, on average, 73 percent more than those who have only a high-school diploma, up from about 50 percent in the late 1970s. The key issue, however, isn’t whether college pays, but why. The simple, popular answer is that schools teach students useful job skills. But this dodges puzzling questions.

First and foremost: From kindergarten on, students spend thousands of hours studying subjects irrelevant to the modern labor market. Why do English classes focus on literature and poetry instead of business and technical writing? Why do advanced-math classes bother with proofs almost no student can follow? When will the typical student use history? Trigonometry? Art? Music? Physics? Latin? The class clown who snarks “What does this have to do with real life?” is onto something.

The disconnect between college curricula and the job market has a banal explanation: Educators teach what they know—and most have as little firsthand knowledge of the modern workplace as I do. Yet this merely complicates the puzzle. If schools aim to boost students’ future income by teaching job skills, why do they entrust students’ education to people so detached from the real world? Because, despite the chasm between what students learn and what workers do, academic success is a strong signal of worker productivity.

Suppose your law firm wants a summer associate. A law student with a doctorate in philosophy from Stanford applies. What do you infer? The applicant is probably brilliant, diligent, and willing to tolerate serious boredom. If you’re looking for that kind of worker—and what employer isn’t?—you’ll make an offer, knowing full well that nothing the philosopher learned at Stanford will be relevant to this job.

The labor market doesn’t pay you for the useless subjects you master; it pays you for the preexisting traits you signal by mastering them. This is not a fringe idea. Michael Spence, Kenneth Arrow, and Joseph Stiglitz—all Nobel laureates in economics—made seminal contributions to the theory of educational signaling. Every college student who does the least work required to get good grades silently endorses the theory. But signaling plays almost no role in public discourse or policy making. As a society, we continue to push ever larger numbers of students into ever higher levels of education. The main effect is not better jobs or greater skill levels, but a credentialist arms race.

Lest I be misinterpreted, I emphatically affirm that education confers some marketable skills, namely literacy and numeracy. Nonetheless, I believe that signaling accounts for at least half of college’s financial reward, and probably more.

Most of the salary payoff for college comes from crossing the graduation finish line. Suppose you drop out after a year. You’ll receive a salary bump compared with someone who’s attended no college, but it won’t be anywhere near 25 percent of the salary premium you’d get for a four-year degree. Similarly, the premium for sophomore year is nowhere near 50 percent of the return on a bachelor’s degree, and the premium for junior year is nowhere near 75 percent of that return. Indeed, in the average study, senior year of college brings more than twice the pay increase of freshman, sophomore, and junior years combined. Unless colleges delay job training until the very end, signaling is practically the only explanation. This in turn implies a mountain of wasted resources—time and money that would be better spent preparing students for the jobs they’re likely to do.

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College Presidents Making $1 Million Rise With Tuition and Student Debt

A seven-figure salary to run a nonprofit college? You know what they say: Pro Humanitate.

That's the motto of Wake Forest University, where President Nathan Hatch came in first in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s new ranking of compensation for heads of U.S. colleges. In 2015, the latest year for which data are available, he earned $4 million.

Hatch is one of 58 college presidents with total compensation of more than $1 million, up from 39 in 2014 and 32 in 2013, according to the Chronicle’s calculations. Average total compensation for school heads serving the full year was $569,932, up 9 percent from 2014's average. The data were drawn from federal tax filings for 500 private, nonprofit schools. 

"It certainly raises eyebrows," said Dan Bauman, a data reporter for the Chronicle. "It's unusually high."

To recruit and retain senior executives, schools often include deferred-compensation packages, a trend noticeable among most of the top earners in 2015. The chart-busting payday for Hatch, who has headed up Wake Forest since 2005, was partly from compensation of more than $3 million that came due in 2015, said Katie Neal, a spokeswoman for the university.

"President Hatch's compensation over the course of his tenure reflects his exceptional leadership," trustee chair Donna Boswell said. The school has raised nearly $800 million under Hatch, she said.

Total compensation includes base pay, bonus pay, nontaxable benefits (for example, health benefits, life insurance and dependent care) and other pay (such as severance payments, spending accounts and club dues). Such perks as housing and travel may also be included. Hatch had base pay of $839,944 and a bonus of $92,000.

In fact, all five of the highest-paid university presidents in the report on 2015 reaped deferred pay and bonuses that dwarfed their base salaries. James Wagner, then head of Emory University, took home the second-highest amount, fueled by a 10-year deferred-compensation award, according to spokeswoman Nancy Seideman. Of Wagner's $3.51 million take-home pay, $991,460 was his base salary, according to the Chronicle.

High pay and hefty endowments in academia have long drawn skepticism, or scorn, apparent most recently in the depths of the Republican-drafted tax legislation making its way through Congress. If it is passed in its current form, schools with more than $500,000 in endowment assets per student — about 30 universities, including Emory, as of 2014 — could see their annual investment income taxed at 1.4 percent, a levy that higher-education advocates have decried as "arbitrary," saying it "makes no sense." Currently, both public and private nonprofit colleges are tax- exempt.

Across the country at the University of Southern California, C.L. Max Nikias collected a total of $3.18 million, of which $1.5 million came from a "one-time special bonus," said John Mork, chairman of the school's board of trustees. Since joining the school as president in 2010, Nikias has been responsible for a record-high level of freshman applications, the largest campus expansion in university history and "exceptional success" in the school's fundraising efforts, Mork said.

"For these reasons and many others, the executive committee of the board believes that President Nikias is doing an excellent job and was appropriately compensated," he said.

A modern university president’s responsibilities are greater than people may realize, the Chronicle’s Bauman said. School heads are often expected to lead the university as well as its medical enterprises, fundraising efforts, alumni relations and many other endeavors, all under the public eye, he said.

"It's not the interpretation that we get from pop culture, the guy sitting behind a big wooden desk reading Plato," Bauman said.

As college presidents' compensation has risen, so have tuition and student loan debt. In 2004, about $364 billion in student loans was outstanding. That figure has more than tripled to $1.3 trillion, according to the most recent New York Fed data.

"You have a lot of people arguing that the pay for presidents is out of line for someone in a nonprofit education role," Bauman said.

Argue away, say boards of trustees, usually the body responsible for determining a president's compensation package. Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania, took home $3.09 million in 2015, making her the highest-paid Ivy League head and the fourth-highest paid overall. David Cohen, chair of the school's board of trustees, said he wouldn't do anything differently.

"The trustees believe she is the best university president in the country and that her salary should rightly reflect the stellar leadership she has brought to Penn," he said.

To compile its list of private, nonprofit schools, the Chronicle looked for those that have the biggest endowments, are listed as participating in the Title IV federal student aid program and are classified as baccalaureate, master’s or doctoral institutions.

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