I have been thinking about this over the past couple days from many different directions. If this is too much, here is the TLDR:
Schools no longer have a simple way to discriminate based on race. Harvard demonstrated discrimination against Asian-Americans in undergrad admissions leading to the case. They have to use other methods if they value racial diversity. It will be very school dependent but probably not big of a change for medical school, probably more for undergraduate admissions. Examples and reasoning below.
Affirmative Action (AA) in principle was designed to help boost African-Americans and then women stemming from inequalities that were present at the time because of past laws/circumstances that hindered them from pursuing higher education. I think no one disagrees with the initial reasoning behind this. Nowadays, for college admissions, gender is not as significant of a factor for most schools (except some heavy STEM universities) so it doesn't even factor into most admissions processes.
However, the main issue with college/med school admission is it is basically a zero-sum game. There are a limited numbers of spots so by accepting one person, that slot is taken and is removed from the options of other applicants. At this point, things for undergrad admisions are so competitive that grades/test scores are basically not enough to separate students from one another. Even extracurriculars are not enough to separate students. Top universities could fill their undergrad class up multiple times with equally outstanding students with no real differences with regards to test scores, grades, and other activities. Therefore, it sometimes feel like a lottery to get into these top schools even for the best students.
With AA, there was an easy way to admit URM to keep racial diversity. There was a loose "pool" of applicants in which you could select the best from and made things look diverse. However, what was also apparent was there was an easy way to discriminate against Asian as seen with documents from Harvard. Examples include "
lower personality traits" and "
personal qualities". I will quote the most impactful statements.
Alumni interviewers give Asian-Americans personal ratings comparable to those of whites. But the admissions office gives them the worst scores of any racial group, often without even meeting them, according to Professor Arcidiacono.
Basically, being Asian was a negative factor just for their origins for undergrad admission.
Here is the chart breaking it down. Basically, the personal rating was strongly influenced by race even though interviewers did not notice such a difference.
University officials did concede that its 2013 internal review found that if Harvard considered only academic achievement, the Asian-American share of the class would rise to 43 percent from the actual 19 percent. After accounting for Harvard’s preference for recruited athletes and legacy applicants, the proportion of whites went up, while the share of Asian-Americans fell to 31 percent. Accounting for extracurricular and personal ratings, the share of whites rose again, and Asian-Americans fell to 26 percent.
Here it shows that if race as a consideration was eliminated, Asians-American share would go from the estimated 19% to 26%.
The report found that Asian American applicants performed significantly better in rankings of test scores, academics, and overall scores from alumni interviews. Of 10 characteristics, white students performed significantly better in only one—rankings of personal qualities, which are assigned by the Admissions Office.
So basically, Asian-Americans had lower personal qualities despite significantly higher scores, academics, and better interviews. This was how applicants were being judged by the admission committee for Harvard undergrad.
This was the main rationale why use of race harmed Asian-americans even compared to Whites. Simply being grouped into a pool of competitive candidates who had to "fight it out among others in the pool" was a disadvantage and discrimination. I do not think you could argue against that given the evidence in this case. While AA was implemented primarily to help URM, the race aspects was also being used by schools such as Harvard to discriminate against Asians.
Therefore, race in college admissions was being used simultaneously for AA and anti-asian discrimination. Could you theoretically separate the two? Probably but using race was the easy way for them to keep diversity with a simple algorithm. Even if they want to keep diversity now, it would not be as simple as they would have to design new algorithms/scores to do this. An example is
prop 209 in California and it is a case-study after race was abolished as a factor. While an immediate drop in URM was noticed, they incorporated other measures to diminish this decrease.
The question is whether AA or use of race as a whole should be kept for the diversity reasons. That is a question of belief. While
studies have shown physicians of the same race are more likely to provide more positive health outcomes, how far should diversity factor into admission decisions compared to academic and extracurricular achievements? Should this be a factor even in undergraduate admissions? Imagine two students who were in the same school, had similar SES, participated in the same extracurriculars and had similar academics. Their chances of admissions for the two should theoretically be the same. However, should their skin color be a key deciding factor as to who get into the top schools? Because that is the current system that was in place at Harvard undergrad.
On the other hand, would society be acceptable to student bodies that are not racial diverse or representative of the larger population? Would there be more protests and less motivation from some groups to try for these top schools? Is this a net benefit or harm to society? Those are the balancing questions schools have to decide.
Schools will have to decide how much they want to preserve diversity with the change in algorithms. There are schools like
Caltech which only decide based on merit. Will more schools follow? Schools can still preserve diversity in other ways without directly using race, so to what extent will that be done?
For medical school, I tried to find statistics regarding if Asian Americans are harmed by current medical school admissions compared to white counterparts. In my opinion, it is not that significant, at least not as apparent as Harvard's undergrad admissions. Looking at the GPA and MCAT scores, the difference between white and asian is a 1.8 MCAT score difference in matriculants but there is also a 1.3 point difference in the applicants. The GPA were basically identical. Most of the top medical schools do not directly state the number of Asian Americans in their class profiles but of the ones that do, it is sometimes shockingly high.
Harvard is 47%.
Hopkins is 51% and
UPenn is 36%. I really do not think it will get much higher but I could be wrong. At least, I would argue it is not as blatant discrimination. I still think URM is a very favorable characteristics in the current medical school admission process, as illustrated by
Duke's admission profile (which also is oddly 73% female in their incoming class).
UCSF has 54% URM though their median MCAT is 90th percentile, around 513!
Overall, it depends heavily on the school but I think the majority of medical schools do not have significant biases against Asian compared to whites. There are still significant efforts to have a diverse class profile, which once again in a zero-sum game will affect others. I doubt many will advocate for purely academics/achievements for medical school admission. The other side of the spectrum is near quota like or admissions focused not on academics which is even more outrageous. Some middle ground is selected and perhaps this decision might shift it slightly to the former than the latter.
Legacy and sports admissions for undergrad are an entire separate issue. In previous cases, the school mostly considers what you can do in the future. Legacy and sports are what your parents have done or what you can do for the school right now in addition to your future potential. Basically, the school decides whether
legacy is important and may be rewarded or punished by donations/engagement or wasted slots. To get rid of them could lead to worse outcomes and more issues for the school so I doubt those will be affected or touched anytime in the near future.
Funny, they didn’t say everyone should have 472+. I am pretty sure they would have accepted many with mcat score of less than 500 and many with 520+. It doesn’t mean they are equally qualified. I am pretty sure they would have rejected many with 518+. Is it fair? Not to me.
