Lawyers filed a civil rights case against Harvard on Monday, alleging that the university’s longstanding admissions policies consistently disfavored applicants of race.
Boston-area activists filed the complaint with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in response to the Supreme Court’s decision to abolish race-based admissions procedures in two instances, one against Harvard and the other against the University of North Carolina.
Challenging Harvard’s Legacy Admissions
They contend that legacy admissions were resisted by affirmative action. The Greater Boston Latino Network, the Chica Project, and the African Community Economic Development of New England are the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which claims that Harvard’s special consideration of applicants whose family members attended the university or made financial contributions to it amounts to racial discrimination.
The lawsuit claims that approximately 70% of candidates who claim legacy ties are white and that such applicants have a nearly six-fold increased chance of being accepted to the school.
White applicants make up a similar proportion but have a roughly seven-fold higher admissions rate. About 28% of the 2019 class were legacy students.
Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director of LCR, stated in a news release that there shouldn’t be any method for parents to be identified throughout the college application process.
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Equity And Merit In College Applications
Why do we give children rewards for the benefits and advantages that previous generations accumulated?
The last name of your family or the amount of your bank account are not indicators of your ability and shouldn’t be taken into account when applying for admission to colleges.
The lawsuit claims that if legacy considerations did not exist, more minority students would be accepted and that close to 25% of white applicants would not be accepted, citing a number of institutions that have discontinued legacy considerations in admissions and a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
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