Everyone is talking about Affirmative Action in higher education this week as the Supreme Court examines the issue due to a case brought by Asian students.
At the New York Times, a sociology professor named Jennifer Lee offered a somewhat stunning take.
Lee essentially argues that Asian students benefit from bias long before they get to college.
From the NY Times:
Asian American Students Face Bias, but It’s Not What You Might ThinkAffirmative action is on trial again. This time, opponents of race-conscious college admission practices are claiming that Asian Americans are hurt by it. The plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, which presented oral arguments before the Supreme Court on Monday, allege that Harvard holds Asian American applicants to higher academic standards and rates them lower than other students on personal characteristics, such as fit, courage and likability. The proposed solution is to abandon race as a factor in admissions decisions.This approach is based on a fundamental misconception. Asian Americans face bias in education, but not in the direction the plaintiffs claim. Research that I and others have done shows that K-12 teachers and schools may actually give Asian Americans a boost based on assumptions about race. Affirmative action policies currently in place in university admissions do not account for the positive bias that Asian Americans may experience before they apply to college. Abandoning race as a consideration in admissions would further obscure this bias…In “The Asian American Achievement Paradox,” which I wrote with Min Zhou and is based on 162 interviews of Asian, Hispanic, Black and white adults in Los Angeles, we found that Asian American precollege students benefit from “stereotype promise”: Teachers assume they are smart, hard-working, high-achieving and morally deserving, which can boost the grades of academically mediocre Asian American students.
Professor Jacobson recently spoke about this issue at Cornell.
Here are a few reactions from the Columbia tweet posted above.
It’s truly something to behold.
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