Asian Americans Got Played on Affirmative Action

In the lead-up to the 2023 Supreme Court¹ ruling in Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard University and SFFA v. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which ended race-conscious admissions in higher education, the founder of SFFA, Edward Blum, and his allies argued that ending affirmative action would supposedly remove a racial barrier to Asian American access to highly selective colleges and universities. Many Asian Americans mistakenly assumed that prioritizing diversity in college admissions benefited Black, Latinx and Native American students at the expense of Asian American applicants. They believed Blum and SFFA’s claims that efforts to increase campus diversity marginalized Asian Americans—a socioeconomically and ethnically diverse population. 

Now that the latest enrollment numbers for the first year after the Supreme Court’s decisions have been released, it is clearer than ever that those myths about affirmative action were untrue. Although anti-Asian racism is a problem, ending the consideration of race in admissions processes has not provided the jump in enrollments predicted by Blum and SFFA.

Over the past decade, many Asian Americans came to believe that affirmative action programs at highly selective colleges and universities disadvantaged them. This concern is especially pronounced at the highly selective institutions where affirmative action policies are often contested. At such universities, Asian Americans constitute a much larger proportion of the student body compared to their share of the overall population. At Harvard University, they represent 37 percent² of the Class of 2027—the last class admitted before the overturn of affirmative action. About 7 percent³ of the total population in the United States identifies as Asian American. Consequently, many assume that Asian Americans as a group are not in need of affirmative recruitment to enhance diversity on campus.

Read the full op-ed here⁴.