A civil rights investigation into Harvard University’s practice of giving former students’ families and contributors preference in admissions decisions has been launched by the US Department of Education.
The investigation of the elite university’s so-called ‘legacy admissions’ approach, which is utilized by many universities across the country, comes less than a month after a significant Supreme Court decision prohibited the use of race in college application choices.
This ruling, in which Harvard was also named as a target, sparked new debate over the fairness of admissions rules at America’s top colleges, as well as the extent to which those policies contribute to imbalances.
The investigation by the Education Department’s civil rights division is being conducted in response to a complaint made by three organizations representing minority students.
They contend that because Harvard has historically had a predominantly white student body, legacy admissions based on alumni discriminate against minority applicants.
In their case, the groups claim that roughly 70% of Harvard candidates with family ties or connections to donors are white.
“The boost that the predominately white applicants receive from Donor and Legacy Preferences is substantial”, the organizations wrote in their complaint, adding that the recent Supreme Court ruling emphasized the significance of rooting out preferences that unjustifiably disadvantage applicants of color.
The groups distributed a copy of the Education Department’s letter to Harvard in which it stated that a civil rights investigation had been launched.
While the White House Press Secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, declined to comment directly on the issue, she did say that President Joe Biden is usually opposed to legacy admissions.
Jean-Pierre stated that Biden has stated that legacy admissions limit our ability to build diverse student bodies.
When asked for comment by the media, Harvard said merely that it was “in the process of reviewing aspects of our admissions policies” following the Supreme Court’s decision on the use of race in admissions, known as affirmative action.
In that case, the court sided with an activist organization called Students for Fair Admissions, which had sued the country’s oldest private and public institutions of higher learning, Harvard and the University of North Carolina (UNC), over admissions rules.
The organization argued that race-conscious admissions processes effectively discriminated against Asian Americans applying to the two colleges.
To ensure a diverse student body and representation of minorities, Harvard and UNC, like several other prestigious US schools, examined an applicant’s race or ethnicity as a criterion.
Affirmative action programs emerged during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, to address the legacy of discrimination against African Americans.
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