“People around me always saw me as a typical Harvard man,” Calvin Yang said. “It was like my dream.”
His application was stellar: a GPA over 4.0, a 1550 on the SAT and two varsity sports.
Yang had also founded a policy startup in Canada that helped pass landmark legislation aimed at tackling climate change, landing him a spot on Canada’s 30 under 30 list. He even co-organized what was called the largest climate protest in American history, attracting over 300,000 people.
The 21-year-old did everything in his power to become the “Harvard man” he had always dreamed of being.
So when he opened a rejection letter from the school, he was “shocked.”
“I remember just sitting in my room reading that letter over and over again and making sure that I hadn’t mistaken anything,” he told The Post.
Yang said that it didn’t occur to him that race might be a factor until he started comparing results with peer and realized his Asian classmates at the Dwight School in the Upper West Side were having similar upsets.
That’s when Yang, a second-generation Chinese Canadian, started researching how affirmative action policies affect Asian-American college applicants. He came across a group called Students for Fair Admissions.
The non-profit organization represents 20,000 students, and parents, who say they have been rejected from universities as a result of affirmative action policies designed to promote some minorities’ admissions prospects at the expense of others.
They filed complaints against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, alleging that the schools’ race-conscious admissions practices systemically disadvantage Asian applicants.
The cases have risen to the Supreme Court, where a decision is expected sometime this month. The outcome could determine the future of affirmative action in college admissions.
Today, Yang is a rising junior at the University of California, Berkeley. And, while he loves his school, he’s become an outspoken advocate for fair admissions.
“People have said, ‘Oh this kid is complaining about not going to Harvard when he’s going to Berkeley.’ But this is far beyond me personally,” he told The Post. “I’m perfectly happy at Berkeley, but right now I’m fighting on behalf of the Asian community at large.”
Students for Fair Admissions’s case against Harvard alleges systemic discrimination against Asian American students, who they say consistently score lower on the school’s subjective admissions standards, such as controversial personality ratings that allegedly measure traits like “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected.” (The school has denied the accusations.)
The result, the group claims, is that Asian students need to significantly outperform students of other races in order to earn a spot at highly selective colleges and universities.
According to a survey by the National Association for College Admissions Counseling, one in four schools admit race has a “considerable” or “moderate” influence on admission.
In fact, Harvard even has different SAT score thresholds for prospective applicants. Asian students must earn at least a 1350 on the SAT to receive recruitment letters, whereas black and Hispanic students need to earn an 1100.
These revelations don’t shock David Lee. The 60-year-old Queens resident and father of three learned them the hard way when his children, who are now in their early 30s, applied to college.
“I grew up during a time where we felt that affirmative action would benefit Asian Americans,” Lee told The Post. “But I had a big awakening with my kids.”
The wakeup call came when his son applied for a high-school program designed to help minority students in STEM. Lee says a representative for the program turned him away based on his race.
“This is what she said — and I quote — ‘Oh, you’re Chinese. You’re not a minority.’”
Lee, a fourth-generation Chinese American and descendant of railroad workers, said the idea that Asians aren’t minorities is insulting: “In my family history, it wasn’t easy to be in this country. You couldn’t rely on anything else but yourself.”
When his children applied to college, he said, he felt that their race was working against them — an experience that left him feeling “just powerless.”
“I knew something was wrong, but I had no voice,” Lee said. “For Asians, merit is our only pathway.”
If the Supreme Court, which currently has a conservative majority, finds in favor of the students, there are a number of possible outcomes.
The court could enforce stricter limitations on how race is weighed in admissions decisions — or they could go as far as to eliminate race-conscious practices altogether.
Four out of five Americans say colleges should not consider race or ethnicity in admissions decisions, according to Pew Research polling released this week.
Although the majority of all races polled oppose race-conscious admissions, Asian and black Americans were more likely to support race considerations (21% and 28% respectively) than white (15%) and Hispanic respondents (16%).
Daniel Idfresne, a 19-year-old first generation Haitian American and sophomore at Syracuse University, feels that race should not be a factor in college admissions.
“As a student, I take extreme pride in the work that I’ve done,” he told The Post. “[Race-conscious admissions] takes away from that narrative that you have for yourself: that I’m the hero of my story and I got into a school because I worked for it.
“If African Americans have this idea that there’s a possibility that they’re in Harvard because of affirmative action and not because they know their ABCs and 123s, that could hurt their self-image and their belief about being able to leave their mark on the world,” Idfresne added.
According to its website, Students for Fair Admissions is unified by a belief “that racial classifications and preferences in college admissions are unfair, unnecessary, and unconstitutional.”
The group was founded by legal strategist Edward Blum. The Harvard and UNC cases are Blum’s 7th and 8th to make it to the Supreme Court in his long crusade against affirmative action policies.
The 71-year-old has previously strategized similar cases like that of Abigail Fisher, a white applicant to the University of Texas who alleged race-conscious practices were to blame for her rejection. In 2016, the Supreme Court ruled against her in a narrow 4-3 ruling.
Blum told The Post he’s “hopeful but cautious in his optimism” that the court will find in his group’s favor this time around. “The compelling thing about the Harvard case is that… [the school] raises the bar for Asian applicants,” he said.
Blum, who came of age in a liberal Jewish household in the 1960s, said he’s motivated to “restore the great colorblind principles of our civil rights movement.”
Plenty of Asian-American students agree — including Amy, 24, who asked to withhold her last name for privacy reasons.
She was the valedictorian of nearly 400 students at her Colorado high school, with a 4.82 GPA and near perfect 35 on the ACT. And, like Yang, her list of extracurriculars — from state math awards to varsity sports team captainship — are virtually endless.
So Amy set her eye on Stanford University when she applied to colleges in 2017.
“I know Stanford is a long shot for everyone,” she said. “But I was pretty disappointed when I got rejected.”
Ultimately Amy, who now works as a consultant in Southern California, ended up attending the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech.
Although she’ll never know how much race played a factor in her admissions, the possibility that being Asian may have been “a hinderance” in her prospects still looms in her mind.
“People want affirmative action to be this thing that’s correcting for historical wrongs. But they don’t really consider the actual implication on another group,” Amy said. “It’s like fighting fire with more fire.”
As a first-generation Chinese American, Amy added that she and her family don’t feel race-conscious admissions are consistent with American values: “We all thought of America as a land of equal opportunity.”
Yang agrees that a victory in the Supreme Court would mean a victory for the Asian community as a whole.
“Asian Americans are never too pushy in standing up for what we believe in and our rights,” he said. “I think this will be a major win for Asian Americans across this country — and a major win for Asian Americans becoming more engaged in the political process of this country.”
