- [Narrator] There's a fight heating up in the
education world over the use of race and college admissions.
- You can not remedy past discrimination
with new discrimination and that's what colleges are doing.
- The discrimination was so extensive,
that we had to make colleges just for black people
so we could go to college.
- Well, Asians are the largest growing segment
in the American populace and yet their numbers
at your Harvard's, at your elite universities don't change.
- [Narrator] Some Asian American groups say that
race based affirmative action policies
actually hurt their chances of attending top colleges.
The groups filed a complaint with the federal government
in 2015 alleging that Harvard discriminates
against Asian American applicants.
The department of justice agreed to investigate that claim.
Does affirmative action hurt Asian Americans?
First we have to define the term.
- So affirmative action has a really long history.
I think the term was probably first coined
by President Kennedy.
- [Narrator] Rachel Kleinman is a senior counsel
at the NAACP, legal defense fund.
- And that was with respect to employment programs,
federal employment programs, but then,
really sort of expanded upon and put into place
by President Johnson and the idea was really
to put some teeth into some civil rights laws and say,
okay the idea here isn't just to say there's
equal opportunity, but to find ways to
actually level the playing field.
- [Narrator] Since affirmative action policies were enacted,
minorities and women have seen
increases in university enrollment.
The supreme court has ruled that the use of race
in college admissions is constitutional as long
as explicit quotas aren't used,
but some Asian American groups say quotas do exist.
- I think I had a 4.6 GPA, something around a 4.7,
I had a perfect ACT score.
- [Narrator] Michael Wang applied to college in 2013.
He was an outstanding student and even sang
at President Obama's inauguration, however,
he was rejected by every Ivy League school except U Penn.
He filed a complaint with the department of education
alleging that Yale, Stanford, and Princeton
discriminated against him because he was Asian American.
- I definitely felt like, really disappointed,
a little bit angry at that point as well.
You're not sure why you got in or why you didn't get in
and I think that's what made it really hopeless for me
because if I had to go through this all again,
what could I do to maybe improve my chances?
I don't have an answer to that.
- [Narrator] A 2009 Princeton study found that
in order to get into America's top universities,
Asian American student's SAT scores had to be
140 points higher than white students,
270 points higher than Hispanic students,
and 450 points higher than black students.
- That is out of 1600 points.
So that is really unduly harm,
creates so much burden on Asian American children.
- [Narrator] Yukong Zhao is the president of
the Asian American Coalition for Education,
a non-profit fighting for Asian American educational rights.
They argue that Ivy League institutions
use racial quotas to the detriment of more qualified
Asian American applicants.
- That is illegal.
Most Asian American children want to have a big dream.
In order to achieve that,
they have to study with double efforts.
- [Narrator] Since the 90's, the population of
Asian Americans in the US has more than doubled,
but their representation in top universities,
has remained about the same.
- If race is being used as a positive factor,
meaning that it helps an application, that's good.
When it harms the application, I feel like that's not fair.
- [Narrator] Can being of Asian descent actually
disadvantage your college application?
- Affirmative action is not what is causing
Asian Americans not to get in to schools.
You know, racial quotas are not allowed
and universities, as far as I know,
are not using racial quotas.
What they are using are wholistic admissions policies
which do allow for some consideration of race
as one among many factors.
- But you can't tell me that a kid who has to score
540 points higher just because of his race,
over which he has no control,
it's an immutable characteristic,
is not being discriminated against.
- Why is it that it's affirmative action
that they say is causing this when in fact,
in most of these institutions, they are majority white.
You don't go to these institutions and feel overwhelmed
by the number of black and brown students you see there,
and say oh, they must be taking Asian American spots.
It's actually, still, majority white schools.
So the fact that this argument that somehow
affirmative action is causing it,
doesn't really seem to have much of a logical basis.
- [Narrator] According to a survey by the Harvard Crimson,
Asian Americans make up 23.5 percent
of Harvard's freshmen class.
Black students only make up 11.2 percent.
White students, a whopping 58.2 percent.
Compare that to the percentage of college age
Americans of each race.
Asians and whites are overrepresented,
but black students are underrepresented.
Despite the recent lawsuits, 67% of Asian Americans
believe that affirmative action policies are needed.
- Yeah, I think that there can be no question that
we still need affirmative action among many other things.
Both to provide opportunities and pathways
to opportunities for people of all races,
but also to create diverse campuses.
Without affirmative action, we wouldn't be creating
this diverse group of graduates that we need
in order to lead this country, to create business,
to compete in a global economy.
- [Narrator] Harvard has agreed to hand over
years of confidential applicant records to the DOJ,
who will then decided whether they've been
discriminating against Asian American students.
From there, we could be looking at the next landmark
affirmative action trial.