Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College et al

Filing 569

Opposition re 547 MOTION in Limine filed by Students for Fair Admissions, Inc.. (Attachments: # 1 Exhibit 1, # 2 Exhibit 2, # 3 Exhibit 3, # 4 Exhibit 4, # 5 Exhibit 5, # 6 Exhibit 6, # 7 Exhibit 7, # 8 Exhibit 8, # 9 Exhibit 9, # 10 Exhibit 10, # 11 Exhibit 11, # 12 Exhibit 12, # 13 Exhibit 13, # 14 Exhibit 14, # 15 Exhibit 15, # 16 Exhibit 16)(Mortara, Adam) (Attachment 6 replaced on 10/1/2018) (McDonagh, Christina). (Additional attachment(s) added on 10/2/2018: # 17 Unredacted Memorandum in Opposition (FILED UNDER SEAL), # 18 Exhibit 4 (Filed Under Seal)) (McDonagh, Christina).

Exhibit 8

Key Points | Harvard Admissions Lawsuit

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SFFA v. Harvard

The law of the land, supported broadly
Harvard’s lawful admissions policies consider many factors, including race, to
lawful
f
f
factors,
evaluate each applicant as a whole person with the goal of seeking excellence,
expanding opportunity, and bringing together profoundly di erent students to live
with and learn from one another. The Supreme Court has consistently recognized
that a class that is diverse on multiple dimensions, including on race, transforms
the educational experience of students from every background and prepares
graduates for an increasingly pluralistic world, and that an applicant’s race can be
considered as one of an array of factors in assessing the entirety of a student’s
application. There is broad support for those goals. In a recent Pew survey, 71% of
Americans said e orts to embrace diverse student bodies were ‘a good thing’. And
two-thirds of Asian-Americans in a recent Gallup poll indicated support for
consideration of race in admissions.

A strong commitment to diversity
Harvard College directs extraordinary resources and sta

to recruiting and

admitting a student body that is diverse and high achieving, for example, investing
deeply in

nancial aid to allow every admitted student to attend regardless of

ability to pay.

An extraordinary applicant pool
The large majority of the 40,000+ applicants to Harvard College are academically
quali ed, requiring the College to consider more than grades and test scores. In a
recent admissions cycle (in which there are fewer than 2,000 available slots): more
than 8,000 domestic applicants had perfect GPAs; over 3,400 applicants had
perfect SAT math scores; and over 2,700 applicants had perfect SAT verbal scores.

Increase in Asian-Americans
The percentage of Asian-Americans in Harvard College’s admitted classes has
grown signi cantly (by 27%) since 2010, and Asian-Americans comprise nearly 23%
of the 2022 admitted class.

Expert analysis supports Harvard
Professor David Card, a nationally recognized expert and economics professor at
the University of California at Berkeley, comprehensively analyzed Harvard
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College’s admissions database and concluded there was no discrimination against
Asian-Americans.

One person, one vote
Harvard admissions o

cers evaluate each applicant individually and assign ratings

on a variety of metrics, such as academic quali cations, personal attributes,
extracurricular activities, and athletic activities based on a whole person review.
Admissions decisions are made by a simple majority vote, and each member of
Harvard’s diverse 40-person admissions committee has one vote.

Race-neutral means less diverse
A er studying more than a dozen race-neutral alternatives, a Harvard committee
found that none of these practices “could promote Harvard’s diversity-related
educational objectives as well as Harvard’s ... admissions program while also
maintaining the standards of excellence that Harvard seeks in its student body.”

O ce of Institutional Research documents: A preliminary and
incomplete analysis
The OIR documents represent a preliminary and incomplete analysis OIR was
conducting without the bene t of the full admissions database or a full
understanding of the admissions process. The OIR documents themselves directly
acknowledge various missing data and aspects of the admissions process that are
not taken into account, and the OIR sta

have con rmed that the work was

preliminary and incomplete. This work was not part of any “internal investigation,”
and none of the documents cited in the summary judgment papers was created at
the request of Harvard’s O

ce of the General Counsel. Again, SFFA attempts to

distort and mislead in its suggestions that the analysis showed discrimination or
was somehow improperly stopped. As Dr. Card’s analysis shows, when all the data
and information are included and analyzed, no evidence of discrimination exists.

Personal rating
The personal rating re ects a wide range of valuable information in the
application, such as an applicant’s personal essays, responses to short answer
questions, recommendations from teachers and guidance counselors, alumni
interview reports, sta

interviews, and any additional letters or information

provided by the applicant. Harvard uses this information to understand the
applicant’s full life story, for example, where the student grew up, what
opportunities or challenges they faced in their families, communities, and
secondary school, and what impact they might have both here at Harvard and a er
they graduate, as citizens and citizen-leaders of our society.

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Alumni interviewer and admissions o

cer personal ratings, although similar in

name, vary widely because they are based on di erent information. Thousands of
Harvard alumni perform an extremely valuable service as volunteers interviewing
applicants to Harvard College from their communities. The alumni interviewer
personal rating re ects what the interviewer has learned about the applicant during
the interview, while the admissions o cer rating considers the full range of
information in the application (listed above). Any alumni interviewer also sees only
a tiny percentage of the applicants in the pool. They evaluate these applicants in
comparison to those few other applicants they have interviewed, while the
admissions committee has before it a much fuller range of the talented applicants
Harvard is fortunate enough to attract.

A faulty statistical model
Mr. Blum’s case hinges on a statistical model that deliberately ignores essential
factors, such as personal essay or teacher recommendations, and omits entire
swaths of the applicant pool (such as recruited athletes or applicants whose parents
attended Harvard) to achieve a deliberate and pre-assumed outcome. Months of
investigation failed to produce any documentary or testimonial support for SFFA’s
accusation that Harvard intentionally seeks to limit the number of AsianAmericans or discriminates against them. To the contrary, the evidence forcefully
demonstrates that Harvard values the diversity and myriad contributions that
Asian-American students—like students of all other backgrounds— bring to its
campus, and that Harvard seeks and succeeds in recruiting and enrolling
exceptional Asian-American students as well as students of all other backgrounds.

An obligation to protect applicant privacy
Harvard, like every college and university across this country, has an obligation to
protect the extensive personal information applicants entrust to us in the
admissions process. Sensitive student information has been produced in this
litigation, and while names and directly identifying information have been
redacted, other information remains that could lead to outside parties identifying
speci c students. Not one page of 100,000 pages of internal Harvard documents
re ects any systematic e ort to discriminate against Asian-Americans. In seeking to
protect the con dentiality of a small fraction of these 100,000 pages of documents,
Harvard also shares the reasonable expectation of our alumni that their private
correspondence with the University should remain private, rather than be used by
SFFA to drive sensational headlines that seek to distract from the complete lack of
actual evidence supporting their claims.

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