I reject the notion that Asians were discriminated against for the same reason
the only way it is possible to reject the notion that harvard discriminated against asian applicants is by unfamiliarity with the facts that have been made public, so i'll outline them here.
harvard discriminated against asian applicants in two ways:
1) harvard used race/ethnicity as an explicit factor in admissions decisions to produce incoming classes with their desired diversity. race/ethnicity was used in the selection process in two ways. first, black and latino applicants were tipped up on their overall score (comprised of four ratings: academics, extracurricular, athletic and personal). second, after preliminary admission decisions were made, admissions officers adjusted decisions to ensure that enough black and latino applicants were selected to produce a class with harvard's preferred diversity. these facts are not in dispute. harvard does not deny doing this and it is well documented that they did so.
harvard's class has a finite number of slots available, so offering a preference to black and latino applicants necessarily reduced the number of asian applicants that were accepted. you are, of course, correct that harvard is free to admit applicants based on whatever legal criteria they chose. and they did do that; one of those criteria was race/ethnicity. at the time, that was legal, it no longer is.
2. harvard also discriminated against asian applicants by systematically assigning asian applicants lower scores than white applicants on the personal component of the overall score. this is necessarily more difficult to prove than the explicit racial/ethnic preferences above, however the data are extremely convincing that asian applicants a) received lower scores than white applicants in the personal category, and b) that lower scores in the category reduced the chances that an asian applicant would be admitted compared to a white applicant. i've linked the paper outlining that finding below. it is important here to note that this evidence of discrimination is based on the criteria that harvard chose, not any abstract preference for criteria (such as standardized test scores) where asian applicants scored better than white candidates and that the finding that assigning asian applicants lower personal ratings than white applicants reduced their chances of being admitted is after controlling for all other variables, including legacy preferences, faculty preferences, dean's list (as an aside, children of large donors receive a dean's list preference, not a legacy preference as many people seem to think) preferences and athletic preferences, where white applicants are more likely than asian applicants to have an admissions preference.
as such, there are really only two possible explanations for asian applicants, as a group, receiving lower scores than white applicants on the personal component. either harvard systematically discriminated against asian applicants via assigning them lower personal ratings or asian applicants to harvard are inferior to white applicants to harvard in the qualities that comprise the personal rating. criteria for the personal rating are vague, but a couple of descriptions of what it is meant to encompass stood out to me. the personal rating "is meant to capture personal qualities such as likeability, courage, and kindness" and an applicant that receives a high personal rating would be understood to be a "very attractive person to be with and have in your school community and widely respected".
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27068/w27068.pdfadditionally there are a couple of items which i think provide some hint that it is likely that harvard was deliberately attempting to limit the number of asian applicants that were admitted. one is simply the remarkable consistency in the % of asians in incoming classes. between 2009 and 2018, the incoming classes at harvard were: 18%, 18%, 19%, 19%, 17%, 20%, 19%, 20%, 20% and 19% asian. it is understandable that the percent of incoming classes that were black and latino varied little, as there were explicit processes by which admissions officers selected applicants in order to meet diversity targets. however, there was no explicit race-based metric used to regulate the numbers of asian and white applicants admitted. yet, nonetheless, the numbers of each class that were asian remained static. i find that to be curious.
another is that in efforts to recruit students to meet geographic diversity goals, the standardized test score threshold to be targeted for recruitment was lower for white high school students than it was for asian high school students. of course, recruitment is different than the admissions process. but that suggests that harvard believed, prior to knowing anything about an individual student's personal rating, that asian applicants would need higher academic metrics to be competitive than would white applicants.
