 Three students apply to Harvard. Who do you think gets in? They've got amazing extracurriculars, they're all valedictorians, and they've all got the same financial situation. Despite having an objectively better profile, this student isn't going to get into Harvard, but these two will. And this is why. Allegedly. Right now, American colleges are permitted to use race as one of several factors to determine whether or not to admit a student. So even though this person has an objectively better profile, Harvard could say that they would rather have somebody else because of their race. If that seems unfair to you, then stay with me. Affirmative action is complicated, and I'm not going to tell you what to think in this video. I'm just going to do my best to present the facts to you in eight minutes or less. So let's get going. Let's start with what affirmative action does and doesn't do. Affirmative action doesn't involve quotas. The Supreme Court ruled that you can't have hard limits or quotas on any particular racial group, so you can't have a minimum or maximum number for people of any race. But affirmative action does increase diversity on campus. In studies that have looked at states that have gotten rid of affirmative action, their percentage of people of color enrolling in colleges has decreased. And by using race as a metric, universities can specifically pick different kinds of people to fill out their class and create the diverse environment that they want. Contrary to popular belief, affirmative action doesn't admit unqualified people. You can't just get into Harvard because you're black, and you're definitely not getting rejected just because you're Asian. Race has only allowed to be one factor out of many in the holistic review process. It cannot even be a tiebreaker. Affirmative action does allow universities to go beyond race as well. It includes things like gender, sexual orientation, your disability status, and even your age. It's the same reason why a woman applying to a STEM program can get a boost while a man applying to psychology could get the same boost. Universities generally want to lift up the group that is underrepresented. And affirmative action doesn't actually do much at most universities. Affirmative action really only becomes an issue when we're talking about colleges that have a lot of applicants, more applicants than they have seats. And that is predominantly a problem at the universities that are at the top 50, top 100 level in the United States. Michigan State is not doing a whole lot of affirmative action while Harvard apparently is. Allegedly. And that's exactly why Harvard was named in a lawsuit from a group called Students for Fair Admissions or SFFA. SFFA sued Harvard years ago and lost their first two battles in court. But they have since appealed the case to the Supreme Court and that is probably going to have massive ramifications for the college admissions process in the near future. But I am getting ahead of myself. I still want to talk about affirmative action and some of the arguments that people use for and against it. Now, all of these arguments are true to some extent, but how much of an extent is up to you? Pro affirmative action arguments. The number one argument from affirmative action supporters is that it promotes diversity and that diversity is something that we should want on campus. I call this the Pokemon argument. You know, it's like the universities are like Ash Ketchum and they're trying to catch them all and they got to have one of everything. Supporters argue that using race is perfectly fine for this purpose to create that diversity that colleges want. Another argument that is used to support affirmative action is that it writes the wrongs of the past. For example, black people were in the 50s prohibited from buying property in what are now today very nice affluent neighborhoods. That could explain why a black student from downtown Detroit has a lower GPA and SAT score than the white kid that grew up in Oakland County just a few miles away. So affirmative action allows us to sort of fix those problems by, you know, allowing universities to take into consideration those systemic differences. Affirmative action proponents also argue that it promotes equality in general. Some kids are poor. Some kids are born to a single parent. Some kids live in very violent neighborhoods. And so by using affirmative action, we can sort of help out people for other reasons and not just consider their numbers. The anti affirmative action arguments though have some really good points. Many argue that affirmative action is antithetical to the whole concept of merit-based admissions like you should get into the best university because you were the best. Another argument against affirmative action is that it discourages effort. Why study harder for the SAT if you know that because of your race, you can get in with a lower score? Or conversely, why try to get the best score in the SAT if you're Asian American because everybody else is bringing that high score too and you're still going to be discriminated against. And speaking of Asians, perhaps the best argument against affirmative action is that it's kind of racist. I know, right? Really? Is it? How could a policy that is supposed to help minorities end up actually hurting them? That is precisely what the lawsuit from SFFA alleges. It says that Harvard practiced discrimination against Asian American students. The data that they cite in this lawsuit is pretty damning for Harvard if it's true. Let's take a look at the numbers. They typically apply in greater numbers. They usually have higher test scores and higher GPAs. And yet for some reason, they're not being represented as much as they should be, allegedly. Compare Harvard to Caltech, a university that is not allowed to use race in its admissions process. Caltech is about 45% Asian American today. The lawsuit argues that if Harvard had a policy just like that of Caltech, they would probably have a similar distribution of Asians. And so, for some reason, it seems that the Harvard admissions office is systematically making it harder for Asians to get in, allegedly. Now, I should be fair and give you both sides of the argument. Harvard disputes the very numbers used in this lawsuit. They've published their own comments and in fact have made an entire section of their website dedicated to fighting this lawsuit. Harvard's data even goes so far as to say that they had someone independently review six years of admissions data and found that in three of them Asian American students actually got a boost. However, they didn't say which years those were and it makes me sound like they might be cherry picking the data a little bit to make a good counter argument. It's really hard to see how this lawsuit is complete bullshit. Like it looks like they've got a strong case. Whether you agree or not with the lawsuit's claims or whether you agree or not with affirmative action, I think it's important for us to talk about what's probably going to happen anyway because regardless of which side you're on, the decision that the Supreme Court of the United States makes is going to have a permanent and major impact on college admissions going forward. That decision is probably going to come out around May or June, which is when they usually release decisions and conveniently is when the admissions process for the year is completely finished. So it's really good timing for the Supreme Court to announce a major decision that completely changes the admissions process. I think that it bare minimum race will be removed from college applications across the country. Now, I say this because the Supreme Court is now very conservative and conservatives have shown the most resistance to affirmative action, but even they are not alone. If the Supreme Court sides with SFFA and gets rid of race in college admissions, most people would be okay with that. 59% of black adults say that race should not be a factor in admissions and they're objectively the group that benefits the most from it. 62% of Democrats don't support using race and admissions either. So even on the liberal side, there's not a lot of support for this policy. Curiously, those surveys that ask people whether they support affirmative action typically are more positive. And yet, when you ask people about the race specific component, it's more negative. It's almost like a lot of people don't really know what affirmative action is. So the Supreme Court of the United States has a lot of options. They could eliminate just race because that is what this case is focused on and they could keep the other aspects of affirmative action present in college admissions, but they could go much further. Colleges are going to have to make a bunch of changes after this ruling, regardless of what it is. One of those changes will probably be in the tone of the essays. Colleges that want diversity are going to ask students prompts that encourage them to talk about their gender or racial identity so that they can get the diversity they want. New York University has already done this. They got rid of the YNYUSA this year and replaced it with an essay about diversity. That should tell you something. If you're still here, I assume you might care about what I think. And so this is the opinion time. This is where I tell you what I think about affirmative action and about this lawsuit and about these policies. None of this would be an issue if Harvard didn't have 60,000 applicants a year. The real problem here is that we're fighting over these limited spaces at these very selective elite universities because we think that where we go to college actually matters and it actually doesn't. Where you go to college is not that important and it really makes me sad that so many people are making their entire life about getting into one of these Ivy League universities when there are so many other good options out there. In a future video, I'm going to be talking about why where you go to college doesn't really matter. And what really sucks is that because some people are butt hurt that they didn't get into Harvard, they're going to ruin a system that does benefit a lot of minority people in other places. And I don't know that race is necessarily the best way for us to promote diversity and socioeconomic uplift. I do think there are other variables we could consider besides race. Thank you for watching and I'll see you next week.