Harvard Confuses Privilege With Merit

Harvard can’t bring back affirmative action — so why should it give affirmative advantages to the privileged?

For the third straight year since the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision striking down race-conscious college admissions, the reported proportion of Black students in Harvard’s incoming class has fallen. Black students make up 18 percent of the Class of 2027. They make up just 9.3 percent of the Class of 2030. However, since the Class of 2028, the College has calculated racial percentages based only on students who have chosen to report their race — not the actual freshman class — making the precise extent of the change difficult to determine.

Nevertheless, three consecutive years of decline are cause for concern. Harvard can’t undo the Supreme Court’s ruling for now, but it can — and should — make its admission process more diverse, academically driven, and fair.

From what we know, Harvard remains deeply unequal in socioeconomic terms. An analysis by Harvard economics professor Raj Chetty ’00 of earlier Harvard cohorts found that undergraduates from the top 20 percent of the income distribution outnumbered those from the bottom 20 percent by nearly 15 to one.

Of course, Harvard has come a long way from the overwhelmingly white, wealthy, Northeastern male student body of the Class of 1937. But there’s little reason to settle for the diversity of today’s College when so much talent remains overlooked.

A student body drawn from different racial, geographic, and socioeconomic backgrounds enriches the education of everyone on campus. It exposes students to unfamiliar experiences and perspectives and helps ensure that talent, rather than privilege, determines who gets to attend.

We’re not saying Harvard should lower its standards. To the contrary, Harvard should prioritize the quality of its admitted students. Prioritizing diversity at the same time means working to ensure that as many talented students as possible have the opportunity to apply. That is why we previously called on Harvard to reinstate the Undergraduate Minority Recruitment Program: By facilitating more applications, the admissions pool becomes a more representative sample.

But while Harvard should cast a wider net, the more consequential question is how Harvard should choose among its catch.

The College will continue to receive far more qualified applications than it can possibly accept. That gives the admissions office considerable discretion over which qualities it rewards and, by extension, what kind of student body it creates.

Consider Harvard’s emphasis on leadership positions, community involvement, and elaborate extracurricular achievements. These credentials have become the currency of selective college admissions, particularly among students at elite preparatory schools who know how to play the game. We suspect founding a nonprofit or leading three student organizations does not necessarily demonstrate more promise than abiding intellectual curiosity or exceptional academic aptitude.

The consequences of that emphasis don’t end after students have matriculated. When Harvard rewards applicants for accumulating titles and accomplishments, it should hardly be surprised to find a student body preoccupied with doing exactly that. The career- and extracurricular-obsessed culture that permeates campus emerges from what got people here in the first place.

If the College genuinely wants to “recenter academics,” its admissions process would be a sensible place to start. Harvard can begin considering depromoting extracurricular achievement as a decisive criterion.

Then there are the preferences that have little plausible relationship to academic merit at all.

Legacy applicants and recruited athletes enjoy substantial admissions advantages — a reported nine times higher admit rate for the Class of 2017 — preserving pathways into Harvard that disproportionately benefit the already privileged. Whatever the rationale behind these preferences, they’re difficult to reconcile with any commitment to academic merit.

Harvard shouldn’t be a finishing school for the children of wealthy coastal elites. The Supreme Court may have limited Harvard’s ability to consider race in admissions, but it hasn’t prevented the College from reconsidering the unfairest advantages it confers.

Until Harvard seriously confronts those choices, its claims to excellence will ring hollow.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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