After the Affirmative Action ruling, Asian Americans ask what happens next

Kawsar Yasin, a Harvard sophomore of Uyghur descent, found the Supreme Court’s decision last week to ban race-conscious college admissions heartbreaking.

Jayson Lee, a sophomore of Taiwanese descent, hopes the court’s decision will open the door for him and others in competitive schools.

And Divya Tulsiani, the daughter of Indian immigrants, can’t help but think the decision wouldn’t put an end to the toxic side of college admissions.

Asian Americans were at the center of the Supreme Court’s decision against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. In both cases, plaintiffs said high-performing Asian-American applicants were outmatched by less academically qualified students. In the case of Harvard, according to the lawsuit, Asian Americans were paired with a personal assessment, sparking a painful conversation about racial stereotyping in admissions.

But in the days following the court’s ruling, interviews with some two dozen Asian-American students revealed that for most of them — regardless of their views on affirmative action — the decision is unlikely to dispel doubts about the fairness of college admissions. would take away.

“I don’t think this decision has leveled the playing field in any way,” Ms Tulsiani said. “It kind of did the opposite.”

Lower courts found that Harvard and UNC did not discriminate in admissions. But the Supreme Court ruled that, “however well-intentioned and executed in good faith”, the universities’ admissions practices fell short of the constitutional standard, and that race could no longer be taken into account when deciding which students would be admitted.

The court noted that the two universities’ main response to criticism of their admissions systems was “essentially ‘trust us’.”

The universities said they would abide by the ruling. Harvard added that it “should always be a place of opportunity, a place whose doors remain open to those to whom they have long been closed.”

In a community as large and diverse as the Asian-American community, opinions on affirmative action varied widely. A recent Pew Research Center survey conveyed Asian Americans’ ambivalence. Only about half of Asian Americans who had heard of affirmative action said it was a good thing; three-quarters of Asian respondents said race or ethnicity should not be a factor in college admission decisions.

Some students found hope in the Supreme Court’s decision.

Mr. Lee, the sophomore from Maryland, is interested in studying science and technology and supports standardized tests and other traditional measures of merit.

“Before the case, I was indeed concerned that my ethnicity would be a factor in college admission,” he said. “But if colleges implement the new court rulings to get rid of affirmative action, then I think it will be better and more even for every ethnicity.”

Others had more mixed feelings. Jacqueline Kwun, a sophomore at a public high school in Marietta, Georgia, whose parents emigrated from South Korea, said she’s felt the sting of stereotyping when people thought she was “born smart.”

Still, she said she believed the court’s ruling was incorrect.

“Why shut the whole thing down?” she asked. “You have to try to find a way to make yourself happy and make other people happy at the same time, so it’s a win-win situation rather than a win-lose situation.”

According to the majority opinion, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that colleges might consider mentioning race in the essays students submit with their applications if, for example, they could be linked to overcoming discrimination through personal qualities such as “courage and determination.” But many Asian-American students had doubts about that prescription.

Students already feel the pressure to write about hardship, said Rushil Umaretiya, who will be attending the University of North Carolina in the fall. He wrote in his essay about how the women in his Indian immigrant family were the breadwinners and intellectuals, and how his grandmother rose through the white male-dominated ranks at the Roy Rogers restaurant chain to become a regional manager.

Even before the decision, he had seen anxious classmates at his selective high school, Thomas Jefferson High School, in Alexandria, Virginia, make up stories about racial injustice.

“I think college admissions have really dipped into this craze of trauma dumping,” he said.

Ms. Tulsiani, who is studying for a master’s degree in sociology and law at New York University, is a veteran of the application process.

She wrote an application essay for Georgetown about her family—her father worked his way up from deli worker and taxi driver to restaurant owner—in response to a question about diversity.

“You accept that you have to sell some kind of story to appeal to this audience,” she said.

She was pleased that the court upheld the diversity essay option, but felt sympathy for the applicants having to reveal their most intimate secrets and speak with moral force. “It’s a huge burden for a 17-year-old kid,” she said.

She thinks the stigma of affirmative action will continue. “The story will be, instead of ‘you got in because of affirmative action,’ ‘you must have got in because of your class,'” she said.

Some Asian American students believe, contrary to the dominant narrative in the lawsuit, that they have benefited from affirmative action. Evidence presented in court showed that Harvard sometimes favored certain Asian-American applicants over others. For example, applicants with families from Nepal, Tibet or Vietnam, among others, were described with words such as “deserve” and “Tug for BG”, an abbreviation for background.

“I do believe I was a beneficiary,” said Hans Bach-Nguyen, a Harvard sophomore from Camarillo, in Southern California. He said he wasn’t sure until he retrieved his admissions file and found that one of the two reader comments in it referred to his Vietnamese ancestry.

He was happy, he said, to be recognized as a member of an underrepresented minority in higher education. But he wondered if he deserved it. His parents came to the United States as refugees around his age and earned college degrees from state universities.

“I think my guilt is because I didn’t grow up on a low income,” he said.

Echoing a common criticism of the university, he noted that many Harvard students, “even if they belong to a minority, come from financially stable or more affluent families.”

In California, affirmative action has been banned since 1996, yet a few Asian-American students seemed suspicious of what they considered a secret admissions process.

Sunjay Muralitharan, whose family is of Indian descent, was rejected or waitlisted by his top five college choices, a mix of California public and private colleges. He believes his race was a factor. He ended up at the University of California in San Diego, where he is a sophomore.

“I know people say, ‘Oh, it’s just going to be merit-based, merit-based, merit-based,'” he said. “No it’s not.”

Still, he said, he is over his initial resentment. “Growing up in the middle class, I never had to worry about where the next meal was coming from,” he said. “Like it or not, I was placed in a number of tutoring programs. It’s understandable to give a chance to someone who didn’t get that many opportunities when they were younger.”

Cole Edmonds And Anna Bets reporting contributed.