Admissions

To the Editors of the Crimson:

Your recent editorial on Asian-American admissions contained serious factual errors and betrayed a profound misunderstanding of the College's admission policy and its objectives. Our faculty, our undergraduate students, and our alumni/ae have worked too hard for us to allow such inaccuracies to hinder our effort to recruit and admit Asian American applicants.

Two errors of fact in the editorial were particularly disturbing. First, the editorial states: "Harvard addressed these concerns last January in a statement arguing that Asian Americans were over-represented in the sciences and math." The editorial then proceeds to accuse us of racially stereotyping Asian Americans on the basis of their interests. In fact, nowhere in our January statement was there any reference to fields of concentration by Asian Americans or any other ethnic group.

Second, the editorial states: "And Asian Americans admitted to Harvard in 1982 and 1983 had SAT scores 50 to 100 points higher than their white counterparts." As pointed out in the January statement, the largest difference for any year was 50 points, and the typical difference in a given year in 40 points for the verbal and mathematics SATs combined. The Crimson is not alone in its error. One recent article published in a journal, The Public Interest, mistakenly reported a 112-point difference in the combined SAT verbal and mathematics scores for admitted Asian American and white students.

It should be understood that our current admissions policies have evolved over the past several decades under the guidance of the Standing Committee on Admissions of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. For many years we have recognized that a multiplicity of talents is essential to an invigorating learning environment. Even our top priority, academic talent, cannot be precisely measured by any single criterion such as test scores. Each application receives extensive individual evaluation, often by four or more admissions officers and teaching faculty.

The Faculty Committee seeks counsel from all members of the community. Nothing is secret about our admissions policy or the criteria we use. Public reports are made annually and in periodic statements such as the one we released last January on the topic of Asian American admissions. Members of the Asian American community have been active participants in all phases of our admissions process, including the formulation of admission policy.

As our January statement indicated, we have increased the number of admitted Asian Americans every year for over a decade, from 4.8 percent of the freshman class in 1978 to 14.3 percent this year. In part, these increases result from our recruiting efforts. Contrary to the suggestion in the editorial, the percentage of Asian American students has not remained between 10 and 12 percent. There is no support in the data for an assertion that we use quotas for the admission of Asian American students. William R. Fitzsimmons   Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid   Marlyn McGrath Lewis   Director of Admissions   Susie S. Chao   Admissions Officer   Assistant Director,   Undergraduate Minority Recruitment

Editors' Note:

The Crimson misstated the content of the admissions office's January statement and regrets the error.

The Crimson obtained its information about the 1982 and 1983 SAT scores of Harvard enrollees from Professor L.C. Wang at the University of California at Berkeley.

The 10 to 12 percent figure, for Asian-Americans enrolled throughout the Ivy League, refers to enrollment during the early 1980s.