Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College

Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. (SFFA) (plaintiff) sued the president and fellows of Harvard College and the Board of Overseers (collectively, Harvard) (defendant) for a federal-court judgment declaring Harvard’s undergraduate-admissions process in violation of the Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. At the time, Harvard received 35,000 applications for an entering undergraduate class of only 1,600 students, thereby necessitating a highly selective admissions process. Harvard offered admission to an applicant only after a personal interview and a majority vote of Harvard’s admissions committee. Although SFFA conceded that Harvard had a compelling interest in achieving diversity, SFFA charged Harvard with giving undue attention to race despite the availability of workable race-neutral alternatives, to the intentional detriment of Asian American applicants. Harvard argued that its admissions process was designed to enrich each student’s education by exposing a student to the ethnically, economically, and geographically diverse experience of other students. SFFA conceded that Harvard had a compelling interest in achieving this diversity. The court heard evidence that Harvard: (1) carefully trained its 70-member admissions staff and 40-member admissions committee to conduct a well-documented admissions process; (2) considered race as only one component of an evaluation of each applicant’s academic and extracurricular records, as well as “personal factors” such as an applicant’s maturity, concern for others, and likeability; (3) periodically conducted process reviews that legitimately identified no workable alternatives for achieving diversity; (4) neither engaged in racial balancing nor set quotas for Asian Americans or other ethnic groups; (5) did not give undue weight to race in evaluating an applicant’s personal factors; (6) avoided any mechanical awards of race-based preference; and (7) over time, had actually increased its proportion of Asian American students while maintaining relatively constant proportions of other ethnicities. The district court entered judgment for Harvard. SFFA appealed to the First Circuit.