Students for Fair Admissions

Ivy Coach is featured today on the pages of Yale’s newspaper.

Ivy Coach is featured today on the pages of “The Yale Daily News,” the newspaper of Yale University. The piece by Luke Ciancarelli entitled “Group sues Department of Education” details how an anti-affirmative action group known as Students for Fair Admissions filed litigation against our nation’s Department of Education just a few days ago. The most recent litigation was in response to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights’ review of allegations of discrimination against Asian American applicants at Princeton University. The Office of Civil Rights found no evidence of discrimination but Students for Fair Admissions were unsatisfied with the 20-page summary of their finding. They want to be privy to all information the Office of Civil Rights reviewed to render its decision.

As we’ve long stated on the pages of this blog and in the press, we don’t believe filing litigation will bring about ending the longstanding discrimination that Asian American applicants face in highly selective college admissions. Selma. Seneca Falls. Stonewall. These were inciting incidences that, in time, brought about civil rights reform. Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court case that made marriage equality the law of the land, wasn’t the birth of the gay rights movement. No, that movement was born years ago. It was simply one of the greatest successes in the history of this American movement. The organizations filing litigation against universities and the Department of Education would be wise to read the histories of these civil rights movements that brought about change in America rather than try to forge their own blueprint.

Selma. Seneca Falls. Stonewall. We encourage the groups filing litigation against highly selective American universities and the U.S. Department of Education to spend their time instead reading about these seminal moments in our American history.

Oh, and when they do file litigation, they should choose better plaintiffs. In one case, the son of the president of the Asian American Coalition for Education, one of the groups filing these types of suits, is the plaintiff. The son of the founder just happened to be the best possible plaintiff? Must be just coincidence. When two of the greatest attorneys in America, David Boies and Ted Olson, fought to legalize gay marriage, you can bet they chose their plaintiffs wisely. You can bet they were men and women in happy, healthy same-sex marriages. Our point being…perhaps the Asian American Coalition for Education should spend a bit more time in choosing their plaintiffs.

As Brian of our firm is quoted in the piece in “The Yale Daily News,” “Taylor, director of Ivy Coach, a New York-based college consulting firm, said that he thought the college admissions process in general was unfair to Asian-American and Asian students. ‘Admissions officers, if they admit it or not — and more often than not, they won’t admit it — they discriminate against Asian-American and Asian applicants,’ Taylor said. Still, Taylor said SFFA and the Asian American Coalition for Education — a group consisting of over 100 organizations that has also been involved in litigating on behalf of Asian-American college applicants — do not have legal arguments and strategies strong enough to win their cases. Taylor said these groups were choosing ‘the wrong students’ to advocate for, adding that these examples tended to be ‘well-rounded applicants’ whom selective schools such as Princeton are not looking for to begin with.” Indeed.