Princeton University has filed a case to prevent the US Education Department from disclosing confidential documents about the school's admission policies. This move came in after a non-profit organization demanded the said information.
Apparently, the Students for Fair Admissions accused Princeton University of engaging in "anti-Asian" practices on campus. For the record, the same group sued Harvard University and the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill with the same allegation. According to USA Today, Harvard refused to comment on the said matter while the other assured that "the University [of North Carolina] makes admissions decisions based on everything known about each student." It added that race and ethnicity are just two factors among the many.
For his part, Princeton spokesperson Daniel Day told the same source that their institution does not engage in practices that discriminate Asian students. In fact, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has already found "no evidence of anti-Asian" discernment during an investigation conducted in 2015. Additionally, OCR found that the university did not use separate admission processes, reviews, or tracks by race.
On the contrary, per a 2005 study published on the Princeton website, researcher Thomas Espenshade revealed that Asian-American applicants actually did face a "disadvantage" in admissions at elite US universities. In it, Espenshade wrote that Asians, who made up the 29.5 percent of total applicants in 1997, would make the 31.5 percent of the accepted students "if [the] affirmative action for racial minorities were removed." The actual proportion, he added, is 23.7 percent.
Thus, Edward Blum, the president of the Students for Fair Admissions, cited Espenshade's own study as a rationale for his lawsuit. Meanwhile, Princeton noted that its decision to block the Education Department from releasing official documents to Blum's group is for student privacy purposes only. In a statement, the school administration said that they "filed the lawsuit to honor the promise of confidentiality" they have made to all applicants and their families. If Princeton can protect their files now, then future applicants would know that the school respects all materials submitted to it.
