But as I’ve written in the past, the suggestion that admissions officers are actively rejecting Asian applicants solely because of their race is almost impossible to substantiate.

Countless factors inform elite-college admissions decisions—not just because schools are obligated by law to assess applicants holistically, but also because it’s in the colleges’ interest to do so. Elite colleges are trying to build a class of high-achieving, unique students. Accepting the maximum number of those individuals is arguably more important to the institutions than ensuring they have X number of blacks and no more than Y Asians.

In fact, some affirmative-action advocates stress that doing away with race-conscious admissions would actually hurt certain Asian applicants. The category “Asian” encompasses an incredibly diverse spectrum of ethnic groups, from Chinese to Cambodians to Bangladeshi. Most of those groups are severely underrepresented in higher education, some of them more so than African Americans, despite the focus on black students in much of the public discourse on affirmative action. “Many of the things we have fought for in continuing to maintain both the policies and principles behind affirmative action are designed not only to help the overall population but also specific subgroups such as my community,” Mee Moua, a Hmong American who serves as the president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, told me last year.

Despite the widely disseminated narrative that Asians are hurt by affirmative action—including by media outlets that cater to Asian American communities—surveys suggest those communities generally support race-conscious admissions. The National Asian American Survey in 2012 found that three in four respondents support affirmative action. Similarly, in the 2016 Asian American Voter Survey, 64 percent of respondents said they favor “affirmative action programs designed to help blacks, women, and other minorities get better access to higher education.” Just 25 percent said they oppose such programs. These attitudes suggest that one of the prevailing arguments against affirmative action—that Asian Americans are victimized by it—isn’t felt on the ground as much as headlines make it out to be.

Again, there’s certainly compelling evidence that indicates Asians are disadvantaged by affirmative action—namely East Asians, who constitute the vast majority of elite-college applicants. In 2005, a Princeton study found that Asian Americans must score 140 points more than white students of otherwise comparable caliber on the 1600-point SAT in order to be considered equals in the application process; it also found that they’d have to score 270 points higher than Latino students and 450 points higher than black students.

Other studies have found that eliminating race-conscious admissions policies would see a drastic increase in the number of Asian students admitted. Just look at the California Institute of Technology, which bases admission strictly on academics: Asian enrollment at the school grew from 25 percent in 1992 to 43 percent in 2013. Similarly, Asian Americans account for roughly a third of students at the University of California yet make up just 15 percent of the population in California, which prohibits race-conscious admissions. In other words, based on these examples, Asian students appear to be extremely overrepresented in relation to the general population when their institution doesn’t practice race-conscious admissions.

But it remains unclear how the Justice Department investigation would be able to find proof of intentional race-based discrimination. The Department of Education, for example, concluded in 2015 that it didn’t have enough evidence to uphold a complaint alleging discrimination against Asian applicants at Princeton.

Regardless of the forces animating the Justice Department’s new initiative, efforts like it in the past have, so far, yielded very little.

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