Aiming for the Ivy League is considered a pathway to the American Dream for less privileged Americans. But this road to upward mobility may have become considerably harder if you are of Asian heritage.

That is because elite American universities like Harvard don't want too many Asians on their campuses, according to an anonymous group of students who sued Harvard in a high-profile discrimination case. 

To make the matter worse, it is done in the name of diversity.

The lawsuit was filed in 2014 by a group called Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), who claimed to have been denied admission due to their race, alleging that Harvard caps undergraduate admissions for Asian Americans to make room for less qualified candidates from other ethnic groups.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs in Boston ruled in favor of the university, saying its admission policy factoring in a student's race is important for ensuring diversity, and that it doesn't discriminate against Asian American applicants.

"Harvard has demonstrated," Burroughs concluded, "that there are no workable and available race-neutral alternatives, singly or taken in combination, that would allow it to achieve an adequately diverse student body while still perpetuating its standards for academic and other measures of excellence."

Harvard President Lawrence Bacow welcomed the decision in an open letter. "Today we reaffirm the importance of diversity – and everything it represents to the world," he said.

The plaintiffs, represented by a conservative white man named Edward Blum, said SFFA will take the case to the Supreme Court if necessary.

Citing statistics, SFFA claimed Harvard limited Asian-Americans to around 20 percent of the student body by holding them to higher admissions standards than any other racial group, including whites. It drew comparison to actions taken by the university in the 1920 to keep Jewish students' number down.

"We believe that the documents, emails, data analysis and depositions SFFA presented at trial compellingly revealed Harvard's systematic discrimination against Asian American applicants," said Blum, who created SFFA to campaign against the use of race in college admissions.

Win for affirmative action

The point of contention in this case is affirmative action, a civil rights initiative designed to support minority groups disadvantaged by past and present discrimination. It allows colleges to consider race as a factor in admissions, but not to impose quotas. Despite Asians being a minority – 5.6 percent of the total U.S. population – some U.S. institutions no longer include them in affirmative action programs, citing "overrepresentation."

A Princeton professor recalled a conversation during which a university administrator made the comment: "You wouldn't want half the campus to be Chinese." Affirmative action is now often perceived to hurt the chances of Asian American college applicants.

In 1997, the University of California at Berkeley got rid of affirmative action in its admissions. The changes in the university's student makeup that followed were substantial, with Asian American students increasing from 25 percent in 1985 to 45 percent in 2012. Similarly at Caltech, another university that banned race-based admissions, Asian American students rose from 20 percent in 1990 to 40 percent in 2011.

Conservatives have long opposed race-based preferential admissions, with many white students complaining of "reverse discrimination." Blum, a vocal critic of affirmative action, previously challenged the policy for treating white students unfairly in front of the Supreme Court.

Vijay Jojo Chokal-Ingam, author of "Almost Black," is an Indian American who famously took advantage of affirmative action to get into medical school by pretending to be a black man, despite having a low GPA score.

The Trump administration backed the SFFA lawsuit against Harvard. In August 2018, the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a statement of interest siding with the SFFA, arguing that Harvard "failed to show that it does not unlawfully discriminate against Asian Americans."

According to the DOJ, Harvard uses a "personal rating" that may be biased against Asian Americans. The Supreme Court has called such attempts to "racially balance" the makeup of a student body "patently unconstitutional." If this case makes it to the court, which now has a solid conservative majority, it could mean the end of affirmative action.

Rated low on 'personality'

At the center of the controversy is the so-called "personal rating," an understandably subjective admission process that judges personal qualities like "courage," "likability," and "being a good person."

Years of data presented by Harvard showed that despite outperforming other groups in academic and extracurricular areas, Asian American students received lower personality ratings than applicants of other races. However, the rating is solely based on a review of the applicant's file, according to the DOJ's statement of interest, as many rejected students never made it to an interview.

SFFA had contended that this was caused by racial stereotyping, a charge Harvard denied.

Harvard is not alone. Since 1980s, Asian Americans have filed federal civil rights complaints against a number of universities, including Yale, Columbia and the University of Chicago among others. The Princeton Review even advises applicants that "an Asian-sounding surname" may be a disadvantage; and the former dean of admissions at MIT reportedly called a Korean American student "yet another textureless math grind" while explaining the rationale behind his rejection.

In an essay titled "The Harvard plan that failed Asians," the university's own law review noted that Asians must perform better in SAT than all other groups to have the same chance of admission – 140 points higher than whites, 270 points higher than Hispanics, and 450 points higher than African Americans if all else equal. It cited studies showing that Asians, who occupy the top range of SAT scorers at around 50 percent, have the lowest acceptance rates.

However, many Asian American students who spoke publicly on this issue, while acknowledging their disadvantage and intricacy of the matter, have expressed continued support for advancing diversity on U.S. campuses. Some say they do not want to be used as mascot by conservatives who wish to overturn affirmative action.

Burroughs concluded that diversity at Harvard and other schools "will foster the tolerance, acceptance and understanding that will ultimately make race-conscious admissions obsolete."

But SFFA and the DOJ agreed that Harvard had not seriously considered race-neutral factors in admissions, such as the applicant's economic situation. 

The lawsuit has also shone a light on Harvard's other preferential selections of "legacy students," athletes and the children of faculty or of major donors, the majority of whom are white.