MIT Reversed Its Position on the SAT. How About Racial Preferences Next?
Admissions policies implemented in the 1990s restrict the number of Asian-American students.
James Freeman is right to praise the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, my alma mater, for bringing back standardized testing for admissions, which was suspended during Covid (“Go Tech!” Best of the Web, March 29). But he gives MIT too much credit. The school has not done anything to end the racially discriminatory admissions policies it implemented in the 1990s to restrict the number of Asian-American students and increase the number of black and Hispanic students.
As shown in a 2018 analysis of MIT enrollment data by Althea Nagai, the university implemented preferences and racial quotas to cap the number of Asian-American students admitted and to admit other minority students with lower academic qualifications, credentials and test scores. As a result, the admission rate of Asian Americans topped out at about a quarter of the freshman class.
In comparison, CalTech, MIT’s rival for the title of best engineering and science school in the country, never implemented racial preferences and quotas. Its percentage of Asian-American students rose steadily to above 40% by 2016, paralleling the “swift rise” in the “number of Asian undergraduates nationally,” as Ms. Nagai explains.
None of this is a surprise, given that the former MIT dean of admissions, Marilee Jones, commented that a Korean-American applicant “looked like a thousand other Korean kids with the exact same profile of grades and activities and temperament, . . . yet another textureless math grind.”
Stuart Schmill, the current dean of admissions, said nothing about ending MIT’s discriminatory admissions policy when he announced the reinstatement of standardized testing. Until he does that, no alumnus should give MIT any funding or support and the school should lose its holier-than-thou attitude.
Hans von Spakovsky
Heritage Foundation
Washington