Dr. Janelle Wong Co-Publishes Inside Higher Ed article, "Asian Americans Got Played on Affirmative Action"

On February 17, 2025, AAST Director, Dr. Janelle Wong, co-wrote an Inside Higher Ed article with Dr. OiYan Poon titled, “Asian Americans Got Played on Affirmative Action”. In this article, Dr. Wong and Dr. Poon analyze the Supreme Court decision to end race-conscious admissions in higher education, and its impact on Asian Americans.

In the lead-up to the 2023 Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard University and SFFA v. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which ended race-conscious admissions in higher education, the founder of SFFA, Edward Blum, and his allies argued that ending affirmative action would supposedly remove a racial barrier to Asian American access to highly selective colleges and universities. Many Asian Americans mistakenly assumed that prioritizing diversity in college admissions benefited Black, Latinx and Native American students at the expense of Asian American applicants. They believed Blum and SFFA’s claims that efforts to increase campus diversity marginalized Asian Americans—a socioeconomically and ethnically diverse population. 

Read the full article here.