On June 29, 2023, the Supreme Court ended Affirmative Action in higher education when it ruled against the use of race in college admissions in the cases of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. The former argued discrimination against Asian American and White applicants in favor of ‘underrepresented’ minority applicants; both cases held that Affirmative Action violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
But Asian Americans are split on affirmative action. In 2023, around 53% of Asian Americans supported the policy, with South and Southeast Asian Americans more likely to do so.
The decision, mattering greatly in states like California and counties like San Diego County where the Asian American populations are significant and diasporically-diverse, would set precedent for both admissions and racial demographics across colleges and universities in the years to come.
Now two years out from the Supreme Court’s decision, San Diego State University’s chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association reported on the perspectives of various Asian-identifying San Diegans to uncover how time has affected their perspective on the landmark case.
Tyler Duong, senior at Cathedral Catholic High School
Cathedral Catholic High School senior Tyler Duong is an exceptional student, bar none.
Beyond nine AP classes – Duong’s concurrently taken AP Physics 1, AP Calculus AB, AP Psychology, AP Government and AP Literature – he’s also a quarterback for his school’s varsity football team. Duong was even awarded Top Ten All-Student Scholar Team Nationwide, Great American Rivalry Series Student Scholar Athlete and Toyota Player of the Game.
But with college acceptances on the horizon, he’s worried. Even with his accolades, he doesn’t want his ethnicity as a Vietnamese American to be taken into account during his college acceptances. Duong’s worried it could hurt him.
“Merit like GPA, test scores and extracurricular [activities] And then letters of recommendation and essays,” Duong said. “Race and gender should not be considered."
Duong applied to University of Arizona (UofA), Northeastern University, Rutgers University and Chapman University.
He also applied for UofA’s seven-year Accelerated Pathway to Medical Education; and a six-year Accelerated PharmD Program for Rutgers and Northeastern University. Both programs are impacted, meaning that applications are numerous and competitive, but with limited spots.
A National Bureau of Economic Research report found that Asian Americans faced worse odds of being admitted despite having higher average standardized test scores than White students; they were evaluated harsher than their peers.
Duong isn’t against affirmative action because he thinks race isn’t important as a factor. He’s against it because, as a Southeast Asian American, it would have worked against him in his college application.
But being in favor of merit over affirmative action is conflicting for Duong.
“I think that it’s good to accept a lot of people based on diversity, but merit should count more over any kind of race or ethnicity,” Duong said.
His mother, Anh La, is also conflicted. While she agreed that merit should be the standard for college acceptances and that it's also important to support students from disadvantaged groups, La said she sees problems with solely admitting students based on merit alone.
According to La, students with jobs are disadvantaged because they can’t devote as much time to achieving a higher GPA. Assessing who is qualified and who isn’t becomes difficult because there are factors that admissions committees don’t see.
La also said that affirmative action can hurt parents who can afford to cover their children’s college education because households with lower incomes receive the end of the benefit.
“If the individual [...] and if their parents were first generation and worked hard, it’s sort of like they are sort of punished for that,” La said. “Their parents worked hard.”
La immigrated from Vietnam in 1975. According to her, she and her husband have been saving for their two children’s tuition since they were born; she’s a therapist, and her husband is a family physician. While the couple can afford Duong’s education, La says that extra financial support would be beneficial for them.
“Tyler’s scholarships have been merit based,” La said. “There may be some scholarships that are more holistic and awarded based on his essays.”
“I do believe in diversity, multiple perspectives and options,” La said. “I think that’s always incredibly valuable. But, at the same time, if merit is ignored, that’s a problem.”
Isabella Gaeta, third-year at San Diego State University
When Isabella Gaeta applied to colleges in Fall 2021, two things were top of mind: racial diversity and unflinching political progressiveness.
Gaeta identifies as both a biracial Asian American – her mother, Korean, and her father, White – or Korean American. She’s from Santa Monica, California, where the demographics are 66.9% White and 16.4% Hispanic, according to the United States Census Bureau. By contrast, Asian Americans in the county made up 9.8% of the population.
Now a third-year at San Diego State University, where the demographics are 34.1% White, 34.8% Hispanic and 7.9% Asian according to SDSU’s Fall 2024 enrollment data, Gaeta says her needs are met.
“I think being able to learn from one another about our different upbringings is essential in order to have a better understanding of different views of the world,” Gaeta said.
Gaeta supports affirmative action. She said that “Everyone comes from different backgrounds and comes from different walks of life, and I do definitely feel like race plays a part of it, especially in America.”
According to Gaeta, affirmative action was an acknowledgment of America’s history of oppression and “White superiority” in the United States. Likewise, with the landmark decision’s reversal in 2023, Gaeta believes that “the Supreme Court does not have an open mindset about who actually lives in America, and the help that immigrants and people of color need for college.”
Having interned at Lionsgate Entertainment Company, where she helped bolster the careers of underrepresented talent through partner programs, Gaeta hopes to work with diversity, equity, and inclusion in the entertainment industry.
“Equity is important,” Gaeta said. “Unfortunately, we do live in a time where we have to think about race and background. It does go into account when you're applying for colleges.”
Brianna Nguyen, first-year at San Diego State University
A 2023 Pew Research Center study found that 27% of Asian Americans don’t have an opinion on Affirmative Action. Brianna Nguyen, a Vietnamese-Cambodian American and SDSU first-year student, is part of that statistic.
But it’s not that Nguyen doesn’t know what Affirmative Action was, or what its effects were.
“[Affirmative Action] was an attempt to make a more even playing field,” Nguyen said. “It was not good for Asian Americans, specifically, because there was a large number of qualified Asian American applicants who were denied spaces into select schools”
Nguyen’s lack of opinion stems from her not “feel[ing] educated enough” on the topic in her high school courses.
“I don't think there was much emphasis on it in [AP United States Government and Politics], but the class I am in right now – Asian American studies – they’ve talked about it because it pertains more to Asian Americans,” Nguyen said.
On September 1, 2023, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1354, requiring California K-12 schools to include extended Asian Americans history in social studies curricula, with development of an educational framework can take about three years, according to the California Department of Education.
Amira Noeuv, graduate student at University of California, San Diego
Amira Noeuv, a current graduate student at the University of California, San Diego and former SDSU Asian American Studies professor, believes that affirmative action is a necessary safeguard meant to promote equity for marginalized communities.
She believes that supporters and critics of affirmative action must look at the policies as being applicable beyond higher education and race.
“I find that affirmative action really enforces [...] that our identities — gender, race, color, ethnicity, socioeconomic class — aren't used against us, that we're not being discriminated against,” Noeuv said.
According to Noeuv, one of the common misconceptions about affirmative action is that it negatively targets White and Asian students.
According to a report by the UC InfoCenter, Asian students are the largest demographic at UCSD, making up 39.7% of the undergraduate student population for the fall 2024 term; White students are the second largest undergraduate student demographic at 17.2%.
Noeuv said that UCSD’s Asian population enrollment data can be parsed even more to showcase Asian ethnic groups that are less prominent, like Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders.
The UC InfoCenter collected disaggregated race and ethnicity data for the fall 2024 term. The data shows that out of the 130,539 Asian students admitted, ethnic groups like Hmong, Malaysian, Sri Lankan, Laotian and Bangladeshi all had less than 1,000 students admitted.
With this data, Noeuv explained it is impossible to think about Asian Americans and affirmative action without addressing the model minority myth and exclusion that happens within the population itself.
“It doesn’t take into consideration all these unique experiences within this umbrella,” Noeuv said. “Then you aren’t going to allocate certain resources to Asian Americans because you're already thinking, ‘Well, they’re already achieving,’ or even if there is hardship, ‘They’ve demonstrated that they’ve been able to succeed and persevere.’”
This ultimately harms those who have been historically marginalized within the Asian American community. After being associated with these stereotypes, it will be harder for them to receive the resources that they need.
Noeuv said that she believes having federal legislation for affirmative action is important because it offers a benchmark of protections for different marginalized groups. But with the Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action in 2023, those national guidelines were stripped away.
California has historically banned affirmative action even before the Supreme Court ruling.
Noeuv said that some California colleges have tried to find other ways to support their marginalized communities by implementing different support programs or recruitment outreaches.
However, these efforts are often on a campus by campus basis and not universally applied.
“Certain states and certain counties will still want to achieve diversity on their campuses, in their programs or in their employment. They will try to find other ways to reach out and recruit those from [other] backgrounds,” Noeuv said. “But then there’s also another piece about retention. How do you get these students and how do you make sure they successfully get through their academic career?”
One way college institutions are able to retain students from different backgrounds is by offering community-specific resources.
However, without affirmative action, Noeuv said these programs aren’t a guarantee and are at risk of losing funding.
“I think some programs might be eliminated because there's the whole politics of funding,” Noeuv said. “An institution could easily say, ‘We don't have the funding to do these outreach programs that would recruit at predominantly Latinx or African American schools.”
If these programs are dismantled, people from these communities and socioeconomic backgrounds may not feel supported at their institutions — including the Asian community.
Stephen Cho Suh, Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at San Diego State University
In June 2023, the Supreme Court of the United States officially ended affirmative action in education in the United States.
Stephen Cho Suh, an associate professor of Asian American Studies at San Diego State University and co-editor and contributor to two books on the Korean diaspora, disagrees with the ruling.
“What we see, I think with his most recent Supreme Court ruling is [an] argument that all forms of affirmative action are basically equivalent to negative action in their consequence, which I don't agree with personally,” Suh said.
“I feel that affirmative action, especially in American Society, which has historically been very unequal and continues to be unequal along racial lines, needs affirmative action to move closer to the line of equity,” he added.
Suh went on to explain negative action.
“It's the counter to affirmative action,” Suh said. “Negative action is when institutions institute artificial caps in order to limit the admissions of a specific group, and then, as a result, benefit the admissions of other groups.”
Suh said that Asian Americans benefited most from affirmative action in the 1960s and 1970s when there was not a large population of Asian Americans in higher education.
However, that is no longer the case, and he noticed that universities such as the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, Los Angeles used negative action to limit Asian admissions.
“So, when you put artificial caps in to limit the admissions rates of specific populations, because I feel like there are too many of them, I think that's in and of itself is wrong policy,” he said.
He advocates for affirmation and opposes the use of negative action.
“Affirmative action on its own, in this case trying to increase the admissions of populations [that have] been marginalized as a way to remedy social ills, I'm very much in support of that kind of policy,” he said.
The Asian communities also held different perspectives when it comes to the banning of affirmative action.
Suh commented that he could see the divided understanding of affirmative action between the U.S.-born Asians and Asian immigrants.
“Those who are immigrants to this country who don't necessarily know the history of civil rights and how we saw affirmative action come to be as a product of the civil rights movement,” he said. “They tend to think of higher education as being meritocratic [and] equitable.”
Suh explained that Asian immigrants may not understand “there are a lot more qualitative factors to the admission process” in the education system in the U.S. compared to the clear-cut academic requirements in Asia.
Meanwhile, the misconceptions from the U.S.-born Asians tend to misunderstand their competitions.
“Those who are benefiting from affirmative action today, namely African Americans and to some degree Hispanic Americans, they're not taking away Asian American spots,” Suh said. “It's the white Americans who are, and so Asian Americans aren't competing against those who are benefiting from affirmative action. They're competing against other competitive applicants like white Americans.”
Suh commented that it is unjust how other minority populations “get pitted” against Asian Americans with affirmative action based on disinformation.
“It is unfair, I think, for Asian Americans to not even be considered because there's a general assumption that there are too many Asian Americans at [certain] institutions,” Suh said.
Suh said that affirmative action can positively impact minorities in higher education because he received aid related to it when he was a graduate student.
“I applied for a number of minorities, Asian American, people of color grants and fellowships that are exactly affirmative action type fellowships and grants,” he said. “… if it wasn't for that, I for sure wouldn't be in the position.”
“I wouldn't be in the fortunate position I am,” he repeated.
Suh expressed that he thinks the banning of affirmative action was not a good decision.
“The [education] system is unequal and there needs to be more responsibility in fixing the system,” Suh said. “I am firmly an advocate of affirmative action policy, and to me, the batting of affirmative action, the undoing of various systems that try to proactively address systemic inequalities, is really in bad faith.”
Jeff Deguia, Advocate in Southern California chapter of Asian Americans Advancing Justice
Asian Americans Advancing Justice is an activist group centered on “[strengthening] the rights and dignity of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities.” They are one of many activist groups advocating for the reinstallment of affirmative action nationwide.
Filipino-American activist Jeff Deguia, working in the southern California chapter of Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AJSOCAL) said that affirmative action is crucial in securing access to higher education for students who otherwise would not have it.
“[Affirmative action is] an equitable response to structural oppression that many students face in the country,” Deguia said. “It allows all students to achieve an opportunity in higher education that wasn’t previously achievable by historical oppressions of their communities.”
To Deguia, affirmative action offers an opportunity for students to stand on level ground and to have a fair chance at pursuing their higher education, despite their inequitable circumstances.
Deguia himself is a first-generation college student – the first in his family to go to college – and a second-generation American – his parents immigrated from the Philippines. He said that because of his immigration status, he felt ill-prepared for higher education, and benefited greatly from the extra support affirmative action provided in his college applications.
According to a 2024 study by the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, while immigrant-origin students make up a sizeable 32% of all enrolled students in the country, first and second-generation immigrants are frequently outnumbered by people whose families have lived in America for longer, signaling a disconnect between immigrant communities and the college applications process.
“I think you have a long lineage of people who have gone to school they know how to apply, they know the timelines, FAFSA, [and] the process of getting into school is so much easier than someone who is a first time student in their family” Deguia said. “Taking into account being the first in your family to go to school is huge and I think that should be celebrated. This should be a chance for that to happen.”
On the other side of the affirmative action battle is Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), an activist group centered on supporting litigation that does not take into account a student’s race and ethnicity as factors for admission. We reached out to SFFA via phone and email but were unable to attain a statement from them at this time.
SFFA has published various studies detailing alleged anti-Asian discrimination in admissions practices and filed several lawsuits against American universities’ affirmative action policies, including one in 2015 that went to the Supreme Court but was struck down. The core of their stance is the belief that “race-conscious” policies are inherently discriminatory – that removing race from consideration entirely would allow students to earn admissions through merit.
Removing affirmative action is a move towards “colorblindness,” according to the SFFA website.
The mere fact that race is among the traits considered during the admissions process raises alarm bells for those worried about racial discrimination.
Deguia disagrees. “Race is everything in this country,” he said. “To remove race [from consideration] or to blame race both are wrong [...] Race plays a huge part in the way we live [and] how we access things in life,” Deguia said. “A lot of even Asian American students were blaming Black and brown students for taking spots [in college], when in reality, so many of the spots go to poorer, southeast Asian families.”
Deguia doesn’t want Asian Americans to be a “wedge” between White, Black or Latino Americans.
“I wanna remind folks that there are a lot of passionate individuals from different organizations who are willing to pull the line and push for more,” Deguia said. “A lot of young people want to see the world become better.”
Despite the 2023 ruling, Deguia persists – and he hopes others like him will, too.
“[E]ducation equity is still a priority for all students regardless of their status,” he continues. “If they dream of having a college degree, they can achieve that.”
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