Considering the implications of the lawsuit on Harvard's suspected discrimination against Asian students

Both articles, “The Uncomfortable Truth About Affirmative Action and Asian-Americans” and “Defending Affirmative Action”, discusses the issue that Harvard’s suspected discrimination against Asian applicants. From the side of the lawsuit, it is declared that from facts like many Asian applicants with perfect scores on the SAT and extraordinarily high GPAs are rejected by Harvard and that white student “require” a lower SAT and grade to get in that Harvard is discriminating against Asian students. There might be, however, other possible approaches toward this intersectionality between race and education opportunities. When we try to look at this issue from the perspective of Asian students, the case might first appear to be extremely unfair; but when we think deeper, there are more implications than just unfair treatment of Asian students who excel at academics. While admittedly grades and the SAT are important, they do not reflect a student’s characteristic nor does it reflect a student’s actual academic skills regarding conducting researches instead of taking tests. Therefore, there is the need for other standards for the selection of students, such as qualities like leadership and characteristic of students. This on itself does not conflict with the fair chance Asian applicants get. The reason why so many students want to attend great universities is not bonded to values like strong academics and research, but also the quality of the student body as a whole in that there are important life lessons to be learned from one’s peers in colleges. But when qualities like leadership and “social skills” are taken into account, Asian applicants are often marked as having a lack of these characteristics and are rejected, and this phenomenon has a lot of implications. The reason of the quotation marks on ‘social skills’ is that social skills, or the general character of a student, is determined based on western, in fact, highly “white”, values, which is the reason why Asians were often seen as lacking these elements and thus rejected. This, therefore, goes beyond the scope of a matter within universities and colleges. Rather, it is a social issue in that the assessment of individuals in school and out in the society of the United States is still predominantly dominated by white values, which inevitably causes Asians and other “aliens of the United States” to suffer from discrimination. As mentioned, this issue does have two sides. The standard of looking beyond the scope of academics does provide a better learning and university environment for students, yet in the same time there is the social issue of looking at individuals from “white eyes”. The lawsuit going on, therefore, should not have its effect being limited to people rethinking and reassess the college application process, but rather, it partially should have the responsibility of allowing people to reconsider the so-called “social norms” within the United States.