WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is preparing to redirect resources of the Justice Department’s civil rights division toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants, according to a document obtained by The New York Times.

The document, an internal announcement to the civil rights division, seeks current lawyers interested in working for a new project on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”

The announcement suggests that the project will be run out of the division’s front office, where the Trump administration’s political appointees work, rather than its Educational Opportunities Section, which is run by career civil servants and normally handles work involving schools and universities.</s>Almost exactly a year after a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action, news broke this week that the White House was set to start investigating—and maybe bringing legal action against—colleges with admissions policies seen as unfair to white applicants.

The New York Times reported Tuesday night that the Justice Department under President Donald Trump had announced internally it was looking for lawyers willing to get involved in a project "related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions." Though department officials didn't publicly comment on the article, it was quickly confirmed by The Washington Post. It also immediately became a hot topic of discussion on social media, where the hashtag #AffirmativeAction was trending for most of Wednesday.

Related: Abby Fisher strategist Edward Blum reacts to Trump rumors on affirmative action

But a lot has been going on recently in Washington—like, say, the investigations into the Trump administration's possible links to Russia and the debate over whether a hot dog qualifies as a sandwich—so you may not be as up-to-speed as you'd like on the subject of race-conscious college admissions. If that's the case, we're here to help.

Here are quick answers to the questions you may be too afraid to ask.

What is affirmative action?

Merriam-Webster defines it as "an active effort to improve the employment or educational opportunities of members of minority groups and women." Now, though, we're talking specifically about affirmative action in college admissions, or basically a higher education institution's choice to consider race as part of the application process. It's also referred to as "race-conscious admissions."

Who does it affect?

Every year, about 3.5 million students graduate from high school. Statistically, about two-thirds of them immediately go to college, meaning that as of last fall some 20.5 million people were enrolled in postsecondary institutions, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. About 58 percent of them were white, about 15 percent were black and about 17 percent were Hispanic.

The race gap is real: One study from the Brookings Institution found that black students comprised only 4 percent of undergraduates at top colleges.

Why is it such a big deal?

There are benefits to a diverse campus, like better social development. But there's also evidence that six-year graduation rates are higher at more selective schools. That matters because college graduates make an average of 56 percent more money than people with just high school diplomas, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Is it illegal?

Eight states have banned affirmative action in admissions, among them California, Oklahoma and Florida, according to Pew Research Center. Institutions in those states have tried to increase diversity by examining applicants' socioeconomic class, accepting more community college transfer students and offering more financial aid, The New York Times reported in 2015.

On a national level, the Supreme Court most recently ruled on the issue last year in the case Fisher v. the University of Texas. That lawsuit centered on Abby Fisher, who was rejected from The University of Texas at Austin. At the time of her application, the university had a race-conscious program to evaluate students who didn't make a certain cutoff for instant admission. Fisher said she'd been discriminated against for being white.

After remanding the case to lower courts in 2013, the Supreme Court ultimately decided in June 2016 that the affirmative action policy was constitutional. But there are still a few other cases on the issue in the works right now, including a 2014 lawsuit alleging that Harvard University's policies discriminate against Asian American students.

Do white people have affirmative action, too?

Affirmative action focuses on minority groups, but many critics argue that legacy admissions are an equivalent for affluent white students. Legacy preference is where family or friends of alumni get advantages in the application process—whether that's personal attention from a dean, an automatic advance to the second round of admissions or something else. A 2013 study found that legacy applicants were roughly 23 percent more likely to get into highly selective colleges than standard students with the same qualifications.

So is this Trump story true?

Possibly. After an anonymous source told right-leaning The Daily Caller that the internal announcement that was the basis of the Times story didn't reflect any new policy, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders brought it up at Wednesday's media briefing.

"The New York Times article is based entirely on uncorroborated inferences from a leaked internal personnel posting in violation of Department of Justice policy," she said. "And while the White House does not confirm or deny the existence of potential investigations, the Department of Justice will always review credible allegations of discrimination on the basis of any race."</s>A discrimination complaint lodged against Harvard's admissions process in 2015 by Asian-American groups could get a fresh look by the Department of Justice — setting the stage for renewed debate on the constitutionality of affirmative action.

The Justice Department said Wednesday that it issued a job posting in its Civil Rights Division for "volunteers" to investigate the complaint, filed by a coalition of 64 Asian-American associations, that was left unresolved from the Obama administration.

DOJ spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores' clarification came after The New York Times and The Washington Post published stories Tuesday that said the department is planning a new project to investigate universities' admissions that may discriminate against white applicants.

Flores didn't specify whether the department is moving forward on the 2015 complaint, but the detail that it is still willing to pursue it at all was heralded Thursday by some Asian-American groups as a welcomed surprise.

"Today, we are very encouraged that the Trump Administration will start looking into this issue, providing Asian-American students with equal protection under the laws," the Asian-American Coalition for Education, which filed the Harvard complaint, said in a statement.

The coalition's president, Yukong Zhao, added that Asian-Americans deserve to have the matter heard by the Justice Department.

Last year, his son, Hubert, filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education claiming that despite having a 5.3 GPA, high PSAT and SAT scores, and other sterling credentials, he was unfairly rejected from Cornell and Columbia universities, The Cornell Daily Sun reported.

"We expect that the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education will take concrete actions to help restore the spirit of (the) American Dream: reward individual efforts and merits, and treat all individuals equally," said Zhao, who is also a Chinese-American author from Florida.

His coalition's 2015 complaint was dismissed by the Department of Education that same year because of a similar lawsuit that had already been filed in federal court. The coalition had been hoping the DOJ would still take it up.

Meanwhile, the other lawsuit — involving former stock broker Edward Blum, who runs the group Students for Fair Admissions — also alleged that Harvard's admissions policies are discriminatory against Asian-Americans. His suit remains in the discovery process.

It says the evidence of discrimination can be seen, in part, in the numbers: A 2009 Princeton study found that Asian-Americans need an SAT score 140 points higher than whites to get into a top private college. But compared to Hispanics, they need to score 270 points higher and compared to blacks, 450 points higher.

The suit also says that while Asian-American enrollment hovers around 14 to 18 percent at Ivy League institutions, it's much higher at state schools in California where racial preferences and other attributes have been banned from admissions consideration since 1996.

But other studies have looked at the difficulties minorities have for getting accepted into certain colleges: A 2013 University of Washington study noted a 23 percentage point drop in minority admissions at public research universities where affirmative action is banned, compared to 1 percent in states without bans.

Proponents of race-based admissions point to Harvard's latest student body data that shows the class of 2021 is more than 22 percent Asian-American — higher than the nearly 15 percent of African-Americans, nearly 12 percent of Latinos and 2.5 percent of Native Americans or Pacific Islanders.

Harvard spokeswoman Rachael Dane said the school — which has a 6 percent acceptance rate, making it one of the hardest colleges to get into — prides itself on attracting a diverse class.

"Harvard's admissions process considers each applicant as a whole person, and we review many factors, consistent with the legal standards established by the U.S. Supreme Court," she said.

The Supreme Court last year upheld the affirmative action policy at the University of Texas Austin after a white student sued the school for racial discrimination in the admissions process.

Prominent Asian-American groups lauded that ruling, saying that while Asian-American students may feel jilted for not being accepted to elite schools despite having the grades, the idea of affirmative action for race is necessary for fostering a level-playing field and bridging disparities in higher education.</s>In 2015, when 64 Asian American groups filed a complaint with the Department of Justice alleging that Harvard University illegally discriminated against Asian students in admissions, Joe Zhou had little hope it would go anywhere.

He had made the same allegation against Harvard in a lawsuit on behalf of his son, who had been denied admission despite near-perfect ACT and SAT scores, a 4.44 grade-point average, being named class valedictorian, and a resume that included teaching English in China and serving as captain of the varsity tennis team.

So when the Trump administration announced Wednesday that it planned to investigate racial discrimination against Asians in college admissions, Zhou was thrilled.

“Maybe now people will finally pay attention to something we Asian Americans have been talking about for so long,” he said.

His lawsuit is making its way through a Massachusetts federal district court. His son, who is listed an an anonymous plaintiff in the lawsuit and who did not want his name used in this story, currently attends UC Berkeley.

The broader Asian American community is divided on the issue, with several groups criticizing the administration’s announcement.

“Affirmative action benefits everyone, including Asian Americans,” said Nicole Gon Ochi, an attorney for the civil rights group Asian Americans Advancing Justice, which has filed arguments in the Zhou case backing Harvard’s admission policies. “It especially helps traditionally disadvantaged Asian American students, like Southeast Asian university students and low-income Asian students.”

The group helped sponsor a 2016 poll that found that 64% of Asian American voters supported “affirmative action programs designed to help blacks, women, and other minorities get better access to higher education.”

About 25% of Asians surveyed opposed affirmative action. Among those of Indian, Chinese, Philippine, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese descent who responded, support was lowest among Chinese, at 41%.

Zhou, who is Chinese American, said he’s frequently heard complaints about admissions procedures from friends and families in his community.

“This will not help my son, who will graduate soon, but it could help Asian Americans for the next 200 years,” said Zhou, who is a board member of Students for Fair Admissions, a conservative group that recruits plaintiffs for lawsuits against affirmative action at universities.

It supported a white student’s case against the University of Texas at Austin that was decided last year by the Supreme Court, which said race could be considered in admissions.

In its Wednesday announcement, the Trump administration did not mention Harvard specifically but said the Justice Department would investigate a complaint lodged by 64 Asian groups about discrimination at a university.

The complaint also argues that Harvard’s use of “holistic” admissions — which take into account a wide range of factors beyond academic performance — is really a way “to disguise the fact that it holds Asian Americans to a far higher standard than other students and essentially forces them to compete against each other for admission.”

Many of the groups that filed the Harvard complaint are small, suburban cultural or educational associations, such as the Great Neck Chinese Assn. on New York’s Long Island or the 1441 Manufactured-Home Residents Assn., which represents residents of a mobile home community in Rowland Heights, Calif.

Affirmative action opponents often cite a 2009 study that found Asian Americans had to score 140 points higher on SAT exams in order to be on equal footing with whites in private university admissions — a difference they sometimes call the “Asian tax.”

Sarah Isgur Flores, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said it “is committed to protecting all Americans from all forms of illegal race-based discrimination.”

At Harvard, which has argued in a Supreme Court brief that not considering race would hurt its “excellence” as a school, the incoming class of freshmen is 22.2% Asian American, 14.6% African American, 11.6% Latino, 2.5% Native American or Pacific Islander, and 49.1% white.

By comparison, the U.S. population is 5.7% Asian American, 13.3% African American, 17.8% Latino, 1.3% Native American or Alaska Native, 0.02% Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and 61.3% white, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Shien Biau Woo, a former lieutenant governor of Delaware, said perceptions of admission disparities spurred the get-out-the-Asian vote group he founded, called the 80-20 Initiative, to sign on to the Department of Justice complaint.

“We didn’t get anywhere on this for a while because we were in a Democratic administration, and politicians serve their party’s interest,” said Woo, a political independent and former Democrat.

But groups on the other side of the issue say enrollment statistics alone don’t tell the full story.

“Most opponents of affirmative action from Asian American communities believe Asians who have higher test scores are missing out on the opportunity to go to elite schools,” Ochi said. “But the test score phenomenon exists regardless of whether the university considers race in its admission. So there is something else happening.”

Ken Forde-Mazrui, a University of Virginia law professor who specializes in race, said that the focus on university admissions is misguided — and that the Trump administration is taking up the complaint by Asians largely because their interests align with those of many whites.

“This is primarily about conservative leaders protecting the privilege of access to society’s resources and opportunities for certain white constituents,” he said. “Such leaders’ purported concern for discrimination against Asian Americans is politically opportunistic.

“I don’t see many of them concerned about discrimination against Asian Americans in other contexts,” he added, “such as the ‘bamboo ceiling’ in corporate America, where such discrimination does not harm white interests.”</s>The Justice Department signaled Wednesday that it would examine “race-based discrimination” in college admissions, alarming some civil rights advocates who fear that the Trump administration is trying to roll back affirmative action policies.

In an internal job posting, the department’s Civil Rights Division said it was seeking lawyers willing to work on an investigation and potential litigation involving race-based admissions policies.

Although Justice Department officials said the move does not herald a shift toward attacking race-conscious admissions policies, civil rights advocates and legal experts said the investment of resources could have a ripple effect that hurts minority students hoping to enroll in college.

In addition, they say, the effort by Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, who as an Alabama senator voiced opposition to affirmative action, is another stark contrast between the priorities of his Justice Department and those of former Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr., who served under President Obama.

“Whenever there’s a credible allegation of discrimination on the basis of race, the department will look into it,” said a Justice Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the department’s policy to not discuss personnel matters.

The Justice Department’s job posting was first reported late Tuesday by the New York Times. At her regular briefing on Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders acknowledged that the newspaper had obtained a “leaked internal personnel posting,” but declined to comment on it, except to say: “The Department of Justice will always review credible allegations of discrimination on the basis of any race.”

Hours later, the Justice Department issued a statement saying the posting was in response to a complaint filed in 2015 regarding allegations of discrimination against Asian Americans in an unidentified university’s admissions practices.

In recent years, the Supreme Court has mostly ruled favorably on affirmative action in college admissions, although it has upheld some restrictions at the state level that have significantly chipped away at the practice.

Last year, in a 4-3 decision, the Supreme Court upheld the use of race as one factor in evaluating college applicants. The case, Fisher vs. University of Texas, centered on Abigail Fisher, a white Texas resident, who filed suit after she was denied admission there. She had argued that the university’s consideration of race in admissions discriminated against her because she was white.

In cases in 2003 and 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that race could be among several factors weighed when admitting students.

The 1978 case, Regents of University of California vs. Bakke, was a major turning point, said Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, who argued in favor of affirmative action before the Supreme Court in 2003 in cases involving the University of Michigan.

In the Bakke case, which involved a medical school applicant to UC Davis, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote that university leaders could not use affirmative action to correct social injustice, but could as a way to achieve a diverse student body which would contribute to a "robust exchange of ideas."

“It severed a major reason for using the policy,” Bollinger said.

The job posting at the Justice Department caused concerns among civil rights groups that fear the Trump administration will seek to investigate claims similar to Fisher’s.

Jessica A. Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said the Justice Department could indirectly intimidate universities from using race as a factor in admissions.

“This easily could have a chilling effect, as universities would not want to be subject to being sued or investigated,” Levinson said.

Derrick Johnson, interim president and chief executive of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, said in a statement that the Justice Department “seems laser-focused on achieving rights and privileges for ‘just-us,’ totally excluding people of color.”

“Affirmative action was not created as a way for African-Americans, Latinos, or Asian-Americans to get an unfair advantage over their white peers,” Johnson said. “It’s a mechanism to level the playing field and create equal opportunity for people of color following decades of oppression. We should promote and foster efforts to promote diversity on college and university campuses not hinder it.”

And Matt Cregor, education projects director at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice, said, “If they want to go after affirmative action, they should go after legacy.”

So-called legacy admissions policies, which favor the children of alumni, ultimately exclude minorities from pipelines to leadership jobs, said USC Rossier School of Education professor Estela Bensimon.

“Criteria have changed over time, depending on who was being advantaged,” she said. “When Jews were outscoring non-Jewish white students, the criteria for admission at elite universities changed to include ‘character.’”

Legacy is typically an issue at private schools, which have generally been outside the scope of efforts to rein in affirmative action.

While the courts have affirmed the use of affirmative action in higher education, eight states, including Michigan, Oklahoma, California and Arizona, have barred its use. The state bans generally arose from ballot initiatives or state legislators.

“There’s long been a perception that there were enormous preferences given to minority students and that this crowded out lots and lots of white students,” said Jesse Rothstein, professor of public policy and economics at the UC Berkeley.

In California, voters greenlighted the ban through a ballot initiative in 1996, Proposition 209, which passed with 54.6% of the vote.

The measure’s passage initially decreased black and Latino enrollment throughout the University of California system, particularly at its most selective schools. But UCLA has used other methods, such as recruiting in high-minority areas, to boost its diversity: In 2015, the school caught up to its pre-Proposition 209 levels of minority student enrollment.</s>The Justice Department signaled Wednesday that it would examine “race-based discrimination” in college admissions, alarming some civil rights advocates who fear that the Trump administration is trying to roll back affirmative action policies.

In an internal job posting, the department’s Civil Rights Division said it was seeking lawyers willing to work on an investigation and potential litigation involving race-based admissions policies.

Although Justice Department officials said the move does not herald a shift toward attacking race-conscious admissions policies, civil rights advocates and legal experts said the investment of resources could have a ripple effect that hurts minority students hoping to enroll in college.

In addition, they say, the effort by Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, who as an Alabama senator voiced opposition to affirmative action, is another stark contrast between the priorities of his Justice Department and those of former Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr., who served under President Obama.

“Whenever there’s a credible allegation of discrimination on the basis of race, the department will look into it,” said a Justice Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the department’s policy to not discuss personnel matters.

The Justice Department’s job posting was first reported late Tuesday by the New York Times. At her regular briefing on Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders acknowledged that the newspaper had obtained a “leaked internal personnel posting,” but declined to comment on it, except to say: “The Department of Justice will always review credible allegations of discrimination on the basis of any race.”

Hours later, the Justice Department issued a statement saying the posting was in response to a complaint filed in 2015 regarding allegations of discrimination against Asian Americans in an unidentified university’s admissions practices.

In recent years, the Supreme Court has mostly ruled favorably on affirmative action in college admissions, although it has upheld some restrictions at the state level that have significantly chipped away at the practice.

Last year, in a 4-3 decision, the Supreme Court upheld the use of race as one factor in evaluating college applicants. The case, Fisher vs. University of Texas, centered on Abigail Fisher, a white Texas resident, who filed suit after she was denied admission there. She had argued that the university’s consideration of race in admissions discriminated against her because she was white.

In cases in 2003 and 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that race could be among several factors weighed when admitting students.

The 1978 case, Regents of University of California vs. Bakke, was a major turning point, said Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, who argued in favor of affirmative action before the Supreme Court in 2003 in cases involving the University of Michigan.

In the Bakke case, which involved a medical school applicant to UC Davis, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote that university leaders could not use affirmative action to correct social injustice, but could as a way to achieve a diverse student body which would contribute to a "robust exchange of ideas."

“It severed a major reason for using the policy,” Bollinger said.

The job posting at the Justice Department caused concerns among civil rights groups that fear the Trump administration will seek to investigate claims similar to Fisher’s.

Jessica A. Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said the Justice Department could indirectly intimidate universities from using race as a factor in admissions.

“This easily could have a chilling effect, as universities would not want to be subject to being sued or investigated,” Levinson said.

Derrick Johnson, interim president and chief executive of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, said in a statement that the Justice Department “seems laser-focused on achieving rights and privileges for ‘just-us,’ totally excluding people of color.”

“Affirmative action was not created as a way for African-Americans, Latinos, or Asian-Americans to get an unfair advantage over their white peers,” Johnson said. “It’s a mechanism to level the playing field and create equal opportunity for people of color following decades of oppression. We should promote and foster efforts to promote diversity on college and university campuses not hinder it.”

And Matt Cregor, education projects director at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice, said, “If they want to go after affirmative action, they should go after legacy.”

So-called legacy admissions policies, which favor the children of alumni, ultimately exclude minorities from pipelines to leadership jobs, said USC Rossier School of Education professor Estela Bensimon.

“Criteria have changed over time, depending on who was being advantaged,” she said. “When Jews were outscoring non-Jewish white students, the criteria for admission at elite universities changed to include ‘character.’”

Legacy is typically an issue at private schools, which have generally been outside the scope of efforts to rein in affirmative action.

While the courts have affirmed the use of affirmative action in higher education, eight states, including Michigan, Oklahoma, California and Arizona, have barred its use. The state bans generally arose from ballot initiatives or state legislators.

“There’s long been a perception that there were enormous preferences given to minority students and that this crowded out lots and lots of white students,” said Jesse Rothstein, professor of public policy and economics at the UC Berkeley.

In California, voters greenlighted the ban through a ballot initiative in 1996, Proposition 209, which passed with 54.6% of the vote.

The measure’s passage initially decreased black and Latino enrollment throughout the University of California system, particularly at its most selective schools. But UCLA has used other methods, such as recruiting in high-minority areas, to boost its diversity: In 2015, the school caught up to its pre-Proposition 209 levels of minority student enrollment.

“UC has been increasing its outreach efforts to historically underrepresented groups like Latinos and African Americans, while still bound to the strictures of Proposition 209, which bars consideration of race or ethnicity in granting admission,” UC President Janet Napolitano said in a statement. “It would be tragic, to say the least, if these efforts somehow ran afoul of this reported misguided Justice Department initiative.”

One reason states started banning affirmative action, Bollinger said, is a disconnection from history. During the civil rights movement and the Jim Crow era, Bollinger said, people were “painfully aware of the injustices of slavery and Jim Crow laws that favored whites over African Americans and Hispanics,” he said. “It’s hard for movements to sustain themselves.”

In 1997, Sessions told the Senate Judiciary Committee that affirmative action was a “very, very difficult subject.“

”I think it has, in fact, been a cause of irritation and perhaps has delayed the kind of movement to racial harmony we ought to be going forward [with] today. I think it makes people unhappy if they lost a contract or a right to go to a school or a privilege to attend a university simply because of their race,” he said at the time.

More recently, Sessions’ Justice Department has staked out positions on civil rights that have concerned several groups and have contrasted with positions under the Obama administration.

Last month, the department filed a brief in an employment discrimination case arguing that the Civil Rights Act does not protect people who are fired because of their sexual orientation. And in July, the department reversed an Obama-era position on a Texas voter identification law. The department filed a motion in a federal court to dismiss the department's earlier claim that the ID law was enacted with the intention of discriminating against minority voters.

In a May memo to federal prosecutors, Sessions instructed them to pursue the harshest punishments legally allowed, another reversal of an Obama-era move that gave federal lawyers more leeway to reserve such prosecutions for repeat offenders and people who had committed the worst of crimes. Justice Department officials hope the changes at the federal level — which prosecutes a sliver of crimes across the country — will trickle down to a similar approach to crime in states.

Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which advocates on behalf of civil rights groups, focused on affirmative action Wednesday, saying the move by the Justice Department was another example of the administration “changing course on a key civil rights issue.”

“The announcement today that it is now actively seeking to challenge efforts that colleges and universities have undertaken to expand educational opportunity is an affront to our values as a country and the very mission of the Civil Rights Division,” Gupta, who led that division under Obama, said in a statement. “Longstanding Supreme Court precedent has upheld the constitutionality and compelling state interest of these policies, and generations of Americans have benefited from richer, more inclusive institutions of higher education.”

Times staff writer Joseph Tanfani in Washington contributed to this report.</s>The U.S. Justice Department is planning to investigate and possibly sue universities over admissions policies that discriminate against white applicants, the New York Times reported on Tuesday, citing a department document.

The internal memo seeks lawyers in the department’s Civil Rights Division who are interested in working on a new project on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions,” the Times reported.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that universities may use affirmative action admissions policies, which are intended to give minority applicants an edge in getting into college. The court has rejected racial quotas but said race could be used as one factor among many in evaluating an applicant.

Critics of affirmative action say that in some cases it goes too far in discriminating against white and Asian-American applicants.

The Times said the Justice Department document does not explicitly say whom it considers at risk because of affirmative action admissions policies. But the Times reported that supporters and critics of the project said it clearly targeted admissions programs that seek to help black and Latino students.

A Justice Department spokesman told Reuters the department would not comment on personnel matters.

The Times said the document suggests the project will be run out of a part of the Civil Right Division where its political appointees work, rather than the Educational Opportunities Section, which is devoted to handling cases involving universities and is run by career civil servants.</s>By most standards, Austin Jia holds an enviable position. A rising sophomore at Duke, Mr Jia attends one of the top universities in the country, setting him up for success.

But with his high GPA, nearly perfect SAT score and activities — debate team, tennis captain and state orchestra — Mr Jia believes he should have had a fair shot at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania. Those Ivy League colleges rejected him after he applied in the fall of 2015.

It was particularly disturbing, Mr Jia said, when classmates with lower scores than his — but who were not Asian-American, like him — were admitted to those

“My gut reaction was that I was super disillusioned by how the whole system was set up,” Mr Jia, 19, said.

Students like Mr Jia are now the subject of a lawsuit accusing of discriminating against Asian-Americans in admissions by imposing a penalty for their high achievement and giving preferences to other

The case, which is clearly aimed for the Supreme Court, puts Asian-Americans front and centre in the latest stage of the affirmative action debate. The issue is whether there has been discrimination against Asian-Americans in the name of creating a diverse student body. The Justice Department, which has signalled that it is looking to investigate “intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions,” may well focus on

The case asserts that the university’s admissions process amounts to an illegal quota system, in which roughly the same percentage of African-Americans, Hispanics, whites and Asian-Americans have been admitted year after year, despite fluctuations in application rates and qualifications.

“It falls afoul of our most basic civil rights principles, and those principles are that your race and your ethnicity should not be something to be used to harm you in life or help you in life,” said Edward Blum, the president of Students for Fair Admissions, the organization that is suing

His group, a conservative-leaning non-profit based in Virginia, has filed similar suits against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Texas at Austin, asserting that white students are at a disadvantage at those colleges because of their admissions policies.

The federal government potentially has the ability to influence university admissions policies by withholding federal funds under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids racial discrimination in programs that receive federal money.

In many ways, the system the lawsuit is attacking is one points to with pride. The university has a long and pioneering history of support for affirmative action, going back at least to when Derek Bok, appointed president of in 1971, embraced policies that became a national model.

The university has extended that ethos to many low-income students, allowing them to attend free. has argued in a Supreme Court brief that while it sets no quotas for “blacks, or of musicians, football players, physicists or Californians,” if it wants to achieve true diversity, it must pay some attention to the numbers. The university has also said that abandoning race-conscious admissions would diminish the “excellence” of a education.

Melodie Jackson, a spokeswoman for Harvard, said that the university’s admissions policy was fair; that it looked at each applicant “as a whole person,” consistent with standards established by the Supreme Court; and that it promoted “the ability to work with people from different backgrounds, life experiences and perspectives.”

Harvard’s class of 2021 is 14.6 percent African-American, 22.2 percent Asian-American, 11.6 percent Hispanic and 2.5 percent Native American or Pacific Islander, according to data on the university’s website.

For the case, initially filed in 2014, Mr. Blum said, the federal court in Boston has allowed the plaintiffs to demand records from four highly competitive high schools with large numbers of Asian-American students: Stuyvesant High School in New York; Monta Vista High School in the Silicon Valley city of Cupertino; Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va.; and the Boston Latin School.

The goal is to look at whether students with comparable qualifications have different odds of admission that could be correlated with race and how stereotypes influence the process. A Princeton study found that students who identify as Asian need to score 140 points higher on the SAT than whites to have the same chance of admission to private colleges, a difference some have called “the Asian tax.”

The lawsuit also cites Harvard’s Asian-American enrollment at 18 percent in 2013, and notes very similar numbers ranging from 14 to 18 percent at other Ivy League colleges, like Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton and Yale.

In contrast, it says, in the same year, Asian-Americans made up 34.8 percent of the student body at the University of California, Los Angeles, 32.4 percent at Berkeley and 42.5 percent at Caltech. It attributes the higher numbers in the state university system to the fact that California banned racial preferences by popular referendum in 1996, though California also has a large number of Asian-Americans.

The data, experts say, suggests that if were forbidden to use race as a factor in admissions, the Asian-American admissions rate would rise, and the percentage of white, black and Hispanic students would fall.

argued that Mr. Blum’s group lacked standing to sue, but the court rejected the motion in June, based on signed declarations from several Asian-American applicants to who were rejected and who are members of the organization.

A year ago, the Supreme Court upheld a University of Texas admissions plan that allows race and ethnicity to be considered as one of many factors in admission. But some legal experts noted that Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in his dissent, said the Texas plan discriminated against Asian-Americans, and they saw that as a future theme to be pursued by opponents of affirmative action.

Alan Dershowitz, the law professor, echoed that view on Wednesday.

“The idea of discriminating against Asians in order to make room for other minorities doesn’t seem right as a matter of principle,” Mr. Dershowitz said.

Mr. Dershowitz said that investigating discrimination against whites, however, raised a different set of questions.

“Generically, whites have not been the subject of historic discrimination,” Mr. Dershowitz said. “When you start getting into subgroups of whites, then the question becomes a more subtle one.”

The lawsuit likens attitudes toward Asian-Americans to attitudes toward Jews at Harvard, beginning around 1920, when Jews were a high-achieving minority. In 1918, Jews reached 20 percent of the freshman class, and the university soon proposed a quota to lower the number of Jewish students.

That history, Mr. Dershowitz said, made affirmative action opponents wary of admissions policies that resulted in a college population reflecting a group’s share of the general population.

Some Asian-American students believe Harvard’s system has enriched their educational experience. Emily Choi, who will be a junior with a history and literature concentration at this fall, said the university had been her dream school since she visited in seventh grade.

She graduated from Ardsley High School in Westchester County, N.Y., as editor of the newspaper, president of the Latin Club and vice president of the student council with a 4.0 G.P.A. and 35 out of 36 on the ACT.

She was not aware of concerns about discrimination against Asian-Americans until she arrived on campus and heard about the lawsuit, she said, and she was glad of the diversity she found at

“I firmly believe in affirmative action,” Ms. Choi said. “The diversity at has been key to my learning, and I think that if there weren’t so many people of different backgrounds, I wouldn’t be forced to think about things in new ways.”

Mr. Jia, who is not a party to the lawsuit against Harvard, graduated in 2016 from Millburn High School in New Jersey.

He applied to 14 colleges, including Duke, Cornell, Dartmouth, Brown, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Rutgers, New York University, Georgetown and the University of Pennsylvania. His SAT score was 2340 out of 2400, his G.P.A. was 4.42 and he took 11 Advanced Placement courses.

In addition to playing tennis, participating in the debate team and playing violin in the state orchestra, he did advocacy for an Asian-American student group.

“All I know is that my student profile and all the extracurriculars I was involved in, and the grades I achieved were, I think, sufficient to get into a couple of the schools I applied to,” he said.

The experience has left Mr. Jia questioning the admissions process. “I felt that the whole concept of meritocracy — which America likes to say it exercises all the time — I felt that principle was defeated a little in my mind,” he said.

But, he added, he is coming to terms with the results. “I didn’t want to blame everything on one reason.”</s>School-admission campaigners and experts breathed a collective sigh of relief when a long-sought-after pledge to review England’s overstretched system featured in the Conservatives’ general election manifesto.

For years, they have been calling on the government to look again at the increasingly fragmented and complex school admissions system. But since the election, there has been silence on the subject. And those in favour of change are becoming concerned that ministers could yet shy away from a debate over what is always a divisive issue.

Now that the full academisation and grammar school policies that pushed school admissions back up the agenda have been abandoned, could a review of the entire system go the same way?

Dame Sally Coates, United Learning’s director of academies in the south of England – who has repeatedly called for the admissions system to be overhauled – doubts it will happen. “I wish there was a review, but I don’t think there will be anything,” she says. “It is a bit of a hot potato, which is why I don’t think they have done anything about it yet.

“At the moment, admissions is complex and open to back-door selection. It needs to be centralised and transparent.”

School admissions has become an increasingly controversial subject ever since the number of state schools granted autonomy began to grow during the 1990s.

In 2007, a toughened-up admissions code, for which schools were required to “act in accordance” with rather than just “having regard” to, was designed to put escalating concerns about back-door selection to rest. But a decade later, those fears are back with a vengeance. And it is not just about the huge expansion of admission authorities triggered by the mass academisation that began under the coalition government in 2010; there is also concern about whether those expected to police this increasingly complicated system have the capacity to do the job.

Last year, Tes established that the number of academies – which control their own admissions – rose by 2,226 per cent between 2010-15. But the amount of public money spent on the Office of the Schools Adjudicator (OSA) – which oversees England’s state school admissions system – rose by less than 5 per cent in real terms over the same period.

The resources of local authorities, which also have a key role in monitoring admissions, are increasingly being stretched, too.

Another potential problem is that schools no longer have to revise their admissions “immediately” following an OSA ruling, although they must still do so within two months.

Alan Parker, a former schools adjudicator, believes that the proportion of admission authorities trying to retain policies that do not comply with the code are likely to have increased following the change, brought in by the coalition government.

“The government could restore [these powers] but that would be to admit that [former education secretary] Michael Gove was wrong in 2011,” he says. “A May government is unlikely to be seen to be reversing things done by Michael Gove.”

It is not as though the government is unaware of problems with admissions. In March last year, as universal academisation was being discussed, ministers were considering radical changes to school admissions that would hand back some academy powers to local authorities. Admissions re-emerged as a political issue later in 2016, as the government unveiled its now-abandoned plan for more academic selection.

In September, Theresa May used her first speech as prime minister to call for an end to “selection by house price”. Tes understands that Department for Education officials went on to hold discussions earlier this year with academics, think-tanks and other experts on admissions to explore how the system could be made fairer (bit.ly/AdmissionReform).

May hoped that lifting a ban on new grammar schools would overcome some of the selection-by-house-price issue. But the Tory manifesto acknowledged that this would not be enough to solve the problems that less-affluent families faced when trying to secure “the best” school places. A review of admissions was needed.

“[Increasing academic selection] will have a great effect, but alone they cannot overcome the unfairness of selection by house price, where ordinary, working-class families find it difficult to access the best schools because they cannot afford to live in the catchment area,” it read.

“We will therefore conduct a review of school admissions policy.”

The manifesto was definite about what this would not mean: “We will be clear at the outset that we will never introduce a mandatory lottery-based school admissions policy” (see box, page 9).

But detail was scarce about what was on the table. When asked after the election in June whether plans remained to carry out a review, the response from schools minister Nick Gibb was not wholly encouraging. He would only say that the DfE “routinely keep the admissions system under review”.

Fears are now growing that the issue has been overtaken by events. Melissa Benn, chair of admissions campaign group Comprehensive Future, says: “My feeling is that the landscape is so unstable now and the Tories are in such disarray that I expect they don’t know [what’s going on].”

Even in the DfE admission meetings, held before the Conservatives suffered their disappointment at the polls, Tes understands that there was little agreement between experts on what should be done.

One source who attended the meetings says: “I got the sense they were a bit directionless. They thought that if they got experts together, there would be some obvious things that could be done. But it was clear in the meetings that there just wasn’t a lot of consensus. To me, there are not easy wins around admissions.”

Agreement over the key problems that currently exist is easier to find. Critics are concerned that the admissions system still gives those families able to afford a house near a top-performing school a better chance of securing a place.

And there are fears that the growing number of academies, as well as some schools’ lengthy and complex oversubscription criteria, are making the system more difficult to navigate for parents of disadvantaged children who would benefit most from a good school (bit.ly/SharpElbows).

Social-mobility charity the Sutton Trust argues that a fairer solution would see school places allocated via lottery, or banding, to reduce the emphasis on catchment areas and allow more disadvantaged children to access schools with good results.

Banding aims to secure a “fair” comprehensive intake by dividing children into ability groups and then taking pupils from each band. But the approach is open to manipulation.

Others say that a review is needed to look again at the role of the local authority in school admissions. Currently, councils still play a central role in policing admission arrangements and co-ordinating applications for school places. But as more schools have become academies, and therefore now run their own admissions, it has become harder for local authorities to carry out these responsibilities.

Rebecca Allen, director of thinktank Education Datalab, believes that the government needs to be clearer on what it thinks the ongoing role of a local authority should be.

“How can they retain the statutory duty to ensure each child has a suitable education if they cannot control school-place provision and admissions?” she asks.

Early last year, Tes reported that ministers were considering putting local authorities in charge of appeals over academy admission decisions and for admissions to academies during the school year, as part of a move towards an entirely academised system (see bit.ly/AcademiesAdmissions). Such a move might have been welcomed in some quarters, but it would have represented a major U-turn on a key component of the academies programme: autonomy over admissions.

While academies, and the trusts that run them, retain the freedom to set their own admissions, concerns are growing about how they are choosing to use this autonomy.

This year’s OSA annual report included local authority warnings about a growing tendency for multi-academy trusts to name primaries within their chains as feeder schools in the oversubscription criteria for their secondaries – even if these primaries were some distance away from the secondary.

Councils say this has had an effect on their planning for school places and can lead to “a fall in successful preference allocations, possible increases in transport costs and a deficit of places in some areas”.

OSA reports during the past year also reveal that a number of faith schools have increasingly complex admission arrangements. In some cases, religious schools have required families to fill out supplementary information forms that asked for prohibited information.

There seems little doubt that an overhaul of school admissions is needed. And the Conservatives’ manifesto and DfE roundtable meetings on admissions suggest there is government recognition of the flaws in the current system.

The reappointment as education secretary of Justine Greening, who regards social mobility as a priority, has also boosted hopes of a significant review. But as Parker says: “Reviews of admissions are easy to announce, but more difficult to put into effect.”

School admissions remain a potential minefield for ministers, especially when you lack a parliamentary majority – and even more so when the experts you have consulted are divided on the solution.</s>FILE PHOTO -- A student walks at the University of Texas campus in Austin, Texas, June 23, 2016. The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday, upheld the practice of considering race in college admissions, rejecting a white woman's challenge to a University of Texas affirmative action program designed to boost the enrollment of minority students. REUTERS/Jon Herskovitz/File Photo

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department is planning to investigate and possibly sue universities over admissions policies that discriminate against white applicants, the New York Times reported on Tuesday, citing a department document.

The internal memo seeks lawyers in the department's Civil Rights Division who are interested in working on a new project on "investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions," the Times reported.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that universities may use affirmative action admissions policies, which are intended to give minority applicants an edge in getting into college. The court has rejected racial quotas but said race could be used as one factor among many in evaluating an applicant.

Critics of affirmative action say that in some cases it goes too far in discriminating against white and Asian applicants.

The Times said the Justice Department document does not explicitly say whom it considers at risk because of affirmative action admissions policies. But the Times reported that supporters and critics of the project said it clearly targeted admissions programs that seek to help black and Latino students.

A Justice Department spokesman told Reuters the department would not comment on personnel matters.
The U.S. Justice Department announces internally that it is to start investigating colleges which have admissions policies that are seen as unfair to Asian Americans.