Admissions Granted

Admissions Granted was watched as part of the Seattle International Film Festival 2024! It had its showing on Sunday, May 12th as part of the festival, and it was the Seattle premiere of this documentary!

Getting into college can be hard! After all, before you can even qualify, it takes most people at least 12 years to finish high school first. That is a big time commitment. If you don’t do it early on, who knows, you might run out of time. But finishing high school isn’t the only thing you have to do. You also have to take extra tests to show you are smart. You have to stand out, so might need to show you volunteered. Or participated in clubs. Or excelled in the arts. Or had hobbies. Or might need to be a great writer. Who knows!

But then colleges have to pick you. And they look at all these standards. And if they are public a certain percentage need to be in state. They need to make sure they have a diverse student body, and diversity can mean a lot of things. Now for one group of students, who had high marks, perfect scores, and extracurriculars, they had their eyes set on Harvard, and got denied. Now these students, realizing a lot of them were Asian American, founded the “Students for Fair Admissions” (SFFA) group, and decided to sue Harvard, for not including them because of their race. Using affirmative action AGAINST them.

This lead to bigger law suits, and multiple attempts, and eventually UNC got grouped together with it as well, for a lawsuit that would go against the Supreme Court, and threaten to end Affirmative Action forever.

This case was a good poster child for race war.

Now, this case did happen literally summer of 2023. So you might already know the result. If you care about this, you knew the result. But this let you know a lot of the players involved, and hear both sides talk passionately. And how many years this took, waiting for a majority supreme court to be Conservative. At this same time, there is talk of groups being used for alternative purposes. And using the people, even if they don’t care about them, because they just want Affirmative Action to go away.

And this documentary goes into SO MUCH DETAIL. Like, yes, they both sides the argument. And that both sides have legitimate points of view, but not always the full story. For example, just having the best test grades does not mean one is going to be picked for college. There are so many factors involved, and the school is painting a giant picture, that there is something more, and SHOULD be something more. Similar to how the best person who applies for the job might not always get it. Because building diverse groups with different backgrounds and talents makes sense, you don’t want a team of all clones.

This is a frustrating thing, because there is clearly a right side, but the other side has valid points, and it doesn’t mean the absolute destruction of a program. It just means more clarity and changes are needed. But wildly enough with this documentary, there was a line or two at the very end, about asking some deep, deep questions about Harvard and their resources in general, that is such a mind blowing statement, I want a documentary purely on that.

In the end, Harvard isn’t the end all be all of places that must exist. There are so many good places, it shouldn’t be on a pedestal. I love how fair this documentary felt. No one was a bad guy. Well, one lawyer clearly was. But outside of that, people were people, even when yelling in each others faces protest chants outside the Supreme Court.