What will help you get into Harvard? Super-rich parents with a chequebook and pen

Want a place at Harvard? Persuade your parents to give the university a nice gift. A new building, perhaps, or a million dollars for a fellowship. That sort of thing.

It has long been understood that you can, to some extent, buy your way into many of the US’s prestigious universities. There are certainly plenty of examples of people with more money than sense being admitted to elite educational institutions. Jared Kushner, for example, got into Harvard despite having a mediocre academic record. To be fair, this may have had nothing to do with his father pledging $2.5m (£1.9m) to the university shortly before he was accepted. Perhaps the admissions office just had a hunch that this was the genius who was finally going to bring peace to the Middle East.

While it is no secret that offering financial gifts to certain Ivy League universities may compensate for a lack of natural gifts, the extent to which Harvard’s admission process favours relatives of big donors is only now being laid bare. This is thanks to a lawsuit currently under way against Harvard that accuses the university of discriminating against Asian Americans. In seeking to determine how Asian Americans are treated by Harvard, the lawsuit has unearthed a number of internal university documents that give unprecedented insight into its (seemingly money-centric) admissions processes.

A 2013 email exchange among Harvard administrators, for example, was presented at the trial on Wednesday. In one email (subject line: “My Hero”), the dean of the university’s Kennedy school of government commends the dean of admissions for doing a great job in extending offers to students with generous parents. “I am simply thrilled about the folks you were able to admit,” the email says. “[Redacted] has already committed to a building.” The other people described as “big wins” in the email were connected to donors who had “committed major money for fellowships”.

Another email made public in the trial talked about rolling out the red carpet for an applicant whose family had donated $1.1m to Harvard. There is also an email exchange in which a Harvard development officer and an admissions dean discuss how much money they are likely to extract from a candidate. “Going forward, I don’t see a significant opportunity for further major gifts,” the email says. “[Redacted] had an art collection which conceivably could come our way. More probably it will go to [a] museum.”

While the lawsuit has brought attention to the way in which donations and admissions are intertwined at Harvard, this wasn’t its primary motive. The case, brought by a nonprofit organisation headed by a controversial conservative, Edward Blum (and supported by the Trump administration), is rather more complicated than that. While ostensibly about racial bias against Asian Americans, the lawsuit is widely seen as an attempt to dismantle affirmative action policies that give traditionally underrepresented groups such as African Americans and Latinos a better chance at attending elite universities such as Harvard.

Blum has been active on this issue for years; he previously brought an unsuccessful lawsuit against the University of Texas at Austin, alleging it discriminated against white students in admissions. When that failed, he declared he “needed Asian plaintiffs”. He apparently decided he would have a better chance at dismantling policies designed to protect African Americans if it was done under the guise of helping Asian Americans.

Conservatives love to decry affirmative action as “reverse racism” and condemn the idea of racial quotas. What this lawsuit, perhaps inadvertently, has made abundantly clear, however, is that the most widespread affirmative action programmes at play in elite institutions don’t help minority racial groups – they help rich, predominantly white people. These programmes just aren’t labelled “affirmative action”. They are labelled the status quo.