Are Jewish students over-represented at Harvard University?

Question

According to David Duke:

Jews are dramatically over-represented in comparison with every ethnic/racial group in America. In comparison with European Americans, Jews are almost 47 times more represented than their population would merit. That’s four thousand seven hundred percent over-represented in comparison with the actual population of Jews and European Americans!

Is it true?

Search for the claim in Google returns results from mainly alt-right and biased websites.

Answer 1

Jewish students are overrepresented in Harvard compared to the percentage of Jews in the US total population, but the graph shown misleading and is based on wrong numbers.

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The Graph is Misleading

Instead of showing the representation of different ethnicities compared to their percentage in the general population, which is what we are accustomed to see, we are presented information in a new way, where the numbers compared are the representation percentages, a very strange and unusual way to show data. It's shown like this in order to convey a higher representation percentage for Jews than the real one. They try to claim:

Jews are almost 47 times more represented than their population would merit

But looking at the site, we see that their numbers are:

Jews are 1.8 percent of college age Americans and given 25 percent of the admissions.

Those numbers are wrong, but even if we take the numbers as true, that would put the Jewish overrepresentation at 13.9 times and not 47 times.

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The Numbers are Wrong

Going over the claim in the site, as mentioned above, Duke claims that Jews are 25% percent of the Harvard students, as cites the source as Hillel and Princeton review without linking to the sources. But, according to Hillel the number of Jews on campus is:

   6694          4109          803(12%)             822(20%)
Undergrads    Graduates    Jewish Undergrads    Jewish Graduates

Which makes the total percentage of Jewish students in Harvard 15%.

The number of Jews in the population is hard to find, as it's not asked in the US census. According to a New York Times survey:

Jews make up 2.2 percent of the American population, a percentage that has held steady for the past two decades. The survey estimates there are 5.3 million Jewish adults as well as 1.3 million children being raised at least partly Jewish.

Which puts the representation of Jews in Harvard at 704%.¹

Other ethnicities in Harvard, according to the Harvard admission statistics are²:

African American                    13.7%
Asian American                      22.1%
Hispanic or Latino                  12.6%
Native American or Pacific Islander 2.6%

Which means that 51% percent of the admissions are non white. Adding to it the Jewish number would mean that 34% of Harvard admissions are "European American".³

From the 2010 US census (wikipedia link) the percentage of the US population according to ethnicity is:

Non-Hispanic White                                      63.7 %
Non-Hispanic Black                                      12.2 %
Non-Hispanic Asian                                      4.7 %
Hispanic or Latino                                      16.3 %
Non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaska Native           0.7 %
Non-Hispanic Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander  0.2 %

Again, assuming that Jews count as Non-Hispanic White, the percentage of "European American" is 61.5%.

Which makes the representation of each group:

"European American"                 55%
Asian American                      470%
African American / Black            112%
Hispanic or Latino                  77%
Native American or Pacific Islander 288%

Putting those number into the nonsensical formula of the chart would yield the following results⁴:

Jewish overrepresentation in Harvard compared to other ethnicities overrepresentation:

• "European American": 12.8 to 1
• Hispanic or Latino: 9.14 to 1
• African American: 6.28 to 1
• Native American or Pacific Islander: 2.44 to 1
• Asian American: 1.49 to 1

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^{1 - Representation is calculated as: (% of students of certain ethnicity)/(% of US citizens of that ethnicity).}

^{2 - I couldn't find the percentage of students in Harvard by ethnicity/race (other than for Jews), nor the admission numbers for Jews, so I'm using the numbers I have. Also the admissions document doesn't state if it's for undergrads only or for grad and undergrad programs. I assumed the former, as it makes the Jewish overrepresentation bigger. In case where we are talking only about undergrad programs, then the Jewish representation would fall to 545%, which is still the biggest representation, but it's significantly lower than the 704% figure.}

^{3 - Jews come in all the colors of the rainbow and can be of different races, since they are not regarded as a separate race in the sources used, I had to chose what to take them from. Since most of the Jews are of European, Middle Eastern or North African (non black) descent, and since that would be the most generous interpretation of the claim (as it would reduce the number of "European American" and thus make their representation even smaller) I chose to deduct the number of Jews from the number of non Hispanic White in both the Harvard admission percentage and the US population percentage.}

^{4 - Overrepresentation ration is calculated as: (representation % of Jews in Harvard)/(representation % of the other ethnicity in Harvard).}