I raise the question, why do elite Universities even have a right to exist? We should make the public system free and excellent like in other countries. When I meet international students and postdocs at ivys they think our system is a travesty. People are "buying" degrees when in their country only the rich and stupid have to do so. Furthermore, the undergraduate culture on campus is one completely divorced from the rest of society and doused in unexamined privilege.

Nationalize Harvard!

https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/

There is a third, peaceful path. Keep the government's nose out of all private, contractual relationships unless one party initiates the use of force.

This case is very unfortunate, because it literally pits racial categories against one another, and claims that Asian-Americans are being unfairly disadvantaged by affirmative action applied to Hispanic and Black applicants, whose likelihood of successful admittance is proportionally much higher, in part due to their race. What's unusual is Asian-Americans apply to Harvard at much higher rates that they occur in the population, which complicates the math, and encourages some reflection about the roles of affirmative action, e.g. whether it intends to counterbalance a pipeline shortfall, or improve absolute outcomes among groups whose society-wide outcomes have lagged behind, or to right past wrongs. These are questions worth asking among ourselves when we see that in some cases, and when faced with the allocation of a limited number of a resource (a chance for a Harvard education) to a large group of people.

It's hard to avoid thinking that this may be an edge case of affirmative action that was purpose-selected by this group to force the courts to consider a larger issue.

I think it's unfortunate that the response to countering discrimination has been to discriminate in the opposite direction instead of working towards pure meritocracy.

Sadly race is a good proxy for socio-economic background, and people get treated differently depending on their skin color. Getting these different perspectives in the class is a positive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17325778

If you designed an admissions process that only tried to normalize for those factors, would it also give the same appearance as being race biased as the current Harvard admissions process?

Note that I am not bringing up the subjective “likability” factor from the Harvard application process. Since it appears to be a subjective rating system it should probably be addressed separately.

I can't speak to how Harvard works specifically, but from what I've seen elsewhere if you're an underrepresented minority your application will get flagged and go through a different process where they take a deeper look into your background. For a white applicant who isn't a recruited athlete or flagged for any other reason, the admissions committee most likely makes a yes or no decision in 3 - 5 minutes just based on your GPA, SATs, and reading the first couple paragraphs of your essays. If your application gets flagged for some reason (being an underrepresented minority, a recruited athlete, letter from a big donor, etc.) then they'll actually take a deeper dive into your background before making a decision.

The colleges also get their simulated US News rank updated a couple times per day based on the GPA and SAT averages of students admitted so far, so what you need in terms of basic stats can vary substantially depending on whether your application gets read in the morning or afternoon.

  Is there any evidence they are directly using race as a
  factor in admissions and not factors that are strongly
  correlated with race

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...

hypocrisy, hypocrisy.

Being a private school you can do whatever you deem right, the problem is that, when you lose honesty, you lose everything.