Race is only a proxy for what really happens in these admissions processes. Imagine your job is to create the best possible 2000-student freshman class for Harvard from the 20,000 students who apply.

You review the applications and notice to your horror that 600-1000 of them all have perfect or near perfect test scores, boring essays, so-so extracurriculars (Overwatch tournaments and robotics club doesn't cut it), play an instrument (well, but not remarkably), and want to study pre-med.

Their grades and scores are STELLAR! But if you admit these students your campus is fucked. Half the freshman class can't do pre-med. Once the pre-med spots fill up what will the rest do? That seems like a very horrible situation to put students in. There's just not enough spots.

What's going to happen to campus social life if half the class has a history of not being social at all? Who's going to produce art and go into politics? Who's going into investment banking to pull down big bonuses 10 years from now?

So you work your way through them and try to take the very best of them. The rest of them you reject. They'll get into fine schools and be successful, there's just only so many slots of students like that in the class.

This cohort of students happens to be massively asian. No one was out to discriminate against asian people when I worked where I worked, their applications were just very problematic at scale.

This has been endlessly discussed to death. It is a factor because it is a factor in society(common eg: black names not getting callback for an interview). It is a factor because social inertia exists. Ignoring it and putting your head in the sand is not moving forward, places like harvard to want to take corrective measures to offset the inertia. Yes we would like to live in a race blind society but it cannot happen overnight.

Because many people still believe in stereotypes. But whether stereotypes have any truth to them is a different question entirely.