I promise you your application was viewed as "well, here's another really smart asian kid who's otherwise unremarkable from the other 1000 we'll see". Meanwhile, hers was treated like precious gold.
If admissions can never see that information they are much less likely to be able to discriminate against it.
Of course, if someone doesn't like the result, and not enough black/asian/jewish/white/whatever kids get in, then someone sues.
But to me, this is the only way of making it on the merits. As soon as you introduce that information into the process, bias takes over.
Also, waaaaaay more asians need to be running for Congress. It's getting better but they're still underrepresented slightly (4.8% of reps are asian while 5.6% of americans are).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_American_politi...
3/9 of the Supreme Court Justices are listed as Jewish.
Not sure what your argument is. The definition of "smartness" seems to be very subjective in this case.
In general, that will still require taking race into account. https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.02413 "Equality of Opportunity in Supervised Learning" discusses various fairness measures in the context of deciding loan applications based on credit scores. The issue is that you only know whether someone was qualified once they pay the loan back, and credit scores are not a perfect predictor of that, which on top of that is differently imperfect for different races. If you want equal opportunity (defined as "the probability of a qualified application being accepted is equal independent of race"), you need different thresholds to compensate for the different prediction error rates.
I don't have data, but I would assume that many Ivy League applicants are straight A students with a varsity sport, so recommendations and personal projects (and luck) are actually very important for admission to very selective colleges.
You also noted a difference in financial aid, but note that Harvard, Yale and Columbia all state that their financial aid is based only on need, not on merit.
During the college applications process, I noticed I was receiving vastly different responses than my girlfriend (wife now) who was African American.
Perhaps you could chalk it up recommendations or personal projects. But my girlfriend and I were both A students that made the varsity swimming team. She was African American and had 5/7 full tuition responses including Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. While I only was accepted into Columbia, with partial financial assistance. We both wanted to attend Yale at the time and this put a dent in our future plans.
I have also experienced a similar scenario in the "pre-interviewing" resume selection phase, right out of college with no experience. My friend group noticed comparatively that those who were not White or Asian tended to get faster and more initial responses to schedule an interview. (I will note that this occurred exclusively when submitting for large Fortune 500 companies, and not for smaller business such as startups. Perhaps some selection bias) However after a while with some work experience on the resume, this doesn't manifest as much.
It is my belief that university admissions and diversity initiatives need to focus more on individuals than race. The goal should be equality of opportunity and evaluation rather than equality of outcome.