> parental income as well as parental education level in admissions

But that leads to the same fundamental problem - somebody who was "unfortunate" enough to be born into decent circumstances but _who was actually more qualified_ than the diversity admit gets rejected.

That's where things fall down, though. I've done some admissions work (I am not professionally in admissions or HR or anything, I was just an academic mathematician). A lot of "qualifications" are experiences you can buy. You can buy volunteer experiences here or there, whether as literally as flying your child to Africa to volunteer or as simply as not asking your kid to contribute to paying the rent and letting them tutor for no cash. You can buy your kid test prep classes -- yes, the poor kid can get an SAT prep book from the library but the rich kid can have a tutor take their child by the hand and cajole/harass/massage the kid through test prep. You must pay pay pay to have your kid participate in traveling soccer league, dance team, lacrosse, etc. Remember travel soccer and similar activities are a way of divesting from the public schools, ensuring that this money and coaching benefits kids whose parents can pay (the right kinds of kids, the kids you want your kid to marry). What else? The music lessons, the robotics contests, the school district that has a full suite of AP or IB classes rather than just a couple, but in which houses start at $425k...

I sure as shit am buying qualifications for my kid, fully recognizing my role in participating in this flawed system. Kid's in robotics, language classes, gets to travel. We switched the kid's school to go to a school with higher standards. We teach the kid both reading (100 Easy Lessons...) and writing (workbooks from the non-US country with better public education) -- small expenses in $ but nevertheless expenses. I'm sure someone will happily tell me that the last part is just good morals on my part, or something, but you can't tell me that $100/day for a robotics summer camp is just good morals. I am buying that kid qualifications.

And then someone will tell me that's not race-based, but look at the perpetuation of wealth disparity thru US history, from chattel slavery on through the robbery from the Freedmen's Bank to the riot that burned down Black Wall Street to the fact that Black servicemen couldn't get mortgage assistance or GI Bill college assistance after WW2. Follow the money.

Poverty has a huge impact on childhood accomplishment. If someone is a regular A student while dodging bullets with a mother on crack, they are probably a much stronger human than someone who comes from an upper middle class family and gets valedictorian, is class president, does volunteer work and won a teen writing award or some-such.

> Poverty has a huge impact on childhood accomplishment.

So help the poor. This has nothing to do with race.

But no one helps the poor - and by the time they get to college they are at a huge disadvantage

So nothing happens

To be fair, this person didn't say anything on the topic of race.

What’s wrong with some randomness in the system?

If schools can reserve spots for legacy admissions or international students to the detriment of merit based then they can also reserve spots for a lottery system

Indeed, but the goal of affirmative action as actually practiced is not to help people who are unlucky in terms of where they are born and are growing up, but to literally just achieve desired racial balance. It is pure racism, it’s all about skin color.

This is why, for example, children of African immigrants are something like half of black Harvard students, despite being a minuscule fraction of population: they want to meet their 13% black quota, but there are too few American descendants of slaves who will not be utterly out of place, so they make up the shortage with Africans.

You don't believe there are 300 multi-generation American black students per year that wouldn't be utterly out of place at Harvard?

Don't throw out numbers like that unless you are willing to back them up, because your claim seems completely insane.

There are, but Harvard is not the only one competing for them. Once you consider all top schools, the population of ADOSes who can make it based on academics is really tiny: given the fundamental constant of sociology being 1 sigma difference between white and black Americans, given how normal distribution works, the difference in figures at the top of distribution is enormous.

For example, if Harvard only wants to admit people 2 sigma above median, by 68-95-99.7 rule it will be 2.5% of white applicants, but 0.15% of black applicants. That’s 16-to-1 even before you adjust for the fact that non-Hispanic whites are 60% and blacks are 13% of population, after which you get something like 75 qualified whites for each whites. Add to that Hispanics whites, who, while overall having lower academic achievement, are not nearly as low as blacks, and Asians, who have even higher achievement than whites, you’ll easily get something like 100 to 150 qualified non blacks for every black applicant.

Even more concretely: there are something like 2 million freshmen every year. 2 sigma cutoff means only 2.5% of them qualify, which is only 50,000 people. 1 in 100 means only 500 blacks qualify at above 2 population sigma. Then you have all Ivies and other top schools compete for these. So yes, you can find 300 blacks at 2 sigma cutoff, but Harvard won’t get all of those. Thus, Africans.

Your cut off makes no sense, because Harvard is about potential. If we had a perfect, balanced, equitable test for academic potential than of course we'd use it, but we don't. So you can't just use the distributions about existing tests to prove your point.

If you truly think that the top 2.5% of black students would be "out of place" at Harvard then you have a completely invented mysticism of what it means to go to Harvard.

You are wrong, we have excellent tests of potential. Read about, for example, about SMPY, where researchers identified kids with high potential in middle school, then tracked their life as they grew up and built their careers. The test they used turned out to be highly effective and predictive: inordinate high percentage of those identified as talented turned out to be highly successful in academic and professional careers. See

https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/DoingPsychScien...

What was this highly predictive test? It was, quite simply, taking SAT at 11-12 years of age. SAT is really good test, and is highly predictive of academic success, its biggest flaw is that it is too easy for those at the top of distribution, but that can be ameliorated by administering it earlier than typical.

> If you truly think that the top 2.5% of black students would be "out of place" at Harvard then you have a completely invented mysticism of what it means to go to Harvard.

If 2.5% of all black students were of Harvard quality, then something like 16% of white students would be, which is something like 3 kids in every high school class. Harvard can afford to be much more selective than that, and in fact it must be so to keep its brand.

So you do have a mysticism about what it is like to go to Harvard.

Regardless of how selective they are with admissions it also doesn't mean that a large chunk of the people they rejected wouldn't have also done fine there.

Arguably it's much easier to get good grades at Harvard due to grade inflation if you are a good student (which you are by definition if you are at the top of your class) than at state schools.