When there limited resources, prefering one type of person is prejudicing against the others.

There are hundreds of colleges, many of which have high acceptance rates and perfectly fine instruction. Are these applicants or the people in this thread then displaying preference or prejudice in the institutions they apply? And if so, what makes it different than the institutions do the same?

The process of discriminating between options is almost always also preference at least via defining or assessing even the objective criteria in a subjective way. The criteria doesn’t always align with the stated goal of the discrimination process. E.g. “we are looking for the smartest” but “gender weighs in for the assessment”.