Why? That is the worst kind of discrimination in my book. How is it my fault that I was born smart, worked hard to capitalize on my innate abities and then competed on a standardized test to perform better than folks who just happened to pop out of a different vagina or uterus? Nice way to fuck me for no fault of mine.

For those saying not getting into Harvard or MIT is no big deal, are either in the sour grapes camp or have never had to face opportunity costs arising from picking a non-exclusive-low-visibility-(but-great)-school.

I don't know what la-la-land they live in, but that Veritas stamp will open doors that no amount of effort, intelligence or other factors ever can.

As an Asian myself, perhaps the question that needs to be asked is if there is enough diversity in our upbringing to be well-rounded candidates for admissions to "elite" schools?

Where this gets politically complicated is by the concurrent policies in favor of non-Asian minorities, but at least there the policies are quite explicit about their justifications (correcting historical disadvantage).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerus_clausus#Numerus_clausus...

Let's face it, the harvard admissions process is secretive they aren't giving all candidates a thorough review, they aren't looking deeply into 150,000 applications in a three month period. They can't. So they dump and dump based on subjective and biased methods being careful to honor first and foremost those requirements like affirmative action. And then they probably get the quota and then start onto the smaller piles. In other words all the activities an Asian might be on, they can and will be overlooked because somebody else has a righter color at the right time when the stack of applications are being sorted by whatever computer or individual at that step.

So to question, "maybe I need a better holistic upbringing?" Bullshit. in this case it's highly likely many many many of these asians had a remarkable upbringing that would satisfy anyone but they got dumped for somebody so the color factor was satisfied.

There have been numerous studies showing that whites favor meritocratic admission criteria, but reverse their position when shown the high percentage of Asian admits (e.g. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1086/670664?uid=2&uid=4&sid...). Indeed the data also shows that white admissions are barely affected in comparison to Asians (e.g. see the MCAT admissions data linked elsewhere in this thread).

It seems to me that the shroud of "diversity" is being used to preserve the existing white power structure in elite universities, especially with the prevalence of legacy admits.

Anyone who has designed a system knows that you can tweak variables to get your desired result and then tautologically justify your decisions post-hoc.

That's only true if SAT score are a good predictor of "success" - however you define that. That's obviously not true for elite institutions since their candidates' SAT score are all bunched up at the top and within the MOE of each other. It's low-resolution. If you want test-based admissions, you'll have to design a test that shows significant differences among the elite schools' applicant pool.

On the hand, just having an "Asian attenuator" is, objectively, racist. The schools that do that will probably claim they just deemphasize applicants who don't have outside activities, which has led to formulaic portfolios of the "right" outside activities among high school students now, because "grades are not enough." Ugh. That's worse than just accepting the top SAT scores.

How can you tell which highly selective universities really have a sophisticated selection process and which are just running ethnic groups through different sized apertures? Elite schools that have legacy preferences have an especially hard job defending their policies.

"White applicants would benefit very little by removing racial and ethnic preferences; the white acceptance rate would increase by roughly 0.5 percentage points."