What I found interesting reading the Unz article was how each year the number of national merit scholar semifinalists (which is the top 0.5% of SAT scores) is roughly the same as the number of freshman spots in the Ivy League (plus MIT and Caltech). Now looking back when I was a teenager, I remember going to the information sessions that these schools had and the way the scam works is that they emphasize how much just having good grades isn't going to cut it when there's so few spots, therefore they have to select on the subjective appraisals of the admissions officers. They claimed that what they were looking for were well-rounded students with varied extracurricular activities and volunteer work, so presumably if you had the grades and didn't get accepted it was simply because other students with similar grades just worked harder for it.
This is really just a smokescreen to let the admissions officers pick the students they want, being allowed to prioritize race-based selection over academic merit. Just based on the bell curve and population size in the United States, the bulk of academically qualified applicants should be white middle-class students like me. But they really want a combination of diversity admits and upper class legacy students (disproportionately Jewish looking at the Unz article). Fun fact, I remember a kid who was half Puerto Rican (and the other half was a white daddy who worked at Intel), who changed his name to Guillermo just to seem ethnically interesting enough to get into MIT under the diversity admission policy. These upper-middle class "minorities" are the ones getting admitted, not some poor black kid living in the ghetto and being tutored by Sean Connery.
What we're seeing now with Asians challenging Jewish control over the Ivy League is really just an attempt by Asians to push in as another favored diaspora. I have no doubt that a Chinese dominated admissions office would behave with exactly the same degree of nepotism. The only hope for a fair admissions system would be for this legal challenge to bring enough of these practices to light that some sort of reform is made to abolish subjective admissions policies.
This is really just a smokescreen to let the admissions officers pick the students they want, being allowed to prioritize race-based selection over academic merit. Just based on the bell curve and population size in the United States, the bulk of academically qualified applicants should be white middle-class students like me. But they really want a combination of diversity admits and upper class legacy students (disproportionately Jewish looking at the Unz article). Fun fact, I remember a kid who was half Puerto Rican (and the other half was a white daddy who worked at Intel), who changed his name to Guillermo just to seem ethnically interesting enough to get into MIT under the diversity admission policy. These upper-middle class "minorities" are the ones getting admitted, not some poor black kid living in the ghetto and being tutored by Sean Connery.
What we're seeing now with Asians challenging Jewish control over the Ivy League is really just an attempt by Asians to push in as another favored diaspora. I have no doubt that a Chinese dominated admissions office would behave with exactly the same degree of nepotism. The only hope for a fair admissions system would be for this legal challenge to bring enough of these practices to light that some sort of reform is made to abolish subjective admissions policies.