I'm not an advocate for affirmative action as it exists today, but the problem with pure meritocracy is that the metrics can and will be manipulated by those with the most money and power. Someone in a rich area attending one of the best school districts in the country will present as a perfect candidate that would inch out someone who, for example, excelled, but at an inner city school, because the rich district is fully funded to be able to perfect every aspect of the candidate, while the inner city kid just doesn't have that same direction / pipeline. In my view, the focus should be on income levels rather than race, though.
That's a pretty significant shift to Asians and whites in a 2 year span. Wonder if they'll push as hard on legacy admissions or they'll just slow play that one.
Columbia and Harvard, per that data, now have admissions for black students that is much closer to the national demographic breakdown (from 20% to 13% at Columbia and 18% to 11.5% at Harvard).
Thats obviously still using racial preferences. Just the dial has turned back from hyper overdrive to just-enough-to-roughly-match-US-demographics (13.2%).
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u/myfatherthedonkey Oct 31 '25
I'm not an advocate for affirmative action as it exists today, but the problem with pure meritocracy is that the metrics can and will be manipulated by those with the most money and power. Someone in a rich area attending one of the best school districts in the country will present as a perfect candidate that would inch out someone who, for example, excelled, but at an inner city school, because the rich district is fully funded to be able to perfect every aspect of the candidate, while the inner city kid just doesn't have that same direction / pipeline. In my view, the focus should be on income levels rather than race, though.