> Rather they've all switched to extolling their inscrutable "holistic admissions process". They switched to that in the 30s because, and these are not my word

> Rather they've all switched to extolling their inscrutable "holistic admissions process". They switched to that in the 30s because, and these are not my words, "Jews were overrunning the campuses". Now it is being used to keep, and these are not my words, "Asians from overrunning the campuses". This has been known for decades: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in That's why sitting in an empty room 30 minutes a week arguing about what to put on a poster as a "student government" officer weighs as much as an A+ in math during the admissions process. It's affirmative action for a certain class of people, but not the one everyone seems to think it is for. The Ivies (and nearly every organization for that matter) only cares about underrepresented classes enough to keep people off their backs, what they really want to do is preserve the "feel" of the institution and that means a different class of individual who may need a leg up because their grades ain't cutting it. > The admissions committee viewed evidence of “manliness” with particular enthusiasm. One boy gained admission despite an academic prediction of 70 because “there was apparently something manly and distinctive about him that had won over both his alumni and staff interviewers.” In other words, they want white frat guys with pastel polo shirts, khaki shorts, boat shoes and (most importantly) mommy and daddy's money who slacked off in school so now they have to weigh laxbro-ness heavily during admission to ram those types through the system. The most deliciously ironic part of all of this is that the class of people that actually benefits from this form of affirmative action is the one most likely to believe in meritocracy, which has never, will never, and does not exist in any form anywhere: unless your employer interviewed every qualified human being on earth and you were indeed the most qualified of the lot, it wasn't a meritocratic hire. You may have been the most qualified of those with the temporal, informational, or geographic attributes needed to self-select for the job, but that ain't a meritocracy.