[hackuser]

> The typical argument is that colleges want kids who are more 'well-rounded' and Asian kids are stereotyped to be less so.

I didn't know any college used that argument. Certainly those kids should be judged on their own merits and not on stereotypes.

> I mean the preference for other races besides Asian when academic performance is held equal.

My point above, which I might not have explained well, is that racial preferences are unavoidable. Academic performance can't be held equal because the various applicants are competing on playing fields that can differ radically. (Also, as I point out at the end, Harvard admits students on many factors that aren't due to performance but due to the applicants' families' social networks and wealth.)

The best Harvard can do is manage the situation to make it as fair as possible, which may include balancing the discrimination against some races with preferences in their favor. I can understand arguments either way but I don't think it's realistic to eliminate that component withhout looking at its affect on the whole system.

[eli_gottlieb]

If they really wanted to make it as fair as possible, they'd set some minimum admissions standards, and then just select randomly from the set of students who meet those.

[wbl]

>Academic performance can't be held equal because the various applicants are competing on playing fields that can differ radically

Caltech manages to do this just fine. So does UC Berkeley. Harvard could stop racism if it wanted to.

[brownbat]

Interesting. Googling led me to a post[1] which claimed that Caltech uses a "pure meritocracy" and avoids consideration of race in admissions.

hackuser's original post noted that there are race-based sorting effects outside of the admissions department. To that point, Caltech's admission policy, flaws or merits of it aside, is not a counterexample to hackuser's claim[2]. That's exactly the sort of system hackuser was talking about.

[1] http://jadeluckclub.com/caltech-meritocracy-from-the-america...

[2] Which I took to be, essentially, "racial discrimination in admissions is inevitable due to selection factors beyond the control of admissions policies."

EDIT: readability.

[jonsterling]

"well-roundedness" includes all sorts of stuff, like sports (especially WASP-y sports, like things involving boats) as well as volunteering and voluntourism.