[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.