[IvyAdmisions]

I was an ivy league admissions officer for a few years after college.

Harvard and the other Ivies don't want to keep out asian people. They want to keep out boring, myopic applicants who spend all day studying to achieve the grades and scores they have and show little sign of interest in contributing to the outside world beyond getting a well-paying job as a lawyer or doctor and raising a family comfortably.

The Ivies get thousands and thousands of applications like this: with incredible academic credentials but nothing else to recommend the applicant. They could fill their entire classes with just applicants like this. And this cohort of applicants just happens to be very very very asian.

In a way it's not dissimilar from how VCs want to invest in founders looking to go big. Founders working on lifestyle businesses are not worth their time. Ivies want to turn out a lot of professionals yes, but they also want to turn out artists, politicians, bankers, military officers and so forth.

[NE2z2T9qi]

The fact that you feel so comfortable saying something that sounds so vicious and dismissive of many many years of students' hard work and aspirations is pretty disconcerting. But even if what you say is true, isn't it a university's mission to expand horizons and channel the talents of hard-working people toward productive and fulfilling ends? Any university worth its salt should be able to mold and guide a proven high-performer quite easily. Finally, if you actually believe what you say, then just admit race-blind and name blind. I'd bet a lot of money that many of your "boring Asians" wouldn't seem quite so boring to you if you didn't know their ethnic makeup.

[IvyAdmisions]

I didn't stick around past two years because I regularly had to make decisions based on assumptions that I outlined above and I just wasn't comfortable with it. It felt bad reading a pretty good application from a kid in Puerto Rico, but passing because "We'll see much better Puerto Ricans in the NYC schools when we review those". Those kids didn't know they were competing, but they definitely were.

I'd say a university's doctoral programs are designed to "expand horizons and channel the talents of hard-working people toward productive and fulfilling ends". Their undergraduate programs are to perpetuate a base of influence and financial prosperity across as many spheres of society as possible and their masters programs are to print money from selling credentials to middling corporate people looking for a leg up.

[IvyAdmisions]

As to your second point, like I said, it wasn't about asian people. There were TONS of white kids with applications like the ones I outlined. Those kids got whacked too, but asians were the biggest group in the cohort.