[opportune]

This is one of the things about affirmative action that bothers me the most. If it's known that people in X subset of students are held to lower standards, then in a Bayesian sense it hurts the people in X subset who would have got in if held to the same standards.

Harvard is notorious for glade inflation, but at other institutions the same phenomenon can hurt people's ability to complete harder degrees. I remember reading a paper claiming that affirmative action resulted in lower minority graduation rates/higher transfer rates in STEM because it put people in academic environments that they weren't prepared for; they could have likely had more success completing a STEM degree if they had attended an institution where they fit more of a median student academic profile