[Aunche]

Legacy and donor admissions aren't the gotcha against race neutral admissions that you think they are. In fact, they go hand in hand. It's not a coincidence that the universities with strong legacy preferences all practiced affirmative action. Legacy students actually have slightly better grades and SAT scores than average, but this would unlikely to be the case if they used purely merit based admissions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences

[digitaltrees]

I didn’t say it to be a gotcha. But let’s admit that legacy admissions and athletes represent a non meritocratic social goal, and then ask why those are legitimate social goals but racial diversity is not one?

[Aunche]

The problem is that affirmative action creates more opportunities to think about race, which leads to more resentment and discrimination. For example, in America, Italians used to be discriminated against, but today they are basically treated the same as all white people. If we had affirmative action for Italian Americans, they'd likely still be discriminated against today.