[ritchiea]

I don't think the two are comparable. At work your goal is to grow and make money as a company. At elite schools they aim to educate their students to better their futures. Colleges are attempting to shape people not make a billion dollars. And I love that here on HN, where from working in the tech industry I can only assume the posters are mostly white and Asian, no one questions whether the metrics are of any quality. Is SAT really a good measure of your talents as a human being? Are high school grades? Two things that vary based on your education before the moment of the test and the grades. The grades themselves being subjective evaluations from thousands of people with different standards. If the quotas were swapped and whites and Asians were getting the "bonus", how quickly would the arguments shift to the idea that the metrics aren't any good in the first place?

Not to mention if you approach the admissions officers at Ivies, particularly at Harvard, Princeton & Yale, they say that they easily could fill 3 freshman classes or more with the applicants they receive. That even most of the rejected applicants could succeed academically at their schools. So yes, I think it's okay to select for diversity.