Ironically, gross favoritism and inefficiency associated with affirmative action were more common 20 years ago than they are today. In the early 1970s, universities and firms faced strong external pressure to improve racial diversity. The available pool of female and minority applicants was much weaker than it is today, while administrators were less savvy about the true costs and benefits associated with affirmative action. If you care about both diversity and merit, there are strong arguments for quotas. Even staunch defenders of affirmative action swear on a stack of Bibles that they oppose quotas.
Few organizations are dumb enough to enact illegal explicit quotas.
Yet in practice, many organizations establish policies that are almost the same thing. They do this because they want to achieve diversity, and at the least cost to their other organizational goals. Ironically, if judges and policymakers drive preferences underground by requiring ostensibly neutral criteria, they may encourage a less meritocratic outcome than we see today. This apparent paradoxical follows straight from the logic of optimization theory. The college also cares about strictly academic criteria such as SAT scores, denoted by s.