> Attending formal education at a higher level is, itself, an outcome.

See, there it is again - SHOWING UP. You didn't say "getting a degree" or "graduating to a high paying job" or even "putting themselves in a position to succeed in life" - simply "attending". That's the problem - merely attending isn't enough to address any historical disadvantage other than "spent at least a day on a college campus as a student". In a list of historical disadvantages, this is just above "has used a ski lift at least once" in importance.

Step back, there are four important factors that make up the value of college:
1. Attendance - how many people go to college.
2. Graduation - where total graduates, not a percentage, dictates success. Because 25% of 4 is worse than 10% of 100,000 in addressing disadvantage.
3. Degree choice - the choice of degree is almost as important as getting one.
4. Post-graduation outcomes - like career earnings, opportunities, stability etc.

Attendance does not address true disadvantage unless the other three also improve - and specifically I think what society wants is more absolute numbers of graduates of good degrees, who go on to great post-graduate success. That seems, to me, a pretty uncontroversial summation of the issue.

The goal of uni quotas is to improve 1, so that 2, 3 and 4 improve. It isn't to address historical rates of attendance. But I could be wrong, and if the case is that the goal is simply getting more blacks and Hispanics to go to uni for at least a day/semester, outcomes be damned, then I withdraw my argument.

I think that the idea of addressing disadvantage is a lofty, important and praise worthy goal. And because it is such an important goal, policy choices have to be effective, and rigorously shown to be effective, because failure only fails the most disadvantaged more.

My fear is that a lot of people judge policy by INTENTIONS, not OUTCOMES, and this leads to inbetween goals of attendance trumping deeper issues.

As an analogy, the push to change people from "I donated so I feel good" to "my donations DID good" is a huge mental shift that effective altruists are championing. If quoatas help improve life outcomes, they need to stay. If they don't, if they put black and Hispanic students in positions to fail or almost worse, to choose lesser paths, then they should be replaced by something better.

Rather than quotas, what is needed is policy that puts black and hispanic students into colleges where they get the largest number of the best degrees for to improve their lives. Going to an Ivy league school to flunk out is worse than going to a tier 2 school and graduating with honors.

I could be wrong about the inbetween goals being a focus, and there may be a whole raft of research that shows these inbetween goals achieve positive outcomes making them the metric to focus on. I'd honestly like to be proven wrong, and know that these policies are on the right track, but it seems to me that the circle of policy to outcomes is rarely fully closed, and with even 15 years of data, the outcomes achieved should be dictating policy, not something more immediately measurable, but ultimately less important, like attendance rates.

TL;DR good outcomes dictate the quality of a policy, not intentions.