> With all due respect, it is not possible for you to understand this since your salary depends on not understanding it.

Nice meme you got there. Too bad it's inappropriately applied.

For reference, my salary or income has never been related to my advising of admissions committees/personnel. It has all been volunteer by request.

I will add that I am very connected to the Asian-American community, and I would speak out strongly against any systemic bias that I witnessed or even suspected.

> The Alumni Rating invalidates any doubt about standard strong etc

That's a nice opinion you have. I suspect based on your comment that you have no idea about the strengths and weaknesses of alumni reviews.

> Any statistically minded person would look at this data and easily conclude that they are racist against Asians.

I totally agree that there is a correlation between race and lower evaluations on certain parts of the application review. I disagree on the cause.

If I had to take a guess (and it's just a guess, since I have never seen a proper comprehensive study on this), Asian-American parents encourage their kids to focus on grades and test scores to the exclusion (partial or complete) of other activities more often than White-American parents do. Focusing mostly or exclusively on grades and test scores makes for a weak applicant to an elite school.

A few notes on that last paragraph:

- There are cultural reasons that this might be true (e.g., pure entrance exam-based admissions are common in many/most Asian countries, so the parents may project this idea on schools in the US).

- Many White-American parents overly focus on grades and scores as well, and they are equally befuddled when their kid does not even get wait-listed.

For reference, if this is true, I do not think that it could be provided as justification in the Supreme Court without a comprehensive study that would be very difficult to do accurately (e.g., self-reported data can be fabulously different than observed data), even if the admissions staff and/or guidance counselors anecdotally (with hundreds or thousands of anecdotes) believe it to be true.

The underlying assumption here seems to be that there is a diabolical cabal of admissions staff (some of whom are Asian) who are all acting in-step with each other to oppress Asian-American applicants while miraculously not leaving any smoking guns (e.g., the worst documented slights are things like calling an Asian-American applicant "a typical standard strong" -- that is, direct no admit -- or something similar). It boggles my mind that people actually believe this nonsense.

Here is a picture that is closer to reality:

All strong admit applicants, Asian-Americans included, are all given offer letters. The rest of the applicants that are marginal admits are all grouped together, and then some class shaping happens. There are many aspects of that shaping of the class with folks rated marginal admit. Race is one, sports is another, arts is another, majors is another, geographic diversity is another,... the list goes on. There are no hard and fast quotas against any race, it's just a constant comparison of tradeoffs with different marginally qualified applicants. The admissions staff are extremely stressed about making the best choices for the school and for the students. Once a class is shaped to the liking of the school, offer letters and wait list offers are sent to applicants. Folks are pulled off the wait list typically in a like-for-like situation (it's usually not just ranked, with top ranked getting first open slot).

Note that if you didn't even make the wait list, no amount of race blind admissions would help you. The people I hear complaining the loudest typically were not even wait listed.

IMHO, some of the people shouting "racism" the most are folks who really do not do much to help themselves in the application process by setting themselves apart as a dynamic contributor to the student body. For example, if an applicant wants to study a popular major like pre-med or CS, then they really need to set themselves apart in the rest of their application since they will be compared to a relatively deep and competitive pool of applicants. Sometimes this is not terribly difficult -- for example, one person I know who double majored in CS and Classics at Harvard in addition to several other highly desirable attributes.

My advice to any applicants to elite schools, but especially Asian-American applicants who think that the deck is stacked against them, is to focus on developing their hook and being a (relatively) unique and positive contribution to the student body. Great grades and test scores are table stakes. Focus on going beyond that.

Anyway, I will conclude with this prediction:

If elite schools are forced to omit race from consideration, Black and Hispanic offers will initially decrease slightly, and White and Asian offers will initially increase slightly. My guess is the number for Asians will be about 3%, possibly less. I imagine that there will be significant outreach by a variety of organizations to help Black and Hispanics make their applications stronger.