I don't know. We're not talking windfalls of financial success here necessarily.
I'd expect Harvard or a similar institution to be mostly full of the esoteric: people with an intense focus of study on something we've never heard of like some biological property of a specific type of plant or some 500 year old historical event that you have to travel to a national archive and learn a dead language to read about.
Ideally those people should be able to come from most economic and status backgrounds.
That's never how it worked although I'm sure with 5,300 colleges and universities some clickbait media sensationalist found an admissions officer saying something off-color on a hot mic somewhere.
The formula is to find something that happens < 0.01% of the time and scandalize it pretending it's 99.99% of the time. It's tired 1990s style tabloid nonsense repurposed in the public sphere.
The discovery from the recent supreme court contained an internal Harvard study that concluded the majority of black students would not be admitted if only academic performance was used in admissions. But you and the other supporters of racist admissions can go ahead and keep pretending it's 0.01% of the time.
There we go. That's not what happened as evidenced after Harvard changed their policy, the percentage of black applicants acceptance was within the normal variation. Percentage of total enrollment changed but not the percentage of applicant acceptance. Instead, application numbers went down. (https://nypost.com/2024/03/29/us-news/harvard-applications-d...)
This has been clumsily misreported by looking at incorrect numbers. It's acceptance rate as a percentage of applicants, not as a percentage of the total enrollment.
This entire sensationalist apparatus relies on sloppy reporting, imaginative thinking and fixing the facts around a presumed narrative. It can't withstand scrutiny because it's manufactured for ad revenue and content engagement.
Scandalous tall tales about Harvard letting in unqualified black students through a secret administrative backdoor is one of the ways grifters sell boner pills through podcasts and wordpress sites.
You are deflecting by talking about what happened to admissions after the SC decision. I am talking about Harvard's own internal numbers that they fought to keep hidden, but came out on discovery.
Also again there's flimsy evidence even here. Percentage of total student body isn't the same as percentage of applicants accepted nor are they necessarily related. For example, a wealthy benefactor offering scholarships could have switched their allegiances or whatever
That's not how this works at all. Do you think someone with a 2.5 GPA in high-school and not much else outside that is getting into Harvard because they're hispanic or whatever?
They're sitting on a stack of applicants to the ceiling of 4.2 GPAs and good looking extracurriculars and volunteer work of all backgrounds. Literally all of them meeting the bar to be successful at $PrestigiousUniversity. Affirmative action is choosing how to pick from that stack.
Not saying it isn't, am saying that nobody is getting a free pass.
But taking a step back, folks aren't really that opposed to "positive discrimination" when forced to actually reveal their preferences. We call positive sexism is chivalry, and positive racism affirmative action and it's broadly supported. The population most strongly opposed to positive racism are people who want or are indifferent to negative racism so it's hard to know how to read that.
Or... not and the results of polls heavily depend on how the question is asked. Apparently more people say affirmative action is good than bad. So maybe? Even the pew poll gets wildly inconsistent results depending on the question. The only consistent thing in all the graphs is the left/right split and you're more likely to be against affirmative action when it's selecting against you.
Affirmative action doesn't seem to fare well when it's a subject of a referendum, even in otherwise "deep blue" states where you'd expect the public sentiment to be in favor of it.
That second group, why are they there?
Let's not let some abstract amorphous principle about some legal fiction prevent us from fixing things.