DC:
If I have not said so again recently, I hold you in tremendous respect, and I am very cautious about entering into any territory where we disagree. When we do it makes me carefully reconsider my own opinions to see what I might have missed, almost more than any member here. (JustAskings dissent, maybe, would have the same effect on me, but you are in rarified company.)
One of the reasons that I concur with you so much is that we usually approach things from the same angle, filtered through our identities as members of a so-called sexual minority. Before we get too far down the road of discussing college admissions, I just want to register than my original position on the main point of this thread was this one:
LINittanyLion, (who is also a fine human being with whom I just happen to disagree this time) and Im shorthanding, used this formula:
Promotion of diversity = political correctness = preferential treatment
This is a rhetorical formula issuing from the right wing spinmeisters and though widely repeated and believed, I think both of those links are wrong, and I wanted to interrogate each of those assumptions. That is, I dont think the agenda for those who would promote understanding of gay/lesbian rights (as well as other minority issues) is simple political posturing for the sake of appearances, i.e. political correctness. I think that most of us think the privileging of hetero-normative assumptions is harmful to everybody, heterosexuals included.
Even when it is political posturing, I dont think the position actually held by politically correct types is that minorities should be given extraordinary privilege, just equal rights. As a gay man, I hear so often that granting me the right to marry someone of my same sex, for example, is preferential treatment because heterosexual privilege is based on their ability to procreate. Ive seen you tear into that argument, DC, so I wont dissect it again here. Ill just note that being granted equal rights (like equal access to educational institutions, for example) is not preferential treatment, but it is labeled that way by those who would set a hidden, higher standard for minorities. You brilliantly unmask those routinely about gay rights issues, but you interestingly come at this thread through the identity of a wronged white male, i.e. majority member, and see it through (to me, at least) unexpected eyes.
None of that has to do with Affirmative Action at all, or with the Special Olypmics either, which I considered to be red herrings, but were the stuff with which LINIttany responded to my initial dissent.
Having cleared up, I hope, what my original post was about and why I dissented from LINittany, let me make a quick hit-and-run on the admissions issue. God knows I am no apologist for Affirmative Action, nor for the current admissions systems of the Ivy League schools. In fact, I think they are deeply corrupt. I just think both you and Nittany are identifying the wrong culprit.
Let me immediate concede that admissions systems are not strictly merit based, as they should be. I think what constitutes ones qualifications may be more complex than just the sort of statistics LINittany provided about his three comparators, but I will grant that whatever criteria is used for evaluating candidates, they are not now applied fairly and objectively. A lot of less qualified applicants are admitted over many people in the pool above them.
There are two big reasons for this, neither of which have to do with affirmative action for minorities, however. The first is that almost all elite schools admit a quota of full pay students who do not need financial aid to afford tuition. That quota is a carefully guarded secret, and often denied, but the fact remains that elite institutions routinely admit as much as 50% of their class primarily on the basis of their ability to pay. (For more complicated reasons that we can go into in a dick site thread, even most institutions that say they admit students on a need-blind basis do not actually do so.) Of course, colleges take the most qualified students they can get for those full pay positions, but wealthy students are often much less qualified than the 50% of students who need significant financial aid from the institution itself in order to attend.
The other reason is that a very sizable portion of the entering class at elite institutions is actually admitted outside the system, and by sizable, I mean nearly 20%. These are students who for some reason or other get admitted outside the standard procedures altogether. Some of those students are, in fact, bringing some qualification that makes them superior to competing peers, just not academic ones. The public is most aware of student athletes, but there are many others. The universitys symphony needs an oboe player, for example, and those are in short supply. It is easily possible that no oboe players made the cut for regular admission, so we take the most academically qualified oboe player out there even if s/he is much less qualified than the rest of the entering class.
Most of these special admits, however, are in another category altogether. They are admitted because they are legacies. That is, their parents are alums or significant donors to the institution. Colleges also admit, without competitive scrutiny, children of political figures, and others who are in a position to assist the college, outside the usual admissions procedures. (If you really want to improve your chances at getting into the college of your choice I strongly suggest that in the space where it asks for your fathers occupation you write, grants administrator for the National Science Foundation. Gilding the lily is suggesting that your mother is an executive in the higher education division of the Catherine T. and John D. McArthur Foundation. There is a good chance you wont get caught lying, but will be immediately ushered into the child of big money pile.)
If somewhere near 20% of the entering class is made of up of special admits, and another half of the class is reserved for full pays, I can easily believe that both you and LINittany were screwed in the process, but not in the way you think.
The nasty secret of university admissions in our time, you see, is that both full pays and special admits, particularly legacies, tend to be overwhelmingly white, and in so far as they are have any religious affiliations, also Christian. They continue to block the access of both traditionally underrepresented students, who are never legacies and rarely have special connections, and middle-class white students. A good dose of political correctness in admissions would probably have helped both you and LINittany as it was not the minority students who account for most of that 25% of the class that was less qualified than you and got admitted anyway, but white students whose major qualification is that they come from the right social class.