This is kind of like what happened to Emmett Till, except for the top five law school part

Now it’s not very nice to laugh at some kid who understandably feels crushed when he doesn’t get into HYP and has to go to Columbia or whatever after his parents — just guessing here — have spent his entire life focused on this precise prize like a couple of terriers staring at a rathole.

So let’s mock them instead, along with the radical centrist uncle.

There is a real bottleneck problem with the ever-more unhinged competition to get My White Kid with the Unisexual and Somehow Vaguely Aristo Name into the one of the Best Schools, but that problem has very little to do with affirmative action in admissions to elite colleges, which in turn has almost nothing to do with actually ameliorating problems of racial and economic injustice in 21st century America.

Comment from Unemployed Northeastern:

I’ve mentioned this before, but the one good thing that came out of the hideous SFFA v. Harvard litigation (brought to you by the same non-lawyer who found the plaintiffs for Fisher and Shelby County) was a pair of NBER papers written by an expert witness in that litigation using discovery data. Basically in the 2010s 42% of accepted white applicants to Harvard were legacy, recruited athletes, dean’s interest students (read: major heirs, children of royalty, etc), or children of Harvard professors – and that per the expert witness/author’s analysis, 3/4 of them would not have gotten into Harvard were it not for those factors.

To put it another way, about 33% of white Harvard undergrads in 2010 got in because of nonmeritocratic factors. Which, looking at the undergrad student body profiles, is ultimately a larger percentage of Harvard undergrads than URM Harvard undergrads in most of those years. And yet people such as those in the tweet thread just KNOW that affirmative action is the ONE thing that kept their precious kid out. Also that nephew’s high school resume was, frankly, borderline for actual meritocratic HYP admissions. And the resume is cookie cutter, TBH. HYP could fill their classes with identical resumes. Understandably, they don’t want to.