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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
I wonder if it's because legacy and athletics are becoming less of a "guaranteed white" admittance. My DC has 2 close friends who are legacies at an Ivy, one child is white, the other is AA. She has another close friend who is a first generation american of asian descent, and that child's parents encourage significant participation in a sport hoping it will help give a boost to college options.

Assuming grades, test scores, etc are equivalent, I would expect a competitive school to give an AA legacy a slight edge over a white legacy, at least until they're getting a good number of AA legacy applicants (I would assume it's still a fairly small pool compared to white legacy applicants).

I would like to see us use SES instead of race. It would give a boost to the kids who truly need one. I think a lot of colleges are punting on real diversity by accepting wealthy kids over disadvantaged kids. [/quote]
Just because you don't value racial diversity doesn't mean other people don't. I can say for certain that the experience of rich, black kids at my private school was different than the experience of rich white and Asian kids. And I'm glad to have known them to get that perspective (the neighborhood my parents lived in was pretty much just white and a little Asian, so I didn't meet rich black kids near my home). [b]Ironically, all of the black students I was friends with at my HYPS school were from lower SES backgrounds except for one Kenyan one, so despite all the concern that rich black kids are taking diversity spots at elite schools my anecdotes don't bear it out.[/b]

You are not the only person in this debate, and your perspective isn't the only one that matters. If you got rid of racial diversity admissions, my college experience would have been worse.[/quote]

Looking at the data, your friendship experience appears to be an anomaly -- unless by saying that your diverse friends were from "lower SES backgrounds" than you, you simply meant that your family was in the top 10% and theirs was in the top 20%.

There just aren't many diverse students who are disadvantaged at HYPS, because very few students at those schools[b] of any color[/b] are from less-advantaged families.  As mentioned above, only 4.5% of students at Harvard come from the bottom 20% socio-economically.  67% come from the top 20% of income!  And the data from Princeton, Yale, and Stanford are the same or worse.  Don't believe it?  Look here https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/harvard-university.  It has data for many top schools.  
[/quote]
Nothing in the data you posted suggests that the black students at those schools don't come from lower SES. That might be true, but your data don't back it up. Black students are a small minority, as are poor students. It's possible, though maybe unlikely, that most of the poor students are also black...but it's definitely likely that a larger fraction of the black students are poor.

And I never said my experience was representative of anything other than my experience. You aren't addressing my point, though, that racial diversity among rich students is also valuable. At least to some of us.[/quote]

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