HINT: DON’T BE ASIAN. What Ivy League Affirmative Action Really Looks Like — from the Inside. “Ivy League admissions are one part meritocracy — the students are quite bright — and one part ideological engineering. And if Americans broadly understood how the process works, support for affirmative action would diminish even further. First, few people understand how dramatic the boost is for favored minority groups. If students were black or the ‘right’ kind of Latino, they would often receive admissions offers with test scores 20 or 30 percentile points lower than those of white or Asian students. When I expressed concern about an admissions offer to a black student with test scores in the 70th percentile — after we’d passed over white and Asian students with scores in the 98th percentile and far higher grades — I was told that we had to offer admission or we’d surely lose him to our Ivy League rivals. Second, these dramatic breaks rarely go to poor kids who are overcoming the challenges of ghetto schools.”