<p>I don't think anybody perceives URMs from top colleges to be NECESSASARILY inferior. It's like how you'd see a football/basketball player of ANY race from Michigan, Notre Dame, Duke, or Vanderbilt: MAYBE they would have gotten in without their athletic abiltiy, OR maybe they would've been laughed at by the admissions office without their athletic abiltiy. So it's not like you'd necessarily perceive them as inferior; it's just that you wouldn't NECESSASARILY perceive them as on par with the majority of the graduates. Once you see the slack these jocks are given with admissions, the easy courses they are steered towards, and the extra assistance they get in studying, you would have to be insanely illogical to think otherwise. On another thread someone cited the average SAT scores for recent classes of Duke basketball players, and it was shockingly low. I doubt that the average SATs for URM students are as drastically different from the non-URMs as the basketball/football jocks' are from non-jocks' scores, but the same principle applies.</p>
<p>When I was at Boston College a long time ago, I took a School of Education course that had 2 white football players in it. The class was primarily geared towards elementary school lesson plans--hardly rocket science--yet these two guys clearly didn't have a clue what was going on, and even tried to get me to do their homework for them (I was the only other male in the class). What's really sad is that they were about 4th string on the football team, so it's not like they were going to make a living playing football.</p>