Affirmative action was employed in many schools in the later half of the last century to combat institutional racism, meaning admissions officers not accepting someone or discriminating by race (mostly toward ppl of african american heritage). According to wikipedia, affirmative action is “favoring members of a disadvantaged group.” It is one of the most controversial and debated topics in college admissions. Many argue that institutional racism doesn’t really exist anymore, and affirmative action should be banned. Some argue that affirmative action is still needed. One of the problems affirmative action creates is that applicants of certain groups of minorities (african americans, latinos, native americans, and pacific-islanders to be precise) get a HUGE boost in college admissions, while majority students (white applicants) or over-represented minorities (asian americans) are at a disadvantage, due to the insane competition. Gender also plays a role here. That’s why female applicants have higher chances of going into STEM fields, especially engineering or computer science. The standards are basically lowered or risen according to race/gender.
In a way, you are competing against your own racial and gender group. Many people argue that affirmative action is actually racist and sexist, since your race and gender are taken into account, not just your merits. It is ILLEGAL to have racial quotas, and all institutions deny that they have racial quotas (instead they call it “holistic-admissions”). However, there’s a lot of evidence that there are quotas in place.
The State of California made affirmative action illegal in public institutions (UC and CSU schools) years ago. Asian acceptance and attendance at UC Berkeley shot up, while the proportion of black freshmen fell by half. Meanwhile, the racial makeup of Harvard’s classes have been CONSTANT in the past several years, despite changing dynamics of applicants.
Personally I’m against affirmative action, as it negatively affects me (lol) and it creates an unhealthy mindset against minority students (you probably heard of the joke “he got in because he is _____ (insert skin color here)”).
All in all, what AA means for you is that it’s going to be harder for you to get admitted, as an asian male (indian americans included), especially into a STEM field. It’s certainly frustrating (for some lol), but there’s nothing you can do about it.
========================================================================
Anyway…
Different colleges have different methods of reviewing apps. Most have 2 - 3 reviewers that read your app independently (they don’t know the other reviewers’ responses). They grade you based on a report sheet and a few criteria. At the end an admissions counselor (usually the one responsible for applicants applying from your region) presents all of the applicants he/she is responsible for. They mostly run down your application and go over the 2-3 reviewers’ ratings. Then they take a vote for accept, reject, or deferral/waitlist, often by a show of hands.
The process takes about 3-5 minutes per applicant in the final decision stage, and each reviewer spends about 5 minutes reading your application and maybe a few more writing comments. So, you’re right… about 15 minutes in total. I think “rolled dice on some admissions” is more of a figure of speech lol. Meaning even though they don’t really do that, a lot of admissions decisions are based on intuition, One extra or one less vote could be the difference between acceptance and deferral. Maybe that one admissions officer didn’t pay attention when voting on your app. He/she was thinking about lunch. Who knows. 