I’m sure there were kids who were hundredths of a decimal points (ahead of my oldest) though they were better than he was. The most valuable thing he did resume-wise was not a school activity and no one at school shared his interest so few really knew what he was up to. I think this happens more often than people realize. Or maybe this really is the year they want the oboe player, not the tuba player and definitely not another string player!
Here’s the information on choice of STEM: http://trends.collegeboard.org/education-pays/figures-tables/students-stem-fields-gender-and-race-ethnicity It’s pretty striking. And these figures are from over ten years ago–I wouldn’t be surprised if the difference is even more now.
The thing is, it’s not “difficult” for Asian boys and unhooked white girls to be admitted to the Ivies or equivalent institutions. Every such college admits hundreds of them. No one is trying to keep them out. It’s extremely competitive for some subsets of those groups. It’s competitive for literary white girls, because there are a lot more literary white girls than there are literary Asian boys, and the universities want a fair number of literary students and would prefer that they not all be white girls.
No symphony orchestra will hire a violin player to play the tuba, no matter how accomplished a musician he is.
Yes, I am all too aware that my literary white girl will face stiffer competition. It’s quite apparent from the participnts I see at her literary activities.
Adcoms can’t “guess” who may have had a lot of test prep. C’mon, that would be patently unfair. And unethical. And you don’t know what an elite thinks is a stellar EC.
In fact, when you say “best students,” the CC perspective, generally seems to be primarily based on stats. You know they are looking for more, that it’s not ‘top down.’ (If it were and Asian Americans were being artificially limited, that would be one heck of an issue.)
“If Princeton takes the kid from the potato farm with a 3.9 and a 2270 SAT, and rejects the kid from Stuy with a 4.0 and a 2400…” But that’s just a slice of what an adcom sees. Just because someone has high stats does not mean they are what that college is looking for, in various attributes. Nor does it mean he didn’t blow his app or interview or otherwise lose ground. Think about what these schools do want to see.
I am not saying AA kids are more likely to blow something. I am saying ANY kid can. Just looking at stats is so insufficient.
I’ll tell you the strongest correlation I’ve ever observed in my 15+ years in the admissions world:
99% of applicants and parents believe that an admissions system favoring their own student’s strengths would be the fairest system possible.
^^and the other 1% are lying. 
“Adcoms can’t “guess” who may have had a lot of test prep. C’mon, that would be patently unfair.” I see, so it would be fair to expect a poor kid who has to spend his spare time working on the family farm to have the same test scores as the kids at magnet schools or as the children of wealthy well-educated parents who can easily afford private tutors?
So when the CA schools went race blind, there was no increase in Asians in non-STEM fields and drop in URMs in these? I’m curious how Berkeley and such schools portray their pre race-blind admission policy that had numbers that were dramatically different. Is their answer that race-blind admissions is racist while taking race into account isn’t?
If URMs aren’t stealing Asian spots and colleges want more non-STEM students, why is there any objection to making admissions race blind? If URMs are getting in truly on merit, you’d expect there’ll be as many cases where URMs will increase as those where they decrease.
@Dadof3
When schools that are race-conscious switch to race-blind admissions, the real reason their number of asian admits goes up is because asian tuba players suddenly prefer to apply there.
The “mess” here is that you can’t say URMs are stiealing Asian spots because those spots are URM’s in the first place per the colleges’ “institutional priorities”, but you can’t say there’s a pre-defined race based quota either because all the numbers can and do fluctuate ever so slightly every year. You can’t tell who is more qualified because it seems there’s no such distinction once the applicant pool passes the “first cut”, after which everyone could be the best possible admit, yet you can always find a convincing reason to explain why someone is not admitted (if not, there’s always the “90%+ applicants are rejected including you!”). It seems a lottery would work just as well yet the holistic admission process is a most sophiscated and mysterious black box ever created by human beings! 
FYI
From the NYT: How Minorities Have Fared in States With Affirmative Action Bans
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/06/24/us/affirmative-action-bans.html
The article title is misleading. It should have been titled how “URMs Have Fared in States With Affirmative Action Bans”. Looks like before the ban, the AOs were putting more than just a “light thumb on the scale”. Immediately after all these schools began to apply race-blind admissions, the percentage of URMS plummeted.
The colleges examined in the NYT article (read article to see graphs):
Berkeley
UCLA
UT
TAMU
FL State
U FL
U Mich
Mich State
U Wash
Wash State
College admissions is a zero-sum game. So who was being rejected before the race-conscious admissions ban? Oh, that’s right… it must have been those White & Asian applicants who didn’t play the tuba.
This is where I see the breakdown in the logic of the posters who argue there is no bias against asian applicants. If resultant racial percentages are solely the consequence of non-racially-biased holistic criteria, then Princeton et al. should just go the way of U Mich and eliminate race-conscious admissions. Don’t be feeding me BS that there’s no racial bias, but you still need to consider race.
I’m lost. Why did this discussion turn into a discussion of whether URMs are being shown preference? Of course they are. The schools say they are.
"You can’t tell who is more qualified because it seems there’s no such distinction once the applicant pool passes the “first cut”, after which everyone could be the best possible admit, "
Says who? First cut is only first cut. After that, they don’t throw darts.
Doesn’t seem to matter how many times we say, this isn’t just about stats.
Exactly the reason why everyone could be the best possible admit because no one outside the black box knows!
Just saying: but people outside the black box do claim to “know” there is bias against Asian Americans.
And then some other do know there is NOT?
A potato farmer kid from Idaho is most likely to be white, since >80% of Idaho’s population is white. The second highest potato producing state is Washington, which is about 70% white.
That chart also shows how few of those (of all of the demographic groups) enrolling in a STEM major actually graduate in a STEM major.