“Can you or anyone else offer a convincing explanation for why that is the case other than the existence of either an Asian quota or increased anti-Asian biases at Ivy adcoms?”
Another possibility: by and large, Asian applicants are unhooked. They’re not generally athletic recruits or developmental prospects, and they’re not as large a percentage of the legacy class. Though it’s a smaller hook, they’re also not as well represented in the first-generation-going-to-college set.
What’s really needed is comparing the admissions rates of unhooked applicants by ethnicity. And that is highly, highly unlikely to happen. Heck, it’s never gonna happen. Best you can get is the estimates that folks here on CC make based on looking at athletic rosters and making educated guesses about the number of developmental/celebrity/etc admits. I wonder if the plantiffs in the case have done that kind of analysis.
Incidentally, the student was admitted to Penn but ended up at Williams.