No, it asks (through the article cited) if holistic admission is a euphemism for, essentially, keeping Asian student populations at many universities below the disproportionately high percentage they already are, relative to the overall population. It also certainly begs the discussion about whether universities are using holistic admissions to go back to (many would say continue) the days where there is a lot of wink. wink, nod, nod in admissions for what the article calls people with “tags”. That is not the same as a discussion as to the merits or lack thereof of affirmative action as a policy. One could apply affirmative action policies in their admissions process or not and still use this “holistic admissions” mantra to discriminate against certain students for the purposes of admission. Depending upon how it is applied, holistic admissions can be the opposite of affirmative action. Affirmative action is designed to increase underrepresented segments of the population; holistic admission is designed to decrease the representation of a certain segment of the population so it isn’t further overrepresented. Or at least that latter statement is the hypothesis for debate in this thread. One can talk about that hypothesis without rehashing affirmative action.