“The drive for diversity has been trending mostly in the past decade (guessing), right? It would take a while for improvements to be reflected in the social mobility data.”
The drive for diversity has been going on for a while, recall the first case challenging Affirmative Action was 1978 (Bakke vs UC Davis med school).
“So it’s not just the expenditure of funds that is at issue here but addressing the first mission of the university — that of academic excellence.”
Well athletes for one, totally throw a wrench in your academic excellence theory. The Harvard lawsuit pretty much confirms that you do not need to be an academic superstar to get in if you’re an athlete. It doesn’t mean that athletes have bad grades or anything like that. I can also factually state the same for Stanford. So that’s 15% of the class that’s not evaluated on academic excellence.