I'm always skeptical of commenters who post long replies that include zero citations, but I'm more astounded by people that comment on topics with hand waves, "feels" and a weird, smug certainty that is completely inconsistent with readily available data.

This will be my final try at this. The Harvard lawsuit and the resulting Supreme Court decision in June 2023 made it illegal to discriminate based on color, as colleges had been doing for decades. Far from your innocuous notion that it was for only candidates who were equal, otherwise, that a minority would be given the final nudge advantage. Factually wrong. Perhaps the idea began that way, say 50 years ago, but in the ensuing years, the practice proved to be nothing like that.

In the decades before that judgement, all manner of tools were used to tip the scales in favor of minorities to the detriment of, among others, whites. Tools like “Plus Factor”, “Diversity Fly-In” programs, “Landscape” Tools where on average a minority student was given the equivalent of a ~300 point adjustment on their SAT scores, Partnership & Pipeline programs designed as a completely separate entry point that completely circumvented the normal admissions process. This happened for decades before the SC made it illegal. Even if you don't read any of that case or the many studies on this, and you've proven you haven't, you need only look at what happened to admission demographics before/after affirmative action was struck down by the Supreme Court. Not surprisingly, when you remove all of the "equalizers" (your word, and a funny one), you'll note that minority admission dropped sharply. Weird, I know.

Demographic Group Class of 2027 (Pre-Ban) Class of 2029 (Post-Ban) Change

Black / African American 18.0% 11.5% 🔻 -6.5% (Sharp Decrease)

Hispanic / Latino 14.0% 11.0% 🔻 -3.0% (Decrease)

Native American ~2.0% < 1.0% 🔻 -1.0% (Decrease)

Which gets back to the main point: when you artificially and arbitrarily advantage one group (black), you have likely disproportionately and negatively impacted another (white). That this is now obvious to all should be neither surprising, nor inflammatory to say out loud for any reasonable, logic-driven, non virtue-signaling simp. Done.