>>>Fair question. How about his having come out of a single-parent family and earned his way to Harvard Law. It's not that hard to get into Harvard or Yale* when your father and your grandfather went there, but when you're a poor, mixed-race kid from Hawaii, not so much.
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>>Wouldn't being an intelligent mixed-race/minority make it "easier" to get in to most universities (you know, they're big on diversity)?
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>Intelligent may not enter the equation. There are majority discrimination programs at Harvard that open the doors to minorities regardless of ability to pay.

You're right about one thing--doors are being opened to minorities. At Harvard, as at most of the top schools in the US, ability to pay doesn't enter the admission decision. Such schools are see to be "need-blind." Last I knew, the only Ivy League school that wasn't need-blind was Brown.

The same schools (and many more) used need-based financial aid programs. Many of the top schools have moved over the last few years to financial aid programs that consist of only grants and no loans.

FWIW, at schools of that caliber, the tuition that is paid by those who can afford it doesn't come close to covering what it costs the school to educate a student. I don't remember the exact figures, but I do remember when Solomon was at Amherst and we were paying between $35,000 and $40,000 a year for tuition, room and board, they told us that they used about $50,000 per student from their endowment income on top of that each year.

However, back to what I sense is your main point, I don't see how these programs discriminate against the majority. In fact, I'd venture to guess that most American families can't afford tuition, room and board for an Ivy-level school (now between $40,000 and $45,000 per year), so these programs, in fact, open these schools to all qualified students, rather than leaving them available only to the rich.

I guess I might as well answer what you're implying, as well as what you actually said. I suspect that what you really meant is that they're taking unqualified minority students over qualified white students. I think a quick look at the admissions data for these schools makes it clear that that's not the case. Here are the stats for the group that were freshmen at Yale this year from (http://www.yale.edu/oir/factsheet.html):

* Acceptance Statistics:
o # of Applicants: 19,323
o % Accepted: 10%
o # of Matriculants: 1,320
o Yield: 71%
* 56% of matriculants came from public high schools.
* 44% of maticulants came from independent, parochial, and other schools.
* 15% of matriculants were Yale College and/or Graduate and Professional School legacies.
* 9% of matriculants are international students.

* Test score ranges (25th to 75th percentiles) for enrolled freshmen:
o SAT-Verbal: 700-800
o SAT-Math: 700-790
o SAT-Writing: 700-780
o ACT: 30-34

Elsewhere on that page, they indicate that 95% of matriculants graduate in 5 years or less, and 99% of freshmen return for their sophomore years. Not a lot of room there to be taking unqualified students.

I'll leave looking up the numbers for the other top schools as an exercise for the reader. <g>

Tamar