And other schools that provide an elite education and prestige all also discriminate in the same way. This case isn't just about Harvard, it's about discrimination against Asians in general. Would be wonderful if the rest of the ivys, stanford, carnegie, vandy, emory, northwestern, the UCs, mich, illinois, purdue, gatech, your local state school, and so on all didn't have legacy admissions and didn't discriminate against asians. But they do. Very few schools (MIT and hopkins come to mind) with that level of prestige and ability to unlock the doors that affirmative action is supposed to equalize access to don't have legacy preference and underhanded discriminiation the way harvard does it. They're not an outlier.
Sorry, but I don't believe that top-notch Asian-American students have any trouble getting into an excellent school, unless they aim for only one in particular and assume that not getting into that particular school is a failure.
If Harvard wanted to, it could require perfect SAT scores, straight-A GPA, and whatever other concrete objective criteria it wanted and STILL have far more students applying than it can accept. They could then use a lottery to select students. But they don't do this. No school does this, even if they could.
Elite schools aim for a well rounded student body. This includes even making room for students that show promise but don't meet the usual criteria. It includes legacy admissions, it includes a number of foreign students who pay full tuition, it includes underrepresented minorities. It includes "unicorn" students of all races who have excellent academic records.
The comment you're replying to also really helps push that "Asians are just single-minded and only care about Harvard" stereotype as well. Ironic since the comment that poster was replying to was about college admission in general, and they fixated on the harvard aspect.
We're "model minorities." We get discriminated against and then get used as examples for those in power to discriminate against other minorities. It's a system where everyone has been convinced that true meritocracy (which is not incompatible with affirmative action when you control achievements for the background of the student) can only be achieved through lateral violence where Asians win and blacks and Latinos lose, all the while those who benefitted most from a legacy of colonialism and oppression can't lose. Let's also not forget that of the white students at these elite schools, wealthy whites are greatly overrepresented, leaving poor deserving whites to fight for scraps as well (look at the data in the article on admission rates after discarding legacy admissions). So another form of class-based oppression can breed there in the guise of race-based rhetoric where again for Asians to be treated properly, even if on paper whites would give up seats, it's the ones who are also fighting to get in on merit and are discriminated against by a classist (as opposed to racist) system. Divide and conquer.
