If you are a private setting...I’d tell the government to get their nose out of your admissions business. If you are a public setting, how exactly are you going to deal with kids with fake high school degrees (A-plus-plus) who really aren’t capable of handling college level courses? The SAT tests are the only way to reset the whole pattern.
But if you go by SAT scores...I’m guessing that a heck of a lot of Asian kids and maybe Indian kids would easily rate ahead of these suburban kids with fake high school education certificates.
But US taxpayers are heavily funding most private colleges too. And, we stick our noses into the hiring of private businesses, etc., already.
What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
This is in a lot of ways reminiscent of Harvard’s “Jewish quota” back in the day. The SATs were actually introduced as a leveling mechanism to, for example, give smart, rural, flyover country kids a chance to go to the colleges of the elite, along with the the coastal private school kids.
This on a lot of levels was a very good thing. But in some ways it also diminished the emphasis on morality and moral development at such colleges, which generally had got their starts as religious institutions.
In some ways, they tried to swing the pendulum back toward that and away from a straight brain race by starting to look to well-rounded kids who had put time into volunteering, for example. But of course, the elite used that opening and excuse to buy their kids an advantage for having founded some sort of third-world charity after having spent a summer volunteering there—and other such ridiculousness.
Virtually all of the so-called private universities accept Federal money for their programs, and thus are subject to compliance with anti-discrimination law. I’m sure you’d find that Harvard is getting big bucks from the Feds for one thing or another.
That said, I have always been amazed at the level of open discrimination against Asians in the academic world. Really, though, what it is at heart is discrimination against excellence (the same reason Jews were discriminated against in admissions procedures) because the “excellence” did not belong to a politically favored group. Hence the need for “affirmative action,” even unstated - as professor Amy Wax recently pointed out, raising a storm with her criticism of the attempt to achieve equality of result by placing completely unqualified minorities in colleges where they could not possibly succeed.
I hope they nail Harvard on this. Oh, and that they find BO’s foreign student application while they’re at it...