Heard a WSJ reporter Dan Golden (that's GOLDEN not Goldin) promoting a book, "The Price of Admission...".
Asians have to get a 1600 (at the time) on their SATs to be admitted to the "elite" schools. The ones
that get screwed are white males and very-smart-but-not-quite-perfect Asians.
Females have Title IX...
IOW, the Asians are also punished for being very very good as a group.
The point is that large numbers/proportions of the Asian applicants were getting 1600 on their SAT's.
That's called "driven".
Little story (true one): The son of a former co-worker of mine was a student at Texas A&M 15-20 years ago. He was a hard enough worker, spent plenty of time in the A&M library. One night he was studying there and missed hearing the closing bell, lost in study, and got himself locked in. Suddenly the lights went out, and the emergency/night lights came on. He looked around, and suddenly realized that under every one of the night lights, squarely in the middle of their little pools of floodlight, was an Asian student. They'd been sitting and studying in those spots all evening, and he hadn't thought anything of it. But then he realized that every one of them had chosen those spots hours before, right under the lights. That was when he realized that these people were fanatics, and that they were competing with him at that level. Or more to the point, they weren't competing with him any more. That story was already over.
So I wonder, is it time to say hello to our future, meritocratic policy elite, the successors to the "neocons"? If so, the good news is, there won't be any mortal conflict with China. The Chinese over there and the Chinese over here will come up with a friendly solution to all outstanding issues and problems, and implement it so smoothly that we'll never even hear the click.