Very easy. Admissions should be race blind and name blind. Everything else, including socioeconomic background, can be included in the admissions packet.
The application process becomes a strict meritocracy when all of these points (race/name/need) are blocked, which works in a perfect world but does not work when you consider that socioeconomic disparities tend to impact minority races the most. Strict meritocracies are favored in the bay but are substantially out of favor everywhere else precisely because so many minorities are born directly into a disadvantage.
To encourage the leveling of socioeconomic success, race-aware admissions will probably be necessary until we as a country start seeing success in moving the odds of economic success closer to the center rather than in favor of white males.
Anyway this isn't really a commentary on this specific lawsuit so much as it's a response to the suggestion of blinding multiple other categories out.
Access to education has been one of the best thing to happen to minorities, and Asians are a good example of that. Most came from poor immigrant families and in the space of 2 generations they made it to top universities. So what exactly were we doing wrong? Seems to me the system is clearly working as a social escalator.
(circa 1998) https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-...
(Circa 2015) https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/01/28/us-ed...
(Circa 2017) http://college.usatoday.com/2017/03/07/report-the-race-gap-i...
The overarching theme is that non-asian minority populations may be disparately affected by adverse conditions continuously perpetuated on them such as single-parenting.
And before we conclude that single-parenting is the fault of the parent -- no, not generally. It's generally the fault of the society that disparately targets adults of a given background for separation or incarceration.
If we're being frank, neither white majority nor Asian minority populations have had to deal with imposed inadequacies in family structure.
TL;DR: Asian immigrants are more likely to have support networks similar to the majority population, something frequently deprived from other minority populations in the US.
If I remember correctly the US government kind of encourages single parenthood through several incentive schemes instead of promoting families, and this has made ravages in black communities since it was implemented. Time to repeal bad policies?
Thomas Sowell on this very topic: https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/07/slavery-didnt-cause-t...
People tend to forget that minorities being born directly into a disadvantage include Asians/Asian-Americans.
So by penalizing the whole band of Asian races to even out admission, a whole bunch of materially disadvantaged Asian populations end up less favored than their African counterparts.
It's an unfortunate state of affairs.
I think this sometimes gets overlooked - no matter what form it takes, the system of college credentialism is in itself fairly arbitrary and removed from actual merit. It shouldn't be surprising that such a system tends to run into a lot of problems.