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Coming from a European perspective as well, I do understand the idea behind Harvard's admission process.

They want to mold a group of people that are coming from the money, brain, physical and societal elite. It is not a school, it is an elite network generating institution.

The academic aspect is their legitimacy generating element. If you take this viewpoint, everything they do makes sense.

>You can't work your way out of poverty over two generations. If anything is the American Dream (arguably there's more people outside of America who have one of these, but I digress), it's being able to see your kids succeed. But they want 1st gen immigrants according to the article.

None of the folks that I think exemplify the American dream that I know personally went to Harvard or even an elite school.

> It seems getting into America's most prestigious institution on merit is incredibly unlikely, compared to if you happened to have rich relatives.

It's mostly prestigious for business. Not saying it's right, but business is almost entirely who you know. The allure of Harvard is networking and name recognition. For tech, you can make amazing contacts at CMU, CalTech, MIT, etc and there systems are at least partially more of a meritocracy.

>Athletes I guess are a special American thing where universities are involved.

While it might be a raw deal for basketball or football where there is a ton of revenue, this is amazing for athletes of less popular sports like swimming, track and field, softball, etc. Also, athletics give people an outlet. It's at least partially why people walk on with no scholarship.

> You can't work your way out of poverty over two generations. If anything is the American Dream (arguably there's more people outside of America who have one of these, but I digress), it's being able to see your kids succeed. But they want 1st gen immigrants according to the article.

Granted this was a few years back, but parents were 1st gen from an Eastern European country. It helped me in the admissions process at a top tech school.

>Do they have a drop-down for ethnicity?

Yes, but pretty vague (e.g; White, Pacific Islander, Asian, etc). I wrote about my parents in my admission essay. I honestly think it helped me get into the school I wanted to go to. I'm not disagreeing the system is shitty, but where you go to school isn't as important as building your network in the US. The school on my resume may have gotten me some first interviews but the people I met at jobs have gotten me every other one. I'm not a super social person, so I never liked playing this game, but people liking you is far more important than what you actually know or where you went to school most of the time.

> - You can't work your way out of poverty over two generations. If anything is the American Dream (arguably there's more people outside of America who have one of these, but I digress), it's being able to see your kids succeed. But they want 1st gen immigrants according to the article.

I’m not following or think I disagree. Plenty of people (me and my siblings included) have gone from poverty to upper middle class in two generations. My grandfathers were literally a coal miner and a steel mill worker in rural Western PA. My parents were the first generation to attend college. My siblings and most of my cousins have achieved solid middle class or better in general.

> from a European perspective

Go to Wikipedia and read about the 1960s in the US - Freedom Riders (whites and blacks sitting next to one another on a bus) almost being beaten to death, buses burned, riots on school integration, dogs and firehoses turned on black children, people registering black voters murdered, 4 little girls murdered at a black church by the Klan, civil rights workers and leaders beaten and jailed and murdered and on and on.

Look to the USA currently - before US football games are played the team must stand and salute the USA and the controversies around that, the Black Lives Matter movement and the politician and media hatred of the concept of black lives mattering - which means police killing blacks for no reason. Or the rage against tearing down Confederate statues with inscriptions praising white supremacy like the one in New Orleans. The anti-blacks murdered someone who wanted the Confederate statue in Charlottesville taken down last year - in fact hundreds of Nazis and Klansmen and other far right groups marched there, and the state government and judiciary has blocked the city government from tearing down the statue. Dylan Roof hated blacks and walked into a church murdering blacks.

And on and on. The former African nation enslaved in the US is still an oppressed nation in the US, along with Puerto Ricans, Hawaiians and such.

Africans being represented at Harvard at a level proportional to their population in the US is an anomaly in the existing oppression of Africans on the US, and all this hubbub is an attempt to correct that.