Notably, the comments section of the article is overwhelmingly in favor of schools not discriminating based on the color of the applicant's skin.
That way you may not get in, but you know you won't get cut because you got assigned an arbitrary 'personality' score if you scored high enough; enables kids to save face with friends/family too.
Not a fully baked idea here, just a potential avenue.
Note that I am not expressing any opinion about any of this, merely pointing out the counter argument.
Insanely high threshold? That's... a very low bar. https://www.statista.com/statistics/195908/number-of-births-... (no idea how good this source is) shows roughly 4 million births a year. A 98th percentile cutoff would admit 80,000 kids per year to Harvard. By contrast, according to https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics (hopefully a strong source), the class of 2021 admitted 2037 people of which 1687 enrolled.
You would hope that 100% of Harvard admits would have 98th percentile (or, really, better) scores, but they don't.
Like by IQ, achievements, attitude, etc.
I feel like a lot of people use this phrase to emphasize... something... without thinking about it.
Asian skin color isn't all that different from white skin color, particularly among the Asians that schools are trying to keep out.
Can you tell the difference between an Asian and a white by looking? Easily, but skin color is certainly not where you'd look first, or fifth, or tenth.