What about the poor asians like my parents who immigrated here, after facing rampant discrimination in their homeland, lived in a poorer neighborhood, because that's all they could afford as new transplants, were enslaved by their own family, but managed to break out of that, go to school again to get into their dream job, and who now want to send their two sons to the best schools in the country?

Why shouldn't those circumstances be taken into account? Perhaps it's because -- as a race -- most Asians are too proud to talk about this in their admissions essays, and moreover, their intellectual accumen would tend to indicate that these -- frankly minor -- issues are not important when considering what school to attend.

What we should really be talking about is why anyone -- Asian or black or whatever -- needs to elicit the sympathy of some old WASP to attend school. The whole 'write a sob story' trope is true because this appeals to popular white culture. It's time that ends, and we let adults run the show.