Using parental income as well as parental education level in admissions would have helped GP's father just fine without any need for race-based affirmative action.
This is why, for example, children of African immigrants are something like half of black Harvard students, despite being a minuscule fraction of population: they want to meet their 13% black quota, but there are too few American descendants of slaves who will not be utterly out of place, so they make up the shortage with Africans.
Don't throw out numbers like that unless you are willing to back them up, because your claim seems completely insane.
For example, if Harvard only wants to admit people 2 sigma above median, by 68-95-99.7 rule it will be 2.5% of white applicants, but 0.15% of black applicants. That’s 16-to-1 even before you adjust for the fact that non-Hispanic whites are 60% and blacks are 13% of population, after which you get something like 75 qualified whites for each whites. Add to that Hispanics whites, who, while overall having lower academic achievement, are not nearly as low as blacks, and Asians, who have even higher achievement than whites, you’ll easily get something like 100 to 150 qualified non blacks for every black applicant.
Even more concretely: there are something like 2 million freshmen every year. 2 sigma cutoff means only 2.5% of them qualify, which is only 50,000 people. 1 in 100 means only 500 blacks qualify at above 2 population sigma. Then you have all Ivies and other top schools compete for these. So yes, you can find 300 blacks at 2 sigma cutoff, but Harvard won’t get all of those. Thus, Africans.
If you truly think that the top 2.5% of black students would be "out of place" at Harvard then you have a completely invented mysticism of what it means to go to Harvard.
https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/DoingPsychScien...
What was this highly predictive test? It was, quite simply, taking SAT at 11-12 years of age. SAT is really good test, and is highly predictive of academic success, its biggest flaw is that it is too easy for those at the top of distribution, but that can be ameliorated by administering it earlier than typical.
> If you truly think that the top 2.5% of black students would be "out of place" at Harvard then you have a completely invented mysticism of what it means to go to Harvard.
If 2.5% of all black students were of Harvard quality, then something like 16% of white students would be, which is something like 3 kids in every high school class. Harvard can afford to be much more selective than that, and in fact it must be so to keep its brand.
Regardless of how selective they are with admissions it also doesn't mean that a large chunk of the people they rejected wouldn't have also done fine there.
Arguably it's much easier to get good grades at Harvard due to grade inflation if you are a good student (which you are by definition if you are at the top of your class) than at state schools.
But that leads to the same fundamental problem - somebody who was "unfortunate" enough to be born into decent circumstances but _who was actually more qualified_ than the diversity admit gets rejected.
I sure as shit am buying qualifications for my kid, fully recognizing my role in participating in this flawed system. Kid's in robotics, language classes, gets to travel. We switched the kid's school to go to a school with higher standards. We teach the kid both reading (100 Easy Lessons...) and writing (workbooks from the non-US country with better public education) -- small expenses in $ but nevertheless expenses. I'm sure someone will happily tell me that the last part is just good morals on my part, or something, but you can't tell me that $100/day for a robotics summer camp is just good morals. I am buying that kid qualifications.
And then someone will tell me that's not race-based, but look at the perpetuation of wealth disparity thru US history, from chattel slavery on through the robbery from the Freedmen's Bank to the riot that burned down Black Wall Street to the fact that Black servicemen couldn't get mortgage assistance or GI Bill college assistance after WW2. Follow the money.
So help the poor. This has nothing to do with race.
So nothing happens
If schools can reserve spots for legacy admissions or international students to the detriment of merit based then they can also reserve spots for a lottery system