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Essays were originally instituted to give admissions staffs an excuse to keep out Jews and other minorities.

Whereas now they only use them to keep out whites and Asians?

Now, as before, they're used to inject subjectivity into a process that could just as well be based on tests and grades alone.

The problem with the purely objective approach is you'd go from having a 40% minority campus to having about 2-3%. That's a political problem.

It depends on what you mean by minority. As hughprime said, most schools restrict the number of Asians they admit. Cornell has a much higher percentage of Asian students and a much lower percentage of African American students than the other Ivies, and it's no coincidence.

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