yup exactly!! there seem to be a lot of ways that this information is being oversimplified in misleading ways, especially given how opaque and complicated the college admissions systems already seems in its acceptance factors.

my other thought about all this is that all these talks about class- or race-conscious admissions at the top tier schools are a bit of a red herring… realistically the impact of these policies from a social mobility perspective is going to be much bigger from mid tier/more publicly accessible schools (eg: state schools).

funnily enough, i’m not really sure that based on this medicore whites can necessarily rest easier. the university of california system stopped affirmative action policies in the 90s but since then, the white population has actually made losses rather than gains in being admitted to the university of california. for example, for ucla, it looks like the percentage of whites admitted has never gone back to 1995 (during affirmative action) levels. i think the individual implementation of these post-affirmative action policies by the educational establishments seems to be the real make or break here.

i wonder what kind of tangible effect this will have overall, given how opaque and discretionary college admissions standards are in the first place. if an institution wanted to, couldn’t class-conscious policies geared towards underrepresented geographies and first generation college students achieve a similar outcome while skirting the ruling on race explicitly?