Comment by filoleg

5 days ago

> It has been illegal to discriminate for a very long time, but it has also been de facto illegal to have demographic compositions substantially different from the general population.

> So, they've always been faced with the problem of needing to either discriminate to get the numbers to match, or not discriminating and risking the numbers falling out of line.

Not disagreeing with your larger point, but this sounds wrong (in a sense that, I don’t think that’s the case).

If what you claim was the case, how has CalTech been managing to have such a large percentage of Asian undergrad students (44% according to their Fall 2024-2025 enrollment data[0], with numbers from previous years not straying that far off either) without ever even a hint of getting in trouble over it (given that Asian people make up roughly 7% of the US population)?

I am sure there are similar examples of other schools, this was just the first major known one that came to my mind. Perchance you are correct, and there is simply something special that CalTech has (and Harvard doesn’t) that lets them not worry about this. But that seems unlikely.