Historically, concerns about "diversity of backgrounds", "well-rounded" candidates, and the even more nebulous "character" were code for the fear by the majority's elite of an overrepresented minority gaining entrance into that elite. In the time when these policies were first promulgated the target was Jews [1], but the strategies and motives seem not to have changed: the presence of enormous academic success among an immigrant minority group without high economic status is resented as somehow a "gaming" of the system that needs to be corrected by introducing subjective factors into the system.

Where this gets politically complicated is by the concurrent policies in favor of non-Asian minorities, but at least there the policies are quite explicit about their justifications (correcting historical disadvantage).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerus_clausus#Numerus_clausus...

As an asian yourself don't belittle your upbringing by assuming you need to be 'improved' by special programs to make you a better all around fit. You're better off being proud of your race or family line and whatever demonstrated intelligence level and then pursue your career interests which (hopefully for us will also align with bettering the world).

Let's face it, the harvard admissions process is secretive they aren't giving all candidates a thorough review, they aren't looking deeply into 150,000 applications in a three month period. They can't. So they dump and dump based on subjective and biased methods being careful to honor first and foremost those requirements like affirmative action. And then they probably get the quota and then start onto the smaller piles. In other words all the activities an Asian might be on, they can and will be overlooked because somebody else has a righter color at the right time when the stack of applications are being sorted by whatever computer or individual at that step.

So to question, "maybe I need a better holistic upbringing?" Bullshit. in this case it's highly likely many many many of these asians had a remarkable upbringing that would satisfy anyone but they got dumped for somebody so the color factor was satisfied.

The less measurable your admissions criteria, the more subconscious bias seeps into your decision making process. You can not extricate the perverse stereotypes that exist in society when making a decision whether a candidate is "diverse" or "well-rounded".

There have been numerous studies showing that whites favor meritocratic admission criteria, but reverse their position when shown the high percentage of Asian admits (e.g. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1086/670664?uid=2&uid=4&sid...). Indeed the data also shows that white admissions are barely affected in comparison to Asians (e.g. see the MCAT admissions data linked elsewhere in this thread).

It seems to me that the shroud of "diversity" is being used to preserve the existing white power structure in elite universities, especially with the prevalence of legacy admits.

Anyone who has designed a system knows that you can tweak variables to get your desired result and then tautologically justify your decisions post-hoc.