That stood out to me too. For all the self-appointed power that higher education institutions have given themselves to balance the proverbial scales of justice, I wonder if they ever take the time to consider the moral hazards of their decision making.
Will the presidents, chancellors, board of governors, or deans of these institutions ever have to compete for these seats? Obviously no, and their own children will likely benefit in some form, whether it is legacy status or academic nepotism/networking, from their parents’ existing positions of power.
So on whom does the burden of balancing the scales, not in theory but in practice, fall? Not white students at the nation’s elite schools, whose enrollment numbers even after various forms of affirmative action have been implemented have remained steady. Not black, latino/a/x, or Native American students whose enrollment numbers have benefited from targeted recruitment. Not international students, whose full-tuition payments have ensured their enrollment numbers have only increased with the decline of public funding (in the case of public institutions) and budgetary restructuring (in the case of private institutions).
From a racial dimension, the primary group paying for higher education’s experiments in educational racial composition have primarily been Asian-American students, among whom there are prospective students (as we can see in the linked comment) with top-percentile scores in their respective areas of study, high-level achievement in non-academic pursuits, and a widely dispersed range of target schools.
For all the moral certainty that higher education likes to presume, they have a dumbfounding lack of self-awareness when it comes to the moral hazard of making others pay for the consequences of their self-appointed mission.
This is, of course, assuming they aren’t fully aware and satisfied with the results they’ve produced.