I understand. But my argument was, it seems unfair that these Asian kids whose ancestors didn't have anything to do with the race discrimination in US, have to be on the receiving end of the affirmative action.
I know it is not a good example but should we have affirmative action in sporting teams as Asians seem to be underrepresented there.
Should we rather improve the funnels before which are leading to this concentration of Asian kids. This is not even considering the fact if even the desire to follow some subject is equal in every race. If it is not and it should be all things being equal at the start, then we should fix the funnels before.
We're talking about policies that favor some groups against others in a competition for scarce resources (college places, scholarships), so it clearly is going to have a negative effect on the people that are not in the favored groups. And even if the policies weren't so openly discriminatory (eg. SAT scores, quotas), the disparate impact on Asian-Americans would still be obvious.
I wish the effort was put into making them less scarce. It's one of the very specific illnesses of American economic culture that we are willing to bite and claw each other over access to things that need not be rare.
There's no shortage of great community colleges, though; the problem is that elite institutions in particular are being made artificially scarce for certain groups of people (Asian-Americans in this case) by government fiat, as well as the fact that prestigious institutions are valued because of their scarcity and exclusivity. If they managed to increase their admissions by a factor of ten, then the value of their degrees in the eyes of society would decrease because amongst other things this would mean that they would have to be less selective about who they accepted.
The number of admissions is limited. If there are two groups, X and Y, and you discriminate in favor of giving more admissions to group X, group Y will have fewer.
