“IMO it’s not political correctness. Most schools see it as part of their mission to improve society as an engine of social mobility, to educate those who don’t come from educated backgrounds.”
In that case, the graduate schools should be way more involved than they are now in admitting URMs. While studies have shown that there is very little correlation with undergrad school and economic success, there is a higher correlation between where people went to grad school and how they did economically. There are people who went to schools ranked below 50 undergrad and went to a top-10 grad school and are doing real well. However, the reverse is usually not true. I’m with you on social and economic mobility, but it would have more impact in grad schools and companies, imo. B-schools do look at hooks like URM, legacy (George Bush ha!), but the other’s primarily don’t. UC’s dropped it for their med and law schools after they were sued for reverse discrimination (med in the 70s, law in the 90s, I think).