“As for affirmative action, I know for a fact that I didn’t get into a top law school because of the quota system. I attended a CUNY undergraduate and my pre-law advisor promised he could get me into the school based on my GPA and LSAT. After the app went in, my advisor told me that a URM girl was applying as well and that she was getting the slot, even though my stats were better. Perhaps if I had been a full pay, but I was at a CUNY school because I was putting myself through school. I was devastated, horribly upset.”
You know, you never know how a quota system is going to work. Sometimes it works against the targeted minority. For example, when I received my AF pilot slot in college, their quota for women was 1.5%. Women had to compete nationwide for 30 slots, and it was brutal. My best friend, an overachiever, never got a slot. They were begging every male ROTC cadet to take more than 2,000 slots for men, and if they had a 2.0 GPA and were physically qualified, they were in. Many of those men washed out of flight school, probably because they weren’t that interested in the first place.
After I got hired by my most recent employer, a friend’s wife called me and was complaining that her husband wasn’t getting an interview with my company because of all those females and minorities they had to interview. I told her how much I sympathized, because it’s tough out there competing for those 95% white guy slots. Silence.
My point being, you don’t always know. Perhaps in your situation you did, because you were only competing against one person, though it seems a breach of privacy for the advisor to tell you whose stats were better.