@AriBenSion That comparison is ridiculous. There were hard quotas for Jews, “only X number of Jews”, despite the fact that, based on academics, their acceptance rates would have been more than triple that of the quota. White people are being accepted at the Ivies at a higher rate than is justified by their academics. Both legacies and athletes are white by a large majority, and legacies have an acceptance rate which is about 5 times that of everybody else, and for athletes it’s even higher - athletes with OK academics had a 70% admission rate, while fewer than 0.1% of non-athletes with the same academics were accepted. For athletes with top academic scores, acceptance rates were still five times those of kids with excellent score who weren’t athletes. At the same time, URMS are accepted at about twice to three times the rate of White kids.
About 20% of admitted students are legacies (that’s what Ivies admit, but it may be as high as 30%, since there are also quite a few legacies who aren’t included in their reports), and about 20% are athletes, while URMs make up about 18%-19%, except in Columbia University.
So the biggest “hooks” aren’t URM status at all, they’re legacy status and being an athlete. The large majority of people benefiting from these are White (at a rate which is much higher than their number of the population).
However, that would not help much, since the acceptance rate would still be less than 10%, and top notch candidates would still be rejected. So, for somebody without a hook, the admissions chance would likely be a few percent more. So instead of the regular 14% acceptance rate or so, for top candidates, it would be maybe 18% or 19%. Not really good odds, I would say.