“Do you really think a school looks at an application and identify the race before they do anything else?”
Yes, unfortunately I think they do. Now, that doesn’t mean that the students in any particular group are not “qualified” to be at the school (whatever that means). But it does mean that students within a particular racial categorization are largely being compared against one another, not against all candidates across groups.
Think of it like boys versus girls, or day students versus boarding. If boarding schools were truly “holistic” in their approach to admission, do you really think that they would arrive at stable numbers for these categories year after year (with of course a little tiny variation probably having to do with imperfect yield projections).
It strains credulity to believe that year to year boarding schools would have roughly stable percentages of varying URM and ORM populations, if they weren’t creating “buckets” of students based on race classification. Again, there is no reason for everyone to get their hacks up over this. As someone above wisely said, it’s not a pure meritocracy; never has been and never will be. Just like society.
It remains that in whatever “bucket” or “buckets” a student is placed (race, athletic hook, boy, girl, full pay, legacy, etc.), he or she will need to meet admissions cutoff for that bucket (or combination of buckets). I imagine that the criteria the admissions offices use to judge candidates vary in substance and in weighting depending upon the bucket being examined. But I for one do not believe the hype of a “holistic” process.
BTW, this is going back some time ago, but when I was an undergraduate I had a work study job in the admissions office of the university’s very prestigious school of social work and we in fact did identify the race of the applicant prominently on the front of the admissions file (back then it was not very computerized and these were yellow hanging folders). In fact, there was not too much other information highlighted other than name, race and undergraduate institution right on the front.