<p>I mean, I dont know why this particular statement is important to you or anything (it doesn’t say much of anything interesting), but its hard to imagine that asians should be considered URMs when they are all over the place at top schools. I think by focusing on the “historical” bit of that statement you are really missing ALL of the “meat” behind why affirmative action (still) makes sense. You really have to get into thinking about the history of race in the US as well as how race is experienced currently (with all the stereotypes and such that are a part of it). The type of argument you are beginning to make is extremely lazy/not very good. </p>
<p>On a different but related note, I get the impression from this forum that people think the standards are higher for asian students than for others in terms of numbers. I fairly certain this is untrue. I get the impression that a disproportionate number of asian students/families try to get into places like stanford more or less purely on numbers (being in honor society/math club/tutoring/volunteering/etc doesn’t make anyone special) which is always going to be hard to do. Part of this I’m told is because a lot of Asian universities have admissions processes that are extremely numbers based. I just know that I’ve talked to an awful lot of asian students/parents about admissions to stanford and they frequently never really get passed the sat/gpa/etc. </p>
<p>I also happen to be in a bit of a unique position to get impressions like the one mentioned just above, although Im not going to elaborate on that publicly in this forum.</p>