I'm a confused by the equity claim to justify discriminatory behavior with what seems like heavy emphasis on race. It seems difficult to achieve equity without transparent, and standardized methods emphasizing a holistic assessment covering visible and invisible, immutable and mutable characteristics--each of which impact individual outcomes.<p>I understand that tackling overrepresentation and underrepresentation is important; but, when emphasizing race to the degree that these academic institutions are, isn't this leading to representation disparities within the racial categories themselves? The racial categories are a very American centric and limited term, and arguably rooted largely as social constructs that loosely define the ethnic populations they cover. For example, and I don't mean any offense or to call any group out specifically, Koreans are overrepresented compared to Cambodians at the academic institutions listed in the article per their population proportion. This doesn't seem to be captured and accounted for under the current system. The same underlying disparity potentiality applies to whites, Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, etc...<p>The interpretation being, that it's a sort of half-committed approach to equity that isn't really leading to equitable outcomes if that makes sense, and may even be exacerbating ethnic marginalization within the racial categories.<p>Another question is, if this isn't leading to genuine equity of outcomes and instead passing discriminatory behavior onto smaller, marginalized ethnic groups, what do you do then? Do you revisit implementing an improved meritocracy system, or implement an equity based system with greater accuracy and precision to prevent this?<p>This doesn't even begin to tackle the issues current racial categorization creates with multiracial people and the essence of "purism."