This makes me mad.

Not necessarily that Berkeley is using kind of odd criteria for choosing its incoming freshmen. Although it is a public university, and thus has some responsibility to turn out quality college grads for our fine state, I can see why they want a "diverse" student body. It makes Berkeley Berkeley.

The part that makes me mad is that people assume bright students will be just as happy somewhere else. I was a lot like the girl in the article from ML who got rejected. I got a 1490. If I hadn't gotten into Berkeley, I would have been very disappointed. For one, it was my first choice. While I may have been able to go to some other Ivy League school, the fact is I didn't want to. (Can you imagine me playing tennis at Princeton?) I'm sorry that Berkeley is the "one shot" (hello Eminem?) for some disadvantaged kids. Guess what? It's not just kids from the ghetto who can't afford Harvard. I would have had about the same trouble scraping together the money for an Ivy League college as the disadvantaged students featured in the article, maybe even more so because my parents didn't qualify for financial aid.

Allowing unqualified applicants to get into Berkeley or other colleges, and med schools too, for that matter, simply breeds resentment among the student body. This is the exact opposite of the intended goal, which is to bring together people from different backgrounds. Some of both definitely happened at Berkeley. I value being around people who are not exactly like me, and I know it's a necessary part of education. I understand that some more highly qualified people will be turned away in favor of including disadvantaged students. But I don't like the assumption that us rich kids will be just fine. It's harder to get into college and med school as a middle class white person, and I just want the affirmative action camp to acknowledge this.

For my part, I will acknowledge that it is harder to be a poor minority applying for college in the first place.