This is a linkpost for https://medium.com/@owenshen/the-ancient-god-who-rules-high-school-e0645b100ae6
Asian kid at Irvington, wants to get into a high competition school in the US, needs to differentiate.
Strongly suspect that legally changing his name to 'Yacouba Aboubacar', listing French as a language on his application, checking 'African American' instead of 'Asian', and writing an admissions essay about the challenges of having an African name in a high-pressure academic environment would, dollar for dollar (name change fees might be close to a single sat prep class fee) be a better investment of resources than just about anything else he can do.
His friends would hate him for it, some would imitate, and maybe one or two would escalate by going for estrogen prescriprions in 11th grade and starting 'transitions' that they will abandon after submitting college applications.
I believe that the lawsuit mentioned here has merit, I don't know where it is now, and look forward to seeinf it wind its' way through the courts: https://studentsforfairadmissions.org/updates/
You may not like the admission bias in the Ivies (I do not, either - the discrimination against Asians is of course especially damning, since Asians do not even share the putative "White man's burden" of their ancestors having wronged minority ethnicities in the past, that's often invoked - however dubiously - as a moral justification for "affirmative action"), but the amount of "Yacouba Aboubacar's" being admitted in any given year is so low in practice that this does not measurably affect the arms race we're talking about here. Even doubling or trebling the number of admission spots at each Ivy would not change things much!