I guess your perspective really depends on what you think the test tells you and what you think HYPMS should value and what getting an education from a place like this means.

If you see HYPMS admissions as a kind of emblem to say you’ve maximized certain modifiable factors about your childhood education, then yes, this looks like it’s not so great for white or Asian people. But there comes a point where candidates of a certain caliber just look identical in all measurable ways. And at the point where you have more people like that applying than slots, there are other values that come into play. For example the community as a whole being more diverse is thought to benefit the education of people of all races who attend.

I’m not sure what people are worried about for the sake of high performing kids. If they aren’t going to undergrad at a place like this, they’re not going to magically become low performing kids. I don’t have data on this but I would imagine a high performing student who doesn’t attend one of these schools is likely to pay less tuition, have greater value added (https://www.brookings.edu/research/using-earnings-data-to-rank-colleges-a-value-added-approach-updated-with-college-scorecard-data/ for example), and potentially go somewhere like this for graduate school if they want to. Or somewhere that actually does what they’re passionate about better than these schools do. They’re very likely going to be fine if they don’t burn out, and if they do, they would have in a place like this too.

What I think rubs people the wrong way about this is that there’s a perception that maximizing every modifiable factor is somehow “earning” a spot that you’re then entitled to on some level and losing to a minority kid. That’s just not how that works. Admissions rank your application on many factors (including legacy in some cases), but all of them will tell you that some aspect of who gets in is just random. There are still too many maximal candidates. And some aspect is about being unique and interesting not just maxing out. So given that, would I rather go to school with a perfect distribution of who maxed out on a single test score? Or rather that the company I pay for my education values a bigger picture of what constitutes a good community for learning? I think I care more about the latter.