Thomas Sowell has written extensively about this, using his alma mater of Harvard.  Using MIT as an example:<p>If you come across a minority MIT undergraduate, it's an absolutely safe assumption they belong there.  With one notable exception (Dean of Students Shirley McBay, who just didn't have the right attitudes for that job), that was also my experience with the staff (probably goes along with the general attitude of meritocracy).<p>MIT is currently getting around 13,000 applicants each year with a third of them being qualified to attend (self-selection by applicants is <i>very</i> strong).  I would assume that MIT accepts pretty much every qualified STEM minority applicant (although I'm sure a lot go elsewhere; predicting yield is probably the hardest part of admissions).<p>As I remember, Sowell's general point was that the very top schools like Harvard (and I assume MIT) take a disproportionate fraction of the top minority students, and therefore to maintain "diversity" the lower tier schools will accept a fair fraction of minority students who aren't as qualified for the school (including ones who don't have much of a chance of making it).<p>This cascades on down the quality/intensity ladder of schools, and is grossly unfair to a lot of the students who would be  happy at a lower tier school but who struggle at best in the one they (initially) attend.  Admittance to graduation rates are instructive.