I don't buy, a priori, that having previously-inadequately-educated minorities go to higher-tier schools than their accomplishments would indicate otherwise is a win for society or the people involved.

I'm totally open to evidence that this is true. I just don't think it's so obvious that we can conclude it without evidence.

What would the other options be? It's not just "this or nothing".

I'm not sure about Michigan, but California was historically famous for its public university system which guarantees everyone a space in a community college, and a promise of a transfer to a state or UC school if they do well (i.e. the "Master Plan"). This was California's idea of how to deliver a world-class education with maximal opportunity for all: if you've been let down, the community college system is there to help catch you up.

For instance, for UC Berkeley in 2021, although black students were underrepresented compared to California's population, among transfer students (mostly from community college), black students were overrepresented. That's how the system was designed to work--if some group's not being served, the community college system gives them a second chance. And transfer students graduate with basically the same UC Berkeley GPA as four-year students, despite them not having originally had the qualifications to get in. More outreach to get more black students into community college might be a better route than differential admissions criteria. Or it might not.

So it's not at all clear to me how worthy the goal is. It seems like it's taken on faith that it must be a supremely worthy goal, and then if anyone has checked whether it's actually the superior path, at the very least nobody bothers to make a big deal about it.

I think this is terrible. We owe a quality education to the students first and foremost. We should ask them to sacrifice very little to accomplish broader societal goals because it's not their fault if we mucked things up.

I've read a few case studies also about black students at UC Berkeley (transfer and direct entry), and it's really hard to know what's going on from those. On the one hand, it's quite clear that a common wish is for there to be a larger black community, which seems reasonable enough. On the other hand, if you read carefully, there seem to be a lot of instances of the exact same complaints leveled against black and non-black students, except the interactions with non-black students were construed as racism and the others were construed as "just didn't vibe with me I guess", and multiple accounts describe being trained to do this by explicit training about racial identity in college. Furthermore, multiple black students misquoted the number of black students at UC Berkeley, making it seem worse than it actually was. And almost everyone said how hard UCB was academically, almost universally saying it was way harder than they expected. This doesn't exactly reinforce the idea that lots of people are over the bar and just need to be admitted in order to thrive.

I'm happy to entertain the idea that because states still can't get their primary and secondary education straight, race-based admissions to university might be necessary. But it seems a very complex issue, and it seems very hard to find anyone who wants to tackle the complexity at the level necessary to make a decision wisely instead of according to an ideological presupposition.

And the whole hyper-race-conscious trend these days adds a huge bundle of complexity to an already overly-complex issue. "We made people paranoid about needing a large cohort of their own race to feel comfortable in college, so now we need to use race-aware admissions in order to give them that cohort" seems like a spectacularly poor justification for policy, but it seems hard to rule out that this is now the case. You might come up with a clear answer from the UC system when affirmative action was abolished, and yet have the findings utterly fail to translate to today because of the substantially different social context.