What have you been reading? I always see legacy students mentioned!

Anyway, your point is that it's legacy students, not black and brown students, who lower quality.

But the article you cited disproves your own point!

Legacy students can't be blamed for taking spots from more qualified students because they have the same average test scores as the other admitted students. It's right there in your own citation. Didn't you read it?

Did you just calculate the 8x number and forget to think about what that actually means in practice, even though the article spells it out for you?

What would it look like if legacy students were taking spots from more qualified students? Why, very likely they'd have a substantially lower set of test scores.

Except legacy students aren't the group for which that is true. Any guesses as to which group that is true for?

Now, you could argue that legacies are bad because they are less diverse than the general applicant pool, and therefore legacy admissions are bad for diversity. There's a genuine potential conflict between legacies and diversity. (You need to do careful accounting, however, to see if the greater average donations made by legacy students on average more than offset the number, thereby increasing the number of students that the school can take by more than the number of legacies they admit--this is a pretty finicky calculation.)

But if you're after quality, as you claimed, you're looking in the wrong place.

Also, Jon Wang might be a kid, but he's an awfully bright kid. It's very ageist of you to assume that you understand the issue better than he does.

(You could also skip the mindreading where you attribute his outlook to have something to do with "a desire to be close to whiteness" instead of simply wanting to further his education.)

If you want to make some other point about how academic quality isn't the only quality that matters, fine--but you simply botched this point. The title, "The misunderstanding," is apt; it's just that the misunderstanding is yours.