Nearly one month after I started at Yale University, I entered a Zoom with a woman from the Registrar’s Office.

I was about to view my Yale admissions file. It’s not something most first-year students that I knew did.

Some were scared: what if the comments were dismissive?

Others felt like it was pointless: we got in, who cares?

But I wanted to know why.

She shared her screen, and one of the first things I noticed was at the top of the document. Right next to my name, the admissions office wrote “Bin: Diversity.”

I wanted to laugh. I didn’t consider myself as “diverse”; I was born and raised in Doral, Fla., a city where more than 30 percent of the population are Venezuelan-Americans who speak, look, eat, think, and live like me.

And even if I stepped slightly out of its bounds, I would still be in Miami-Dade County, whose population is more than 70 percent Hispanic. I grew up feeling part of a majority — Spanish and its cousin Spanglish were everywhere, and it was assumed that everyone could speak it.

But I read on.

After reading my admissions file, I have no doubt that affirmative action helped me. But I also realized that college admissions was never a meritocracy.

It’s a common myth that students like Calvin Yang, one of the more prominent faces for Students for Fair Admissions, measure themselves against. You don’t need to look further than the first sentence of his opinion piece on the New York Post to find his statistics: “I had a 3.9 GPA, a 1550 SAT score, two varsity sports, my own political policy startup, and a spot on Canada’s 30 Under 30 list when I applied to Harvard.”

He knows how impressive he is on paper.

And it resembles the thousands of posts on the sub reddit R/​chanceme, where many high-achieving students believe the myth to be gospel.

In a subreddit filled with more than 90,000 members, there are many highly motivated and accomplished people who can’t help but seek advice from strangers who tell them what they think about their scores, resume, and demographic information.

It’s a pre-admissions game that never leads to concrete answers because all anyone can do is guess who’s “deserving” to get into a selective university (and who isn’t).

And yet, when they fall so far from their desired outcome, students like Mr. Yang place the blame on affirmative action.

But at least now, as he put it in a Harvard Crimson article published a day after the Supreme Court’s decision against affirmative action, they can “rejoice in the fact that at least our kids can be judged based on their achievements and merits alone.”

But the assumption here is that children should solely be judged on their merits and achievements, as if these things are indicative of a person’s success after college.

There have been multiple studies showing time and time again how flawed this perspective can be, with access to standardized testing tutors and resources emerging as symbols of inequity.

But even if that weren’t true, college admissions is never that simple. I say this being in the small percentage of students who were accepted into Yale and who benefited from affirmative action.

I followed the game closely too. While I was applying, I constantly measured and compared myself to others according to my ACT score, GPA, and degree of involvement in extracurriculars.

I read and re-read the PrepScholar article telling me that if I wanted to be noticed by admissions, I couldn’t be “well-rounded.”

I needed a “spike” (but what if my spike was being well-rounded?).

All that did was get me a knock on the door, but none of those things granted me entry.

According to my file, my interviewer seemed to have enjoyed our conversation and wrote that I had a “genuine” personality.

My readers noticed from my recommendation letters that I had demonstrated interest in writing since middle school, something that was apparently unique in the applicant pool.

But they also had their concerns: They mentioned that my curriculum seemed pretty “light” and that it could use some “vetting” (I was graduating without having taken calculus — the horror!).

My numerical scores, which graded multiple aspects of my application like my extracurricular involvement, academic scores, recommendation letters, and interview, were each about average.

But my overall score was high enough for my admittance.

Why? Because I was ultimately an “interesting take from Miami” for my “interest in media.” I wasn’t my test scores or my grades.

I was from the right city. I fit a niche.

The admissions process is not a wholly transparent one, and that will not change post-affirmative action. While we may be able to see the ratings and written comments on our applications and discuss overall admissions statistics, even Mr. Yang can only “speculate” on whether or not he could have made it to Harvard had affirmative action not existed by the time he applied.

I might not have been in the diversity bin.

If students like Mr. Yang think that the playing field has now leveled and that merit will now be the ultimate deciding factor when it comes to selective admissions, they are subscribing to the same belief that if they do, say, and achieve the right things, they will earn the ticket that they deserve.

But they may still be disappointed to find out their results. Who or what can they blame then?

Isa Dominguez is a rising senior at Yale University working as an intern reporter for The Blade.

First Published August 5, 2023, 4:00 a.m.