I am not sure your take is correct, but this might be because of my personal views: I do think the "stereotypical Asian student" today is indeed discriminated on merit, pretty much in exactly the same way that the "stereotypical Jewish student" was excluded thanks to "holistic" admission criteria in the last century. So I guess on that front I agree with you. But I also agree with the article that believing meritocracy works is silly, given that all meritocracy I have seen was functionally equivalent to classism: the kids that had merit usually (not always) obtained that merit thanks to their parents being of a higher societal class, which enabled the kid to worry about school, not about a second after-school job they had to take in order to feed their little sibling. Obviously my example is a bit extreme, but most of the kids that have "measurable merit", have it because their family has been sufficiently high class to enable them to invest in their merit and grow it.
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I am not sure your take is correct, but this might be because of my personal views: I do think the "stereotypical Asian student" today is indeed discriminated on merit, pretty much in exactly the same way that the "stereotypical Jewish student" was excluded thanks to "holistic" admission criteria in the last century. So I guess on that front I agree with you. But I also agree with the article that believing meritocracy works is silly, given that all meritocracy I have seen was functionally equivalent to classism: the kids that had merit usually (not always) obtained that merit thanks to their parents being of a higher societal class, which enabled the kid to worry about school, not about a second after-school job they had to take in order to feed their little sibling. Obviously my example is a bit extreme, but most of the kids that have "measurable merit", have it because their family has been sufficiently high class to enable them to invest in their merit and grow it.