"People have long defended affirmative action by saying 'It's really just a thumb on the scale. It's used only as a tie-breaker between otherwise identical candidates.' I've always known that that's just a lie or just uninformed by the people who say it. But it does betray a sense that even defenders of the policy are a little bit unconfortable defending the reality of it; they would wish it to be more of a thumb-on-the-scale thing but it's not. And we've had research that's shown that for several decades actually. Thomas Espenshade found it was the equivalent of 450 SAT points for an Asian student relative to a black student, everything else held equal."