Diversity/College Admission/Financial aide

Well this has now come home to roost.

My daughter and a close friend of hers that is hispanic will part ways. My daughter is in the top 10 of her class, barely missed being a National Merit Semifinalist, and has lots of extracirricular activities. Her friend is exactly in the same situation. Both have very high SAT's.
Her friend has applied to Yale, Harvard, and Stanford. There is no doubt in my mind she will be accepted to one of these with financial aide. My daughter is bound and determined to go to one school, The University of Texas. (despite my efforts for her to look elsewhere). So all is good.

NOT QUITE:
My wife is livid. She claims that our daughter would never get into the schools that her friend applied to and my wife is most likely correct. And if my daughter did get in, we would have a few problems in that she would most likely NOT get financial aide.
Her friend has parents that are both doctors. They are extremely wealthy. Yet most likely they will be paying less for their daughter to go to an expensive private instituition, than my daughter will to go to a public institution. This is indeed in the name of diversity.

AFTERMATH:
This really does not bother me at all because my daughter will go where she wants to, UT. My view is that it will all come out in the wash and things will be fine for my daughter. But my wife does not see things my way at all... oh nooo... not at all. She must play the its not fair game.

Conclusion:
In our case, I dont feel it really matters, and that my wife is trying to keep up with the Jones' (Gonzalez's) when it really makes no sense in our case. But I can see how it might affect others. Yet the racial diversity across Universities has acutally decreased. It is very hard to find acceptable applicants of all ethnicities. And after reading the following (italicized), which I whole-heartedly agree with, the problem worsens between the have's and the have nots. And the problem is we apparently dont know how to identify have's and have nots. And more importantly, we dont know how to make this a fair blend with the diversity issue.

Intelligence, indisputably, is in part genetic; and every intelligence test shows a gap between black Americans and others. For a long time, scientific research wasn’t very good at explaining this gap. But it has gotten better lately. For one thing, the gap between white and black adults has narrowed significantly since 1970, according to work by the noted researchers William Dickens and James Flynn. Four decades is too short a time period for the gene pool to change, but it’s not too short for environment to improve. Most intriguing, Roland Fryer and Steven D. Levitt, two economists (the latter is one of this magazine’s Freakonomics columnists), have found there to be essentially no gap between 1-year-old white and black children of the same socioeconomic status.


I dont know how to solve the college admissions problem of diversity and equity.