Several admissions officers at Ivy league universities have admitted that because they get so many applications of similar-profile asian-americans (high grades, similar extracuriculars) they hold them to a "higher standard" than similarly-achieving non-asians. This is justified in the name of diversity.
In USSR jews could go to other universities too (though they were low profile and i think had quotas too, just higher).
I don't understand how it justifies the discrimination.
While it's not as extreme as the the situation described in the article, it's still racism. A restaurant isn't allowed to discriminate based on race, why is a university?
"Moscow had many schools, but there was only one place to study pure math: Moscow State University, known by its Russian abbreviation MGU, Moskovskiy Gosudarstvenny Universitet. Its famous Mekh-Mat, the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics, was the flagship mathematics program of the USSR. Since I wanted to study pure math, I had no choice but to apply there."
