Meritocracy should not be replaced with anything else. Full stop.

There are many many reasons… and everyone replying to you is talking about them all

1. a “better” candidate by most academic standards is more likely to be wealthy and, in the US, that means more likely to be White. Simply put, White people have more generational wealth, which makes them more able to participate in extracurriculars, more time to study, less general stress.

2. If a college wants to create a more holistic education than just academic, it benefits them to have a diverse student body. The more diverse the student body, the more tolerant and open minded your graduates will be. They’ll be more open to listening to people that don’t look like them, and society will be better for it.

and then there’s 3) The elite in this country have always been and thus have been biased towards Straight White Men. Without guardrails in place, they will select more Straight White Men, and we will regress.

a candidate that is better than another

Better how? Any metric you use to measure candidates can arguably already be biased towards people who didn’t grow up poor.

Better grades? Students who attended well funded schools get better grades. That’s indirectly measuring wealth

More extracurricular activities? Students from wealthy families have more opportunity to take part in extracurricular activities. That’s indirectly measuring wealth.

Ability to pay? That’s just straight up measuring wealth.

While not the greatest solution, affirmative action was meant to give people born into bad situations a way to climb out. Education is directly linked to wealth and requiring wealth to get an education keeps poor people poor.

It ignores context. The state caused generational harm to a specific group of people. The fix has to target the same people. If you feel in a general sense there isn’t enough opportunity to go around, that’s a different bone to pick imo.

My parents were both in school during desegregation. We are less than a generation from people of color being denied the right to equality in education. Hell, Bob Jones University v. United States was decided in 1983. That sort of systemic inequality doesn’t just go away overnight. You have to take intentional steps to address those inequalities, and affirmative action is one of those steps. Color Blind policies fail to address systemic racism because they assume we live in a post-racial society, but the affects of centuries of inequality still exist everywhere in our society.

It’s more like, you have two candidates who are equally qualified. One is black and one is white. You could choose either. If you have a very low number of black students, you’d obviously want to choose the black student to increase campus diversity and vice-versa.