This is
Dude just didn't do enough extra curricular activities. A perfect SAT score has never guaranteed a spot at an IVY league school. In the 90s the College I went to was predominantly white, but the head of admissions was black and relatively young. The black students got to know her and would hang out with her and her family. One night she told us how College admissions works: Gender balancing played the biggest role in admissions. Women made up the large pool of qualifying applicants. If you just chose based on merit, you'd have a student body of 80:20 women to men. If a school did that, then the top female applicants wouldn't apply or just attend elsewhere, as many want the possibility of meeting their husband in college, and that ain't happening at a school that looks like a WNBA training camp. That meant men of all races received preferential treatment (Yep, White men benefit from affirmative action in college admissions). White and Asian women were discriminated against most. Asian women were discriminated against not just for their gender but their race. Schools didn't want too large an Asian student body. So this dude simply didn't cut the mustard.