And although Evans says 80 to 85 percent of Harvard's applicants are academically qualified to get in, although he says that "in all the years I've been here, the person with the lowest credentials admitted to the class was never a minority," the perception is still there.

"I actually thought that being Asian was going to hinder my chances of coming here," says Eugene Chung '93.

He was probably right. A 1990 federal investigation revealed that the Harvard admissions office kept quotas for Asian students.

While he admits that's a frustrating fact, Chung says he thinks a more diverse community might be worth the sacrifice.

"A lot of people are going to be upset that someone didn't get in for such-and-such a reason," he says, "and they may claim quotas or that kind of thing, but it's a subjective process. You want to try to touch as many bases as possible."

Some students, though, might feel that touching all of the bases necessarily means taking on some slower runners. That, at least, is what Delci feels he has to deal with.

Delci says the image of being somehow "less qualified" plagues all members of RAZA, the Mexican-American students' organization.

"It's a stereotype that we build up for ourselves," Delci says. That stereotype is only rein-forced, he says, by the statistics--high school grade point averages and standardized test scores.

And that affects not only how Delci and other RAZA members carry themselves and deal with other people, but also how other students initially treat them.