Engineering is critical, going to a top engineering school is not. Society does not need more engineers going to MIT and then taking a job at Google. Society does need more genius researchers pushing the boundaries of science, but I find it very unlikely that those people are not already admitted to top schools even in the absence of affirmative action. You can claim people have potential but potential doesn't cut it when one candidate took some community college classes and the other one won a national math competition.

> let's assume that the lawsuit's basic premise is correct

We don't need to assume, we can look at the makeup of UC and UW schools which are legally barred from using affirmative action and are similarly ranked. They average ~50% Asian.

> mono-culture

Your basic premise is that the greater proportion a race is of the population, the more monocultural the population becomes. Not only is that racist, but coming from what I assume is a white liberal it seems very hypocritical.

> responsibility to see to it that those who are not have an opportunity

I'm happy to support income based affirmative action. As we all know, parental income plays a far larger role in SAT scores and lifetime earnings than any systemic discrimination. But racial discrimination under the guise of affirmative action is a terrible idea that doesn't actually result in better outcomes. When you admit objectively less qualified people because of a quota those less qualified people end up doing more poorly down the line in the real world.

For example, even though CMU enforces a 50/50 male/female quota on its CS admits, the makeup of high paying jobs with people from CMU still ends up around the industry 80/20 male/female split, because the 20% that would have originally been qualified to get in without the quota end up doing just as well as their male counterparts that didn't have affirmative action benefits and the other 30% struggle to keep up because they weren't qualified in the first place.