Yes, I would agree. He states that the SAT score serves as a "proxy" for the resources such students have had available to them in high school and, one would in

Yes, I would agree. He states that the SAT score serves as a "proxy" for the resources such students have had available to them in high school and, one would infer, is therefore rigged against middle class and poor students who had lesser quality resources at their disposal. The unstated premise, though, is that elite academic institutions have a social obligation to act affirmatively to equalize outcomes in society by finding alternative ways to qualify students for admission besides the academic capabilities such students demonstrate at the time of applying. Since they have no way of knowing who has what innate merit that may not yet be reflected in academic test scores or historic grades, this ipso facto leads to a system where they have to apply quotas or arbitrary weighting adjustments (e.g., x% upward adjustment in GPA to account for having come from a poor school district) to achieve the equalization sought. Such adjustments will then have the effect of excluding some applicants with higher current performance scores in favor of others with what administrators deem greater unrealized merit, which seems a fairly arbitrary outcome. Whether this would lead to inclusion of more students based on true merit would seem to me to be a dubious proposition but it would decidedly put the schools in the business of trying to iron out social inequalities through admissions standards tied to something other than measurable academic criteria. This is the logical outcome of divorcing the idea of merit from any objective means of measuring it.