The point is to select for diversity for the purpose of diversity, not for the purpose of academic potential. Selecting for prior academic success is a good wa

The point is to select for diversity for the purpose of diversity, not for the purpose of academic potential. Selecting for prior academic success is a good way to predict future academic success — your analogy about encryption makes no sense at all. Academic success doesn’t fail in any of the same ways that encryption does. But the problem is that selecting for prior academic success does not select for diversity, because the environments which support early adolescent academic success are not as diverse as colleges want their own student populations to be. So colleges are left trying to increase the diversity of incoming freshman by passing over more academically successful candidates which don’t meet their diversity quotas. There is tremendous value in having a diverse campus population, but the best way to get there is to have diverse academically successful applicants. Colleges aren’t willing to wait. One problem is that these applicants are also generally paying a lot of money to attend these colleges, and if they ultimately aren’t going to be successful those colleges are causing significant harm by admitting them. Note that one of the primary purposes of the SAT is to predict success in the first two years of college. The not very good alternative is to lower academic standards in the classes themselves, and certainly there is anecdotal evidence of this but I’m not sure about rigorous studies.