The problem with universities simply selecting by score is that it reinforces the inequality feedback loop. Education tends to correlate with wealth. Wealthy pe

The problem with universities simply selecting by score is that it reinforces the inequality feedback loop. Education tends to correlate with wealth. Wealthy people are really good at investing into educating their descendants. Selection by score becomes equivalent to selection by wealth/heredity. Used properly, “hand-tuning” of university population could offset biases liable to be introduced by a seemingly-unbiased simple score cutoff in presence of social inequality—though I wouldn’t go as far as to claim it works as intended. I found this discussion with Daniel Markovits quite enlightening, even if I don’t agree with the 100% of it: https://samharris.org/podcasts/205-failure-meritocracy/ https://samharris.org/podcasts/205-failure-meritocracy/. If it’s partially paywalled, sorry—I think there are other resources online that convey his ideas (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/09/arts/meritocracy-trap-daniel-markovits.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/09/arts/meritocracy-trap-dan..., etc.).