Such a system would actually work out to be more exclusionary if the size of the application pool increases year over year (which, in praxis, it has been). At l

Such a system would actually work out to be more exclusionary if the size of the application pool increases year over year (which, in praxis, it has been). At least a percentage-based system scales up with the size of the application group. A fixed class size does not. For what it's worth, as well, I'm pretty sure that your system is the one actually being used. I would imagine -- but do not know for certain -- that schools like Harvard try to keep class sizes relatively fixed. It's not that their policy is to admit n% of all applicants, but rather, that their policy is to admit n students, and the size of the pool feeding into n keeps going up. Indices, rankings, and people commonly report only the percentage. But the percentage is an output of the system and not an input.