These schools receive a far greater number of qualified candidates than they can or wish to accept. Much like hiring practices at big tech companies, they proje

These schools receive a far greater number of qualified candidates than they can or wish to accept. Much like hiring practices at big tech companies, they project the image that with such a large applicant pool they only accept the “best” applicants. As many of us know in the context of tech hiring, “best” often can’t be measured precisely beyond a certain level of competence, and you reach a point where you’re arbitrarily ruling out highly qualified people who weren’t lucky enough to succeed at the particular whiteboarding question in their run of the gauntlet. We call this system “meritocracy” when it’s more of a poorly administered lottery, where everything from cramming for the coding interview to the biases of the interviewer will swing the result one way or another far more than the actual merit of the applicant. I think people want to believe these jobs or college admissions are awarded based on merit, because it feels much more fair to both the applicant or the institution than alternatives of thinning the applicant field such as nepotism, leveraging one’s wealth/class, or flat out discrimination. But the problem with how we’ve implemented our pseudo-meritocracy is that the metric becomes the goal. Our metrics aren’t good enough to actually say student A should be accepted while student B shouldn’t based on some nebulous combo of test scores, grades, extracurriculars, essays, and personal uniqueness compared to the other applicants being considered. It’s much like people working at Google who say “I could never pass the Google interview if I had to take it.” The results are only partly based on actual merit, and partly based on arbitrary criteria that aren’t fair. So, we have a huge applicant pool, and for the sake of argument let’s say 20% are totally qualified based on the regular college admission factors. The school only admits 5%. The school wants to admit the “best” of the bunch, so the admissions committee invents an arbitrary gauntlet of evaluation that succeeds in ruling out 3/4 of the candidates that passed the initial bar. Or, the school could admit they can’t actually predict who will succeed the most, and of the 20% who cleared the bar, randomly choose 1/4 of those students in a lottery to admit. This feels less prestigious to Yale et al, so they won’t do it. Consider that back when these universities gained their prestige, admissions were largely based on wealth and class and being the correct gender and race, and you may wonder if the point of an elite school to preserve a signaling mechanism for an elite few rather than output better graduates/research/etc than other institutions. Personally, I would be happy with a system that rules out the 80% or so that clearly don’t qualify, and of the essentially equally qualified 20% remaining, awards admissions randomly in a lottery but with quotas matching the demographic percentages of the US to try and compensate for the inequities that cause the applicant pipeline to not mirror the demographics of the country. At any rate, by pretending the current unfair system is merit-based and fair, schools like Yale have shot themselves in the foot.