If you want to hire the smartest kids in the country, you recruit at the highest ranked colleges you can successfully convince people to join your company from.

If you want to hire the smartest kids in the country, you recruit at the highest ranked colleges you can successfully convince people to join your company from. If you think that you can cut out the middle-man and just hire based on SAT scores, then you'll find yourself on the wrong side of a disparate impact racial discrimination lawsuit. That's the result in Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971). Internet commenters will often argue that you can still legally use IQ tests ("that was just one case!"), but those commenters don't know what they're talking about. No employment attorney worth their salt would advise you to use any kind of intelligence test for hiring if you could feasibly do it any other way. Why is using college as a proxy any different? Well, in part because they use affirmative action to make their student body more diverse. If the Ivy League schools didn't artificially inflate their numbers of black and hispanic students, civil rights activists would very likely sue companies for exclusively recruiting at them. One of the many ways that affirmative action is de facto legally mandated in the US. So basically, there is no better way to hire a bunch of smart young people than to hire people who went to the top colleges and therefore probably have top SAT scores. To the extent some of them don't have top SAT scores, that's fine because the overall effect is to help your diversity numbers in one of the least organizationally demanding ways possible. And the admissions committees, disciplinary committees, and four years of commitment have done the job of filtering out people who aren't adequately socialized for elite circles. Therefore, you will not get rid of college until you either get rid of the disparate impact doctrine, or alternatively, come up with a cheaper proxy for talent than college that also has built-in affirmative action.