Here's a spicy take: Merit mostly doesn't exist. In order to invent the concept of merit (for college admissions anyways), you need to weigh colleges, universit

Here's a spicy take: Merit mostly doesn't exist. In order to invent the concept of merit (for college admissions anyways), you need to weigh colleges, universities, high schools etc with varying degrees of power which inherently is extremely subjective. Is someone earning say, a 3.0 at Harvard better than someone that earned a 4.0 at state? What about the highschool student that graduated with perfect As in a lax highschool? Do you consider AP classes more valuable over the student that took college classes instead? How do you address the fact that these sort of things disproportionately affect different minority groups? If you start taking a lot of these factors into mind, you end up with something very similar to affirmative action. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.