I suspect that the breakdown occurred higher up in the organization. The TASPs ran quite well for almost 70 years, and there was a process around them. They we

I suspect that the breakdown occurred higher up in the organization. The TASPs ran quite well for almost 70 years, and there was a process around them. They were originally created as a way to identify great HS students and funnel them into the Telluride House at Cornell, and for many years students regularly turned down Harvard and Yale to go do this; many of them became College Scholars, and the Telluride House had a reputation for having many of the best students on campus. The endowment did quite well (they were early adopters of indexing and the Yale model) and they started the TASS programs. This created a different funnel of almost exclusively black students not recruited based on a standardized test score or 'elitist' credentials, and this group gradually took over the organization and co-opted the giant pot of money. This led to a schism where the 'elitists' left, and the result is the current groupthink as well as the difficulty in recruiting factota (the college students who help the HS students).