Thanks for the many interesting comments. Some of the comments asked why anyone should care if the most elite colleges cast a wide net in seeking students. (Chr

Thanks for the many interesting comments. Some of the comments asked why anyone should care if the most elite colleges cast a wide net in seeking students. (Christopher Avery of Harvard, and his colleague Caroline Hoxby, once of Harvard but now at Stanford, have done research on how the most elite colleges can find more one-off students from rare backgrounds that other colleges miss.) http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/cavery/ http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/cavery/ http://ideas.repec.org/e/pho46.html http://ideas.repec.org/e/pho46.html My answer about why someone looking in from the outside might care about what kinds of students are admitted by elite colleges is the observation that elite colleges can be highly influential on public policy (as several other comments have already pointed out). If we are to have the graduates of Harvard and the other seven Ivy League colleges, along with graduates of Stanford and the other several "Ivy plus" colleges, making many of the policy decisions for our country, I hope they are informed by direct knowledge about the life of the rural and urban poor, the life of students with a disabled parent, the life of first-generation college students, the life of students who attended especially lousy high schools, and so on. I'm sure every graduate of an elite college knows how to take care of "his people," but it might be better for all of us if those graduates, in the aggregate, include most of the subgroups of people that include those of us who never attended such a college. That, to me, is a possible broad social benefit of genuine diversity in college admission.