For elite schools atleast, I don't think it has anything to do with watering down their standards. These schools have the pick of the crop and if 3.3million hig

For elite schools atleast, I don't think it has anything to do with watering down their standards. These schools have the pick of the crop and if 3.3million high school students graduate in the US alone every year, the top 1% of students make up about 33,000 applicants, far more than the 2000 or so Harvard admitted in last year. The issue really morphs from "How do I select the best students for my school?" to "What sort of arbitrary metrics can I use to filter down this list of already amazing students?" If I had to guess however, I'd say these schools, under the guise of character, are trying to select students that have the highest potential to give back to the university. "Oh this student does part-time acting? Well we will accept her on the chance she becomes the next Natalie Portman. This guy has a best selling app? Better put him on the list of potential Zuckerbergs." I'm not an admissions officer (not even close), but that would be my best guess on what someone an admissions officer would do faced with the problem of having so many amazing students to fill their undergrad class 10 times over. At some point it no longer makes sense to filter on raw academic ability (see also, Google's "GPA does not matter"), and a purely random lottery would 1.) never actually be a random lottery (thank you alumni) and 2.) may massively favor one group of people (if I have to choose 2000 our of 33,000, and 60% of that 33,000 are asian from a 150,000k+ income family, you run the risk of homogenous class - if you have to ask whats wrong with this, consider this, would you like to work at a job that hired exclusively white men (or whatever race/gender you are)). Another way to look at it would be this way: if you were given the task to hire a new team of software engineers, and once the resume's came in they all had, 3.9+ college GPAs, Ph.ds in CS, and multiple years of experience on your tech stack of choice, would you just "do a pure lottery" to see who works for your company? Chances are you might end up filtering them on the most circumstantial of metrics (i.e. "This guy was a Yankees fan, I don't think we would get along very well")