I don't know about this. His complaints seem to be that the pool of applicants is largely made up of highly coached overachievers, and that standardized tests a

I don't know about this. His complaints seem to be that the pool of applicants is largely made up of highly coached overachievers, and that standardized tests and an hour-long interview aren't enough time to get to the core of whether someone will be a good Harvard student or not. I wouldn't call that a "sham," more like a systematic failure to recognize, highlight, and quantify the many forms of achievement and merit. A sham to me would be that someone upstream from these reviewers is throwing away all this data and just accepting a pre-formed list of rich white people. Evaluating students in the first place is an extremely hard problem technically and philosophically. That Harvard even has in-person interviews for all its prospective students suggests it's less of a sham than many other admissions processes. Does this guy think the all the other schools are giving five-hour interviews, or psychological test batteries, or brain scans? You have to decide who you're going to let in, and so far no one has found a really reliable way to separate the wheat from the chaff - that is, where the wheat is the type of student you want. Even selecting a 'type' of student is risky, considering people at the age of 16-18 are essentially larval. So not only do you have to gauge performance, but potential. Good luck with that! There's also an ignorant undercurrent of "kids these days," as if kids in the 90s and before didn't have advisors or vanity trips or ultra-practiced answers for every question. The way he got in is the right way, even though as he points out shortly after, there is no right way.