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"Ah, but if they're all applying to the same set of top-ranked schools, they're not necessarily going to accept MIT"
Well yes, but I think you see my point, which is that MIT could make it a lot easier for a certain kind of applicant to get in if it wanted to. And I'm pretty sure a certain kinds of people really would go to MIT over any other school if they got in. For instance, quite a few EECS majors I know. Of course there are other top schools, but you can imagine quite a few top engineering students would find it hard to reject an MIT admissions offer.
"Here's my take, short and sweet, ready?
Nowhere does it say that MIT accepts the best and the brightest.
Never have I heard anybody affiliated with MIT say that they want the smartest kids only."
The short and sweet take does what I tried to do in my long post pretty much as well, and is a good one. As long as top people end up somewhere great, and as long as quite consistently, MIT classes are very high caliber, I don't think one can argue the school's doing a bad job. People *can* suggest improvements, but these need to correspond to general admissions philosophical statements...
I think far too many people don't understand that it's a waste of energy trying to precisely and exactly correlate where exactly you get accepted to how strong of an applicant you are. The right attitude seems to be that if you get accepted to a great school, kudos to you, but if you don't get accepted to a particular one, look forward to another. Nobody's saying that you're not a smart student if you don't go to MIT...go somewhere with other smart people, and make the best of your undergrad years if you really care that much.
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