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sakky -- "meritocratic freshman class" is like "windy prime number". The adjective doesn't go with the predicate. You mean to say "high quality class" or something. Let's just try to speak sensibly
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Whatever terms you want to use, it's just all semantics. The bottom line is just because a school (like Berkeley or other public schools) use highly meritocratic admissions doesn't necessarily mean they get a, what you call, a 'high quality class'.
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Anyway, I think one is not being honest if one says that final class quality is all that matters. Hypothetically, say rejecting all Jews means you enroll all the smart anti-semitic WASPs who hate Jews, and these WASPs are the smartest. (Don't think about the historical example this is inspired by. Just take the hypo as given.)
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Again, this analogy breaks down because in reality, you wouldn't get "all" the smart anti-semitic WASPS to enroll. You might be able to admit all of them, but many of them would end up going elsewhere (i.e. HYPS). Hence, you would inevitably have to backfill your class with some other WASPS's who are relatively less smart.
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Objectively, you get the best class, but by what means? The market values what you are doing, but what is that worth?
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But here again, you are presuming that even in your hypothetical, you really would get the 'best' class.
Like I've always said (and I think you agreed), Caltech doesn't exactly get the 'best' technical students, full-stop. Rather, it gets those 'best' technical students
who are also risk-taking with their careers , because I think we agreed in other threads that there is a significant chance you can come to Caltech and do poorly, and that those students would have been better off going to some other school where they would have done better. You said it yourself - Caltech is not for everyone - and from that, I take it that even if you're an academic superstar, Caltech still may not be for you, depending on your psychological profile. Just because you want to be a scientist doesn't mean that you don't also value career safety. Some top science students do value safety.
So in that sense, Caltech also runs a de-facto 'discriminatory' process, as it discourages those people who value safety from even applying in the first place. Again, take that girl I know from Harvard. She didn't even apply to Caltech as an undergrad because she would never have gone because she viewed it as too dangerous for her. Yet she did well enough at Harvard that Caltech admitted her as a graduate student. So clearly the fact that she chose the 'safer' school didn't seem to hurt her.
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You're right on that. But we could still compare Caltech physics majors vs. MIT physics majors, and so forth. So a direct comparison of so called "student quality" is not entirely out of the question. I don't think anyone would deny that PhDs are virtually required for the hard sciences, hence the need for grad school. Now this comparison would require some insane data sets which I'm not even sure exist.
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Well, I'm not even sure I would be convinced by this. Let's face it. A lot of science students at even the best schools decide not to pursue science as a career, instead opting for more lucrative fare (i.e. consulting, investment banking, etc.). They
could become scientists, they just don't want to. For example, I seem to recall how molliebatmit talked about how a slew of her biology classmates are now management consultants. I'm sure this happens at Caltech also.
It gets to the larger point that just because you major in a science doesn't mean that you actually intend to pursue science for your career. It's just an undergraduate major, nothing more, nothing less. It's not your whole life.