https://www.davidsongifted.org/Fellows-Scholarship/2018-Davidson-Fellows
Profiles of winners just posted. The Davidson Fellowship is more selective than Intel ISEF and Regeneron STS, covering a wide range of projects from science to music. Out of twenty winners this year, thirteen were seniors who submitted their applications before Feb, 2018 and were chosen in early summer. This is a perfect double blind case where neither the colleges saw this award in the apps nor did Davidson know to which colleges the kids applied and were accepted. Here are the results(where they matriculate):
50k winners: Harvard, Harvard;
25k winners: Harvard, Cornell, GaTech, Columbia, Stanford, Harvard, Harvard, MIT;
10k winners: Yale, Duke, MIT
So, what this shows is that both AO’s at elite universities and the scholarship selection committee can independently evaluate the kids work. Not really surprising.
I think it also says that for kids that can seemingly “get in anywhere” (and do), they choose Harvard 
It actually should be surprising to the people on here who reflexively intone the “holistic” chant with regard to elite admissions.
The Davidson Institute is actually looking at a very narrow set of criteria in choosing its Fellows: a specific project and its significance in the field. No GPA, no “course rigor,” no test scores, no recommendations, no evaluation of life history, no judging based on SES, no race preference, etc. - in short, just a single piece of work, judged on the sole criterion of academic merit. You literally couldn’t find a less holistic process, or one that is more narrow.
And yet somehow excellence on this single, narrow criterion is so highly correlated with “holistic” admissions at the tippiest of tippy-top schools? How to reconcile this?
(In stats we speak of omitted variable bias when trying to explain outcomes, and that is what is at work here. It’s the same reason - the same omitted variable - that explains why at Harvard perfect SAT candidates are admitted at literally twice the rate of 1560 candidates, although all will agree that the two scores are within the SEM of each other.)
You know, $0 winners and kids who didn’t apply for the scholarship: Harvard, Cornell, GT, Columbia, Stanford, MIT, Yale, Duke. And a host of other great schools.
I wonder how this compares to, say, TASP.
Wow, I’ve never even heard of this award, and while looking at their website I realized one of this year’s fellows is a daughter of my college friend. I bet her GPA and course rigor are on par too.
How about prodigiously achieved kids will be accepted by tippy-top colleges regardless of advantage or disadvantage from specific admission practices. But they are very rare. Many of them could have went to a top college 4 years earlier and started PhD program at that age at those tippy-top schools if they wanted to. Actually, I know several Davidson Young Schools did that.
But most of tippy-top applicants are still strongly affected by the “holistic” admissions. Note that Davidson Fellowship is not even heard of by the most people, except probably by Davidson Young Scholars, membership of which generally requires IQ score above 3 standard deviations (99.9%), and correlating academic or other achievement. Bottom line is that, it is not a suitable sample for the race discussion.