<p>I’m involved in hiring at the company I work for, and I think it’s fair to say that our applicant pool is comparable to Harvard’s - we hire top students from top schools, primarily Ivy League. We have hundreds of applications for about 15-20 openings per year. At the end of the day, it is basically impossible to make rational distinctions between the 15-20 we hire and the next 50 or 60 (or more) applicants. Sad to say, but we end up looking for reasons to say no, rather than to say yes. I have no confidence that we end up making the right choices. I am confident that the 15-20 we end up hiring are truly stellar, but are they clearly better than the ones we say no to? There I have less confidence. So I guess my point is that I’m confident that Harvard ends up admitting a stellar class, but I’m less confident that the people they say yes to are necessarily demonstrably better than the people they say no to. If you want to define that as a “crapshoot”, I can’t say that definition is clearly unwarranted.</p>