@firmament2x You are making a lot of assumptions about Ferguson in order to avoid providing evidence to counter his argument and back up your original assertion.
My point about David Hogg is that he’s a good example of someone who (in Ferguson’s description) “wouldn’t get an interview at Oxford”. If you can’t (effortlessly) get well over 1500 on your SAT then you aren’t getting an interview let alone a place. They don’t care what else you’ve achieved. There’s a reason Malala was really nervous about whether she’d get into Oxford - she still had to get the same top grades in her A levels as anyone else, regardless of the Nobel Prize. At Harvard her grades wouldn’t have mattered.
And your assertion that “Really smart people with undecided futures will overwhelmingly choose H over any other institution” is belied by the advice of multiple posters in this thread. There are plenty of people for whom $200K+ would provide sufficient incentive to choose another institution.