@websensation I agree, I feel like in that way, the admissions process is flawed because aside from reading the essays, the admissions officers don’t have a way to judge an applicants personality. And again back to the issue of hardworking students, you can see how competitive the engineering applicant pool is. I doubt that a humanities major or even a life science major for that fact would need a 4.60 for UCLA (75th percentile according to the freshman profile). I feel like those numbers are skewed as a result of the engineering applicants extremely competitive profiles.
Maybe there were other factors that were against your friend. Have you read that article on OOS admissions from UC? That article states that in the past, UCLA tends to have a higher acceptance rate for OOS students because their OOS tuition is helping to pay for in state students. The article also says that this year, UCLA is likely to have a higher OOS admit rate in order to counter the fact that they will no longer be offering need based financial aid to OOS, which will significantly drive down the number of OOS who actually enroll. So perhaps, if your friend was in state, this could have been a big thing against him?