Privilege vs potential in college admissions

[roethlisburger]

@ucbalumnus
Typical US high school stats (including test scores and HS GPA) have ceilings too low to sort out applicants to super-selective schools purely based on academic ability, so a super-selective school that heavily focuses on finding and admitting the top academic ability still needs some subjective evaluation of applicant credentials among the large number of applicants showing top end typical US high school stats.

This is a myth. From memory, somewhere between 300-600 kids get a perfect SAT score. Harvard admits about 2000 kids a year. Harvard, and most other elite schools, couldn’t admit a freshman class of perfect SAT scores if they wanted to. Caltech might come the closest, but with a total undergrad enrollment of less than a thousand students, they have one of the smallest class size to fill.