Good discussion on this topic.
I posed it after looking at UT-Austin and thinking about how/why they are not ranked higher overall while their Engineering and Business schools are much higher ranked than UFs. I read about the automatic admittance program and wondered how that might impact the profile of accepted students.
I agree with a lot of @Gator88NE’s points, among others. I cannot see how the automatic admissions process would arrive at the best aggregate profile of students as judged by just about any metric. They probably save a lot of time and money in the admissions process, however…
One appeal is that it should eliminate those seemingly random rejections of highly qualified candidates. Now, I am not convinced that there is not more to the story when I hear about those rejections, but it is conceivable that admissions makes mistakes every now and then. Even so, there is an appeal process that should rectify those one-offs.