Well, my post sure was a doozy. I wasn't thinking along racial lines, and I'm sorry if it seemed to imply that. Downvotes humbly accepted.

My kids went to a competitive high school, and I saw how the top students funneled themselves into an extremely narrow range of interests. Those kids were nice, but putting 1000 of them in one place would be a freak show.

The choosing of rulers is an interesting and complex problem. An idea with some popularity in HN is "sortition" which is the selection of rulers at random. This could be applied to college admissions in the following way. The college doesn't want to admit the top 1000 applicants according to any short list of KPI's that can be gamed. So they admit from the top 10000 students by manual curation, which is guaranteed to be controversial.

Instead, why not identify the top 10000 applicants, and then send out acceptance letters to 1000 students chosen at random by a neutral third party. (Making up parameters here, just for definiteness). The schools would get the variety they want, with an opaque selection function that can't be inverted, and the same potential benefits that sortition offers for choosing the ruling class.