> While I admit that legacy and donations can be a factor as they always have been across all institutions, admissions always have been predicated on finding students who are most likely to find true high level success in the real world. This means finding well rounded students: those that excel in leadership positions, extra curriculars, and athletics as well as in the classroom.

But the SATs still matter. They are a generalized measure of the student’s quality and are a good measure of how they’ll succeed in general. They should be given more weight than subjective measures. And focusing on them also avoids favoring those “extra” activities that are more accessible to students from wealthy families, who can afford it (money and time). For example, a family that needs the big kid to help watch the little kid can’t afford to have the big kid stay for after school sports.

By the way, plenty of public school students also have good test scores AND the extra things you mention. The big corruption of the process is when these qualified students are displaced by decisions that aren’t meritocratic. That’s legacy admissions but also race or gender based quota based discrimination.

What you're missing is that elite prep school admissions to Ivies (for example) virtually all smoke the SAT and are well rounded.

The SAT is weighted. If you are going to complain until it completely overwhelms anything else, then you're going to be in for a disappointment.

And if the goal is to get it to overwhelm everything else until mostly lesser advantaged kids are admitted, you're going to be more disappointed still because elite kids can be elite and hard to beat even just in terms of SAT scores.

Which is where the well rounded aspects of their profile come in.

When that's the case for public school admissions, they also get in. But admissions usually well knows what the competitiveness of their classes was in whatever public school they attended. All are not equal, as it goes. Complaining after having taken non-competitive academics isn't honest in the national discussion.

Less competitive but still competent wealthy students generally end up at a private liberal arts college.

> The big corruption of the process is when these qualified students are displaced by decisions that aren’t meritocratic.

You have no way of knowing that this happens often, and the PR and DEI incentives seem to be against it.

Last, a factor in all of this is college-by-college capacity for tuition assistance. At a certain point in admitting any class, tuition must be paid by a proportion of students. Endowment capacity differs from college to college, but it isn't helpful to act as if these colleges exist solely to educate every promising lower SES student who can't pay. "Promising" being a relative measurement.