I think we also forget that high schoolers are dumb and young. The difference between top high schoolers is not that different from the average. But as the years go by that gap widens. The gaps may seem big at the time but that's viewing it locally. I did a lot of teaching in grad school and while there were a handful of kids (<1%) who were just exceptional this was almost never clear on paper. For the most part the main difference was effort. Some of my favorite students started off terribly! Well below average. But I've seen that turn around in a single class and I've seen freshman who are at risk of flunking out get straight A's in their junior and senior years. (I've also seen the complete opposite!)

Because of this, I always wonder about how many more "geniuses" were missing out on because of this. I'm pretty confident that in an elite university if you threw out the bottom 50% (or fewer!) of candidates and then just randomly selected you'd end up with a pretty similar if not identical outcome. The gap is small and shaped by environments. At college admission time the gap is just so small compared when looking from a PhD level.

I think the admissions systems are fucked up. It's become an arms race over things that don't matter. The root of the problem is just that we're trying to measure systems with lots of noise in them. At some point you're fitting noise, not meaningful data. It'll look successful but it's not successful do to your metrics, it's successful because an arbitrary metric would have sufficed. That doesn't mean don't use metrics, but rather to use cautiously. Data and measures are meaningless without context. In this context we're talking about kids. What, they can't ever fuck up? If they don't fuck up in high school they're more likely to in college. Ultimately we're dealing with humans, who adapt, change, and where it's hard to predict their futures. Personally I'd rather those kids to figure out how to be human easier. I don't know about causation, but there definitely is a strong correlation between their ability to cross these gaps when they've already learned those soft skills (those kids come to college and don't need to learn skills like taking care of yourself, cooking, or other forms of independence. They often are more clear about their desires and not just going through the motions). Unfortunately these are often inversely correlated to grades (like B's, not F's).

We can't have meritocracy if you believe merits can be measured without noise. The irony is that often the pursuit of meritocracy hinders its progress. The unfortunate reality is that there are things you just cannot measure. We should always try and seek to improve but that can't happen without deep understanding of limitations.

I'm also reminded of a scene from Silicon Valley. Richard gets into an argument about the marketing team and Jack Barker says because they're the best you gave to give them easier things to sell. There's a lot of ways to interpret that in this context so I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader.