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.