^^I’d love to see what happened if they did that. And i wonder if the outcome would be so different. I think one of the issues everyone faces is that of their own doppelgangers. To create a diverse (in all senses) class, they need kids with different profiles – even excluding race. How many robotics or AIME champs, how many lax bros, how many violinsts, etc. In every community, often for practical reasons such as what’s available, and often for cultural reasons (what everyone else does), kids do the same activities and often have the same goals (including college preferences.) And when all the kids with the same profile apply to the same schools, only some will get in. I see a variant of this in my own community. And yet I know how hard it is to persuade a kid from my neck of the woods to consider a school in Minnesota, for example. They want to go where everyone else they know is going (or to a school everyone else they know wI’ll be impressed by.)
How a kid is going to bring that profile to the class is, I suspect, what they are looking for. Call it like ability, personality, whatever. But there’s always that hope in putting together a class that these different types connect and collaborate and leave feeling part of each other’s worlds. Essays and LORs are imperfect at best, but I can tell you that I have read a few that have made me think, “nah”…