I generally agree with @Data10 that college admissions is very predictable when you peel back the onion and look at the data, there is a method to the madness. What we don’t see through data are the more subjective factors like the myriad ECs, personal essays/supplementals, letters of recommendation, and now popular 2 minute videos that are read and seen by humans who can be swayed by such additional information. We also don’t see the occasional mistakes, grammatical/punctuation errors, or bad choice of topic for the “Why” essay which could have been one of the reasons GoBears2023 was rejected by UW but accepted to Harvard and MIT? There is a logic behind acceptances, but we only see the end results, not how the result came to be.
Lastly, I think there is a tendency by parents on CC to rationalize why “little Suzy” didn’t get accepted to “selective college X” by suggesting that college admissions is just random, unpredictable, a lottery, etc. when in reality Suzy never really had a realistic chance and didn’t have the whole package to begin with to get an acceptance. I truly believe that adcoms know what they are doing and have a very thorough and logical process they follow to build their freshman class to have the right balance of students every year.