<p>"No because after all, they are academia. Schools still want to report high stats to USNews and other ranking agencies, still want their students to go to good graduate schools, get Fulbrights and Rhodes, get good jobs after graduation.</p>
<p>Also, I take that faculty do prefer to teach interested/intelligent kids over the completely disengaged kids."</p>
<p>Certainly they do, but I wouldn’t generalize that lower stat wealthier kids are completely disengaged as opposed to higher stat poorer kids being more interested/intelligent. Definitely when it comes to GPAs, not all are the same. You can have kids with perfect GPAs looking like high stat students, yet they attended inadequate high schools that practice grade inflation, leaving them completely unprepared for college. And you can have kids coming out of top schools that practice serious grade deflation, making their stats look low (or that they are lazy if they have high SATs), who are far more engaged than their GPAs might reflect. I really don’t know how the schools can paint an accurate picture of most students.</p>