“But that’s not what these schools want. The tippy-top schools could fill their classes with perfect-stats kids many times over. They’d have a pretty boring, monochromatic student body, though, and the schools’ impact on and penetration into society would shrink, because all the kids with special attributes and achievements beyond stats would be thrown out. That’s a bad outcome for Harvard and its peers.”
I disagree with your assertion that these would be monochromatic kids as that’s a huge and disparaging generalization (and note I’m wasn’t by any stretch a perfect stat kid). That being said, even though Harvard and other top schools may not what kids want perfect stats, they enroll a lot of them, and enroll a ton of kids who score above a 2300 or 35. If their SAT average is 2200/33, and hooked enrolled students average say a 2000/28, there has to be a lot of students with 2250/34 and higher to balance that class out.