“Very-high-stats” isn’t the same as “perfect-stats”, @theloniusmonk; the latter is the phrase I used, and I stand by what I said. Harvard could easily fill its class exclusively with kids who have 1600 SATs or 36 ACTs and perfect grades. It would then be the collegiate version of Stuyvesant High School, the most selective public high school in Manhattan, where your admission is based on how you score on one test (see here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-10-05/welcome-to-stuyvesant-high-school-hostile-takeover-high?cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social).
But if Harvard did that, it wouldn’t be Harvard, and it would be a much more imperfect mirror of society than currently. Stuy is about 74% Asian and 1% black, which, notwithstanding that everyone’s an individual, strikes many people as monochromatic - so much so that there’s a movement to make the admissions process there more holistic.
Harvard takes about 20 kids a year from Stuy (which has a senior class of around a thousand). That’s more than almost any other high school, but still only about 1% of the admits Harvard hands out, because Harvard is looking for many kinds of people, from all over the world and with all kinds of talents and attributes, in building its class. Harvard expects that the kids it takes from Stuy will be superstars, and that all the other kids it takes will be as well, in different ways, and will be prominent in different areas of society and different places.
My real point, though, is that there’s a world of difference between very-high-stats (e.g., 2300/35) and perfect-stats in terms of the net you can cast. If you center the class near very-high-stats, you vastly expand the possibility of entry, enabling you to assemble a much more diverse class in terms of backgrounds and talents while taking a large number of super-brainiacs and maintaining a highly intellectual atmosphere. If you center the class much closer to perfect stats, though, you curtail the admissible population and the resulting breadth of your mix sharply. That was what I was trying to say in my post.