I think we are beating a dead horse, but I think you are asking the wrong questions again if you really want to understand why this is a complicated situation.
More illuminating questions would be whether a 3.7/170 from Dartmouth can get the same law school admissions as a 3.9/170 from Alabama. Or whether a 3.7/170 from Alabama can get the same law school admissions as a 3.7/170 from Dartmouth. Or change that to 3.5 versus 3.7, and so on.
And I think many people sort of make a casual assumption that even if a 3.7 from Dartmouth works as well as a 3.9 from Alabama, maybe it is as easy to get a 3.9 from Alabama as a 3.7 from Dartmouth. But that is not a good assumption to make, because again we actually know very high numbers kids do attend Alabama, for cost reasons or others. And while that may not show up in something like a 25th SAT report, when you are looking at being not in the top 25th of your class at Alabama, but top 1%, or even higher–that is getting into the range where the competition is actually going to be extremely stiff.
And I really think kids with top HS grades making college choices are ill-served by casually assuming they will be at the top of their college classes as well. Again, we know that is not going to happen for many of these kids, because it can’t, but it can be tough for these kids to really internalize that probability.
So I think it is not a good idea to encourage kids to just assume that if they take merit money from Alabama that means they are destined to end up one of the top handful of kids with top grades at Alabama. Maybe, but maybe not, and they should be considering seriously both of those possible scenarios when making college choice.
And as another poster pointed out, self-reporting of anecdotes on forums like this are very much not going to give you a realistic sense of all this. Of COURSE the parents of kids who did great are far more likely to tell their stories here. The parent of a kid who took merit money and then did not do as well in college as they expected and then had to change their further plans as a result is just far less likely to tell that story.
None of which is to imply the parents of the kids where it worked out are wrong to tell their stories, indeed it can be illustrative of important possibilities to consider.
But then it is also important to consider the possibilities that are not likely to be shared as proud anecdotes, and to ask serious questions about what happens if you do not in fact get a 3.9 or 4.0 or so on at your college of choice.
Again, we are circling back, but we know what Yale Law did. Yale Law had no one from Bradley on that list. So, Yale preferred to take their 34th person from Columbia over someone from Bradley. And their 59th from Harvard. And their 90th from Yale.
And again, many colleges had one–but not two. So, Yale also preferred to take a 34th person from Columbia over a second person from Baylor, or Ohio State, and so on.
Of course for that one person from Ohio State, it all worked out. And again, if you focus on just that one story, you are necessarily not focusing on the stories of all the other people who went to Ohio State with great numbers in HS and then did not get admitted to a law school like Yale.
But, that very much happens. Including because Yale, and other law schools like it, are perfectly happy to take the 34th person from Columbia rather than a second person from Ohio State, or anyone at all from a variety of universities at any given time.
And to come full circle–did someone with a 3.9/175 from Ohio State not get admitted, whereas someone with a 4.0/175 did? And yet did someone with a 3.9/175 from Columbia get admitted, even though no 3.9/175 from Ohio State did?
I don’t actually know the answers to questions like that, because we don’t have that data. But absent such data, no one knows, and therefore it is not warranted to tell kids we know it makes no difference whether you go to Columbia or Ohio State.