These are private colleges. They can select the students they like to create the campus experience they want to offer, and considering how highly desired they continue to be, I’d say they are doing a pretty good job of it. They aren’t looking for a class entirely composed of scholars. They are looking for leaders in their fields, whatever that may be. Personally I wish they would care more about academics and less about athletics, but overall my daughter has enjoyed the diversity. There are many fine schools which admit on academics alone–if that’s what you want, no one is preventing you from applying to them.
@cmsjmt, The lawsuit you cited gives the same old argument of the “SAT penalty” for Asians. Guess what, most of them are STEM majors and there is an “SAT penalty” for STEM majors. " At California Institute of Technology, for instance, about 40% of undergraduates are Asian-American, about twice that at Harvard." Of course. That’s because at California Institute of Technology, most of the students are STEM majors and the Asian applicants are very disproportionately focused on STEM. At Harvard, they also want English majors, classics majors, visual and environmental studies majors, etc. This has been discussed on other threads and isn’t really on the topic of this thread.
I might add, for kids at the upper end of achievement, the SAT is a very poor measure of ability anyhow. It’s kind of like doing your graduate school admissions based on how many homeworks you forgot to turn in in 9th grade.