<p>Doesn't it bother people that only Harvard College uses this "leadership" criterion? The faculty, the grad school, and the professional schools mostly use the "best student/professor" criterion -- publication, grades, pure academic merit. The exceptions are possibly law school and the MBA program. Yet the faculty and alums from the grad programs probably have more responsibility for Harvard's worldwide rep than those from the undergrad college.</p>
<p>Even the old Harvard mostly used scholastic criteria till the 1920s when the anti-Jewish "leadership" policies started to kick in. From the early 1960s, HYP mostly started to use best student rules to get the top half of their classes again.</p>
<p>I am claiming that there is no proof aside from raw assertion that their leadership rules select many successful individuals who don't come from one of the two categories a) people who would have had a reasonable chance being selected by a school practicing a "Best student" rule a la Chicago or Caltech or b) people with such strong political/financial ties to the elite that school probably played a minor role in their success (cf. Kennedy, Bush, Gore).</p>
<p>Or to take a different example: Until a few decades ago, Stanford was not considered to be nearly in the same league as HYP. Its endowment was much lower than the top ten schools'. Its rise has coincided with the growth of California's wealth and particularly with the rise of Silicon Valley and donations from Stanford's new wealthy alums. Unsurprisingly, the Silicon Valley side of Stanford was mostly founded by those nerdy engineering types who mostly did well in high school on SATs and IQ tests.</p>
<p>As a professor at a first rate school that is constantly worrying about what direction to turn, I can see no clear evidence that well-roundedness counts except when the well-rounded are so close on scholastic grounds that the score/grade differences are mostly trivial. What may differ in college is their interest in studying hard vs. starting a business/writing a novel. But their raw ability is comparable to the nerds. Abandoning purely meritocratic criteria has little payoff except to please local wealthy elites whose giving is often dependent on enough local children getting in.</p>
<p>There is one upside to this foolishness in my view. It means that there are many brilliant students who are turned down by elite schools who end up at very strong smaller colleges or state schools, which then have a chance to raise their reputations. But it's still unfair to the rejected students.</p>