<p>"What I'm saying is why don't at least a FEW colleges in the US give total academic merit a try"</p>
<p>Sure. CalTech, Cooper Union and St. John University (Annapolis and New Mexico) are noted for choosing students based on pure academic merit. Also, frankly at most US universities, if you have high grades, scores and class rank, you'll be virtually automatically admitted.In fact, the majority of US colleges admit most of their applicants.</p>
<p>Out of the thousands of universities in the U.S., it's only the top 25 or so that are able to heavily count things like ECs in their admissions process. That's because places like HPYS have such an abundance of highly qualified applicants that those universities can afford to reject high stat students that other universities would eagerly snap up. The stats are already so high at those universities that they can afford to pass on the valedictorian students with 2400 scores who do nothing else but study in favor of students with acceptable, but not as stellar stats who will also enrich their campus' extracurricular activities.</p>
<p>For instance, Yoyo Ma, Leonard Bernstein, John Kennedy, Al Franken, Benazir Bhutto -- all are Harvard grads who contributed a great deal to the world in ways other than academics. For all I know, they may have been accepted over applicants who had higher IQs, grades or scores and may have eventually turned into an excellent university professor or academic researcher. </p>
<p>However, Harvard wants to produce world leaders, famous musicians, heck, even famous comedians, not just academics.</p>
<p>What other countries do isn't that relevant to most US universities. That's because in many other countries, universities center only on producing students with great academic knowledge. </p>
<p>In the US, however, virtually all universities view it as part of their mission to develop students in terms of extracurriculars, leadership and similar things that after graduation will help students contribute in a variety of ways to our society, which does highly value things such as leadership, community service, ability to function on a team (at work and elsewhere), etc.</p>