I think MOST of the “institutional and social issues” boil down to the equivalent of adjusting the (academically driven) admissions threshold for different groups or folks with certain attributes.
Male applicant at 65% female school? Threshold lower
URM? Threshold lower
Legacy? Threshold lower
Athletes? - Yes, even for these - threshold lower (though there’s some dynamism to this - the coach may push harder and for a lower standard for the future star quarterback than for the future punter).
Now, I readily admit that at the upper reaches of the non-tipped applicants, the ability to distinguish fine-grained academic differences is small (and a noisy, weak signal) - that’s part of my original point. GPA-like characteristics are especially noisy because schools want to project to colleges that all of their graduates are brilliant, and thus are more likely to grade inflate (which raises the average GPA for their kids, but also may decrease the range) and also less likely to make clear rankings available.