Universities Really Are Messed Up (says Yale

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:Yale committee concludes that colleges and universities have completely lost the plot:

“High costs, murky admissions practices, uneven academic standards and fears about free speech on campuses, the committee said, are among the reasons for widening discontent over higher education’s worthiness.

The findings reflect misgivings that Americans have described across years of polling and interviews. But the report, from a 10-professor panel at one of the nation’s most renowned universities, amounts to a damning depiction of academia’s role in cultivating the political and cultural forces that are reshaping higher education’s place in American life.”


https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/us/yale-report-colleges-unversities-trust.html?unlocked_article_code=1.bVA._ebw.-PVgolGZ4r5r&smid=url-share

Your landscaper could have told you this.

Any FOX viewer could have told you this.

Hopefully they’re not patting themselves on the back about these conclusions.

You don't have to be either one of those things to see the issues.

What are the solutions? Seems like the fox viewers decided that destroying funding for scientific research was the solution and instead spending it on bombing a country to result in sky high energy prices that suck lots and lots and lots of money out of all of our wallets . Great job Fox viewers.

Sometimes you have to cause a ruckus
if you want to fight injustice.

A ruckus? An economy headed for a recession. A job market in the toilet for yale graduates and every other graduate. Inflation going up prospects for our kids futures going down That's not a ruckus to fight it justice that is cutting off your nose, lips, ears, eyes, cheeks and chin to spite your face

Just take yale and get the f*** if that's what it takes to get rid of you. You sound like such a genius! You'll be able Make Yale so much better.

I am willing to make those sacrifices to burn the wokeness out of colleges and universities. They brought it on themselves.

Wreak havoc on the country and the world is worth it because you don't like college admissions policies. That is just stupid.

Anyway the backlash is coming. The good for nobody GOP is losing badly in so many recent contests and rightly so. Cant happen soon enough. Reforms to college admissions can happen without burning down the place you fools

No it can't, they don't take you seriously unless you burn the place down. This is the same reason black people riot, nobody takes their concerns seriously until they start burning shit down. A year's worth of rioting 5 years ago and how much police brutality have we had since then? A lot less.
They could have fixed that shit a long time ago, we had the technology to hold cops accountable. But now that people realize that bad things can happen when you let cops kill young black men without much in the way of consequences, we started seeing consequences and with those consequences, we saw fewer bad shootings.

A few years disruption of scientific research is horrible, but worth it. People will die because of delayed scientific discovery, economic growth will be delayed, the consequences are bad for everyone but nobody was taking admissions reform seriously, colleges weren't really obeying SFFA, we had to burn the place down.
If colleges had not lost the plot like they did, this would never have been an issue.
Trump is chemotherapy, the poison that you use to burn out the more deadly disease.
And we are already seeing the changes in admissions and the self reflection by the ivory towers in the OP.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:These are private institutions with their own priorities which they have every right to. The idea that admissions is somehow hierarchical in terms of scores and grades needs to just go away. Elite schools want an interesting mix of interests and talents. They are assembling a class. The fact that a kid might have better admissions chances from having collected rare western wildflowers and being able to have a discussion on them or played violin at an incredible level, or being a top volleyball player while keeping high grades than someone at the top of their class in high school with high test scores is fine. Actually, it is more than fine.

Maybe we need to separate the undergraduate portions of these schools from the graduate portions. The grant money is actually for the grad schools and their research anyway so why pretend. Admissions to the grad schools is pretty straightforward and subject based which makes sense for them as well. The undergraduate schools could make sure that they aren't admitting a disproportionate number of their grad students from their undergraduates and the undergraduate schools can do as they please.

But they don't have a right to tax exempt status.
They don't have a right to any federal funding.
They don't have a right to any research grants.

If their private status takes away our ability to control our dollars, we should only be funding state schools. Let the private colleges fund their own research and their own student aid and their own donation incentives.

We could do that and give up the greatest basic research apparatus in the history of mankind.

Or, you could quit conflating the graduate side of the universities with the undergraduate side.

I conflate the two because they are the same. You are making an artificial distinction.

Do you intend to hold all republicans responsible for trump? Why? Can't you make the distinction between trump and the rest of the party?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Unless Yale plans to dramatically increase in size, the only way to end the “murky admissions practices” is to be open about conducting a lottery for everyone over a certain benchmark. There is no fair way to pick a mere 2% from a pool of highly-qualified 17 year olds.

Or the colleges could start demanding more tail end differentiation between students on the SAT.

There are a thousand perfect SAT scores every year. That number used to be in the dozens.

Tsinghua and Beijing do not have trouble selecting the top 0.05% students among 13 million kids based on the Gaokao, which has never seen a perfect score in its history.

The disdain people would have for academia if we changed our system to mirror China’s would be immense.

Pretty much every poor student that doesn’t go to a prep school would be left behind and couldn’t attend an elite college. This would be a step backwards.

How do you think the SES profile at Tsinghua or Peking compares to Stanford or Harvard?

And is HYPSM the only ladder for social mobility?
Sometimes social mobility from the bottom to the top takes more than a single generation
Go describe our college admissions process in any other country, they will think you must be mistaken.

I am pretty sure that it doesn't look as you are implying. But, there might be less representation by China's 1% because they are all trying to get their money and kids out of the country and choosing to educate their kids abroad. What does that really say about their system?

There is less representation of the 1% in asian countries because you can't buy your way into those schools, they don't have legacy preferences and expensive extracurriculars don't matter.
The ones that come here are not "choosing" to come here. They are coming here because they can't get in anywhere good in their home country and they can afford to come here, they are here because our system is corrupt.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I think the lack of transparency is huge. They really need to switch to just having some basic paramaters (SATs/ACTs above X, top X% of graduating class) and then have a lottery for spots.

That sounds like a recipe for going back to when it was designed to admit even more advantaged students then the current system allows. That's certainly not going to help the Fox News viewers that someone was posting about on here.

But a lottery for students who meet certain clear academic thresholds would get rid of the admissions advantages for expensive sports or starting your own charity (that only your parents donate to - I have a friend whose kids used this to get into an Ivy) or getting an internship at your dad's friends company. With Khan academy a smart kid anywhere can study for the SATs and be in the top of their class if they have the drive.

lottery away for your next future crop of private equity vultures and corporate lawyers. Who cares? Maybe we could take a little more time and attention to find our future nuclear physicists and biochemists, etc. not sure I want my transplant surgeon to be the lottery winner.

THose jobs are not open to only people who went to Yale (or a top college). But if Yale said, there is no meaningful difference among students with SATs above 1550 who are in the top 5% of their graduating class so we will do a lottery I would take that over the current system. if they wanted to, they could run separate lotteries by state or to ensure a class that represents the U.S. by family income. But that takes power away from the school so it will never happen.

There is no meaningful difference between a 1500 and a 1550, where do you draw the line? Private institutions get their own priorities.

There is a big difference between a 1500 and a 1550. And a bigger difference between a 1550 and a 1600. Dartmouth themselves published that if the higher your SAT bucket the better your chance of admission.

The difference between a 1550 and a 1600 typically comes down to the individual exam and a careless mistake or two with zero difference in capabilities. Not sure about the digital SAT but a single careless mistake on the old one could result in a 7890 or a 800 depending on the particular exam. Two misses could be a 770 or a 790 depending on the exam. There is not difference. The GPA differences between admitted students at that level are measured in a few hundredths of a point. YOu could find more correlation in the time of day for a class or the professor than you could in an SAT score.

And yet there is a peer reviewed study saying that there is a statistically significant difference in the average performance of students that got a 1590 vs a 1600.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The most overrepresented student at Yale is the private school graduate. By far. That will NEVER change.

I would not be so sure.

“When selective admissions seem so inexplicable — or, worse, tilted in ways that benefit the already advantaged — it should come as no surprise that many Americans do not trust the process,” the committee wrote.

I just don’t see how you can ever have an explicable process for undergraduate admissions and an admissions rate under 5%. 17 year olds are just not that fully formed yet. And if they were, college would be pointless.

I can point to half a dozen countries where they do this every year.

But none of them achieve what you think that it does. Cram school privilege is even worse in Asia than privilege here, you are delusional if you believe otherwise. Public school kids in the UK get huge advantages over private school kids because of the former huge admissions imbalances. What you dream of doesn't exist. In some countries testing schemes exist which do not achieve what you believe that they do.

I try not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. single test admissions is better than "holistic" admissions that allow admissions officers to limit the number of jews to admit or give some races preferences over others or give preferences to country club sports or people who claim to have a burning passion for medieval literature.

Holistic admissions is far superior because none of these schools are or ever have been optimizing for 'peak' academics. They are building a class which fits your priorities, they are not optimizing the training or another crop of engineers which is what the Asian systems you so admire are set up to do. Also, they are private entities and have every right to build a class as they see fit. Public schools admitting based on exam is something that I am perfectly fine with even if it diminishes the rigor of private schools over time. People don't want these schools because of the training, they are looking for prestige.

People in the west overlook all the downsides to Asia’s various education systems- which is surprising, because they’re visibly poor ideas of how to run one. Even china, which is loved on this forum for whatever reason, has such a utilitarian admission policy, because its government is run by and formed by engineers. Engineers have a certain management strategy that reflects well in the modern Chinese government; meanwhile, the US prefers (usually, not including Trump) pretty privileged, highly educated legally trained professionals in government.

China could not devise a more debilitating attitude through propaganda if it tried and we adopt it almost as a matter of pride.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The most overrepresented student at Yale is the private school graduate. By far. That will NEVER change.

I would not be so sure.

“When selective admissions seem so inexplicable — or, worse, tilted in ways that benefit the already advantaged — it should come as no surprise that many Americans do not trust the process,” the committee wrote.

I just don’t see how you can ever have an explicable process for undergraduate admissions and an admissions rate under 5%. 17 year olds are just not that fully formed yet. And if they were, college would be pointless.

I can point to half a dozen countries where they do this every year.

But none of them achieve what you think that it does. Cram school privilege is even worse in Asia than privilege here, you are delusional if you believe otherwise. Public school kids in the UK get huge advantages over private school kids because of the former huge admissions imbalances. What you dream of doesn't exist. In some countries testing schemes exist which do not achieve what you believe that they do.

I try not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. single test admissions is better than "holistic" admissions that allow admissions officers to limit the number of jews to admit or give some races preferences over others or give preferences to country club sports or people who claim to have a burning passion for medieval literature.

Holistic admissions is far superior because none of these schools are or ever have been optimizing for 'peak' academics. They are building a class which fits your priorities, they are not optimizing the training or another crop of engineers which is what the Asian systems you so admire are set up to do. Also, they are private entities and have every right to build a class as they see fit. Public schools admitting based on exam is something that I am perfectly fine with even if it diminishes the rigor of private schools over time. People don't want these schools because of the training, they are looking for prestige.

People in the west overlook all the downsides to Asia’s various education systems- which is surprising, because they’re visibly poor ideas of how to run one. Even china, which is loved on this forum for whatever reason, has such a utilitarian admission policy, because its government is run by and formed by engineers. Engineers have a certain management strategy that reflects well in the modern Chinese government; meanwhile, the US prefers (usually, not including Trump) pretty privileged, highly educated legally trained professionals in government.

People not from the west but living in the west overlook the downsides and advocate for a system that they understand how to navigate vs one that they do not understand. There is much less angst from the native born. This isn’t unique to the top privates, it applies equally to the top UC schools given that many of these families live in CA. Our system of private universities is unique and the fact that they aren’t focused on peak academics but rather a high baseline then other factors is also pretty unique.

They want to attend these schools because if their prestige but at the same want to change them in ways that would reduce their prestige longer term.

Aside from donors none of the other preferences are instrumental to long term reputation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:These are private institutions with their own priorities which they have every right to. The idea that admissions is somehow hierarchical in terms of scores and grades needs to just go away. Elite schools want an interesting mix of interests and talents. They are assembling a class. The fact that a kid might have better admissions chances from having collected rare western wildflowers and being able to have a discussion on them or played violin at an incredible level, or being a top volleyball player while keeping high grades than someone at the top of their class in high school with high test scores is fine. Actually, it is more than fine.

Maybe we need to separate the undergraduate portions of these schools from the graduate portions. The grant money is actually for the grad schools and their research anyway so why pretend. Admissions to the grad schools is pretty straightforward and subject based which makes sense for them as well. The undergraduate schools could make sure that they aren't admitting a disproportionate number of their grad students from their undergraduates and the undergraduate schools can do as they please.

But they don't have a right to tax exempt status.
They don't have a right to any federal funding.
They don't have a right to any research grants.

If their private status takes away our ability to control our dollars, we should only be funding state schools. Let the private colleges fund their own research and their own student aid and their own donation incentives.

We could do that and give up the greatest basic research apparatus in the history of mankind.

Or, you could quit conflating the graduate side of the universities with the undergraduate side.

All that research can happen at state schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Honestly thank god for holistic admissions. Definitely saved my kids from breaking their backs studying 24/7 just to have a shot. I can’t imagine what it must be like for kids in the UK who slave away aiming for all A* but still don’t get into Oxbridge/LSE/Imperial

The Royal family can't muscle their way into those schools. Those are just academic institutions with integrity.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The most overrepresented student at Yale is the private school graduate. By far. That will NEVER change.

I would not be so sure.

“When selective admissions seem so inexplicable — or, worse, tilted in ways that benefit the already advantaged — it should come as no surprise that many Americans do not trust the process,” the committee wrote.

I just don’t see how you can ever have an explicable process for undergraduate admissions and an admissions rate under 5%. 17 year olds are just not that fully formed yet. And if they were, college would be pointless.

I can point to half a dozen countries where they do this every year.

But none of them achieve what you think that it does. Cram school privilege is even worse in Asia than privilege here, you are delusional if you believe otherwise. Public school kids in the UK get huge advantages over private school kids because of the former huge admissions imbalances. What you dream of doesn't exist. In some countries testing schemes exist which do not achieve what you believe that they do.

I try not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. single test admissions is better than "holistic" admissions that allow admissions officers to limit the number of jews to admit or give some races preferences over others or give preferences to country club sports or people who claim to have a burning passion for medieval literature.

Holistic admissions is far superior because none of these schools are or ever have been optimizing for 'peak' academics. They are building a class which fits your priorities, they are not optimizing the training or another crop of engineers which is what the Asian systems you so admire are set up to do. Also, they are private entities and have every right to build a class as they see fit. Public schools admitting based on exam is something that I am perfectly fine with even if it diminishes the rigor of private schools over time. People don't want these schools because of the training, they are looking for prestige.

People in the west overlook all the downsides to Asia’s various education systems- which is surprising, because they’re visibly poor ideas of how to run one. Even china, which is loved on this forum for whatever reason, has such a utilitarian admission policy, because its government is run by and formed by engineers. Engineers have a certain management strategy that reflects well in the modern Chinese government; meanwhile, the US prefers (usually, not including Trump) pretty privileged, highly educated legally trained professionals in government.

The downsides are hard work and stress. The upside is kids that aren't useless.

[Anonymous]

I am willing to make those sacrifices to burn the wokeness out of colleges and universities. They brought it on themselves.

Hey, anti-woke weirdo finally made it to the party! This troll is usually found hanging out on multiple LAC threads.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The most overrepresented student at Yale is the private school graduate. By far. That will NEVER change.

I would not be so sure.

“When selective admissions seem so inexplicable — or, worse, tilted in ways that benefit the already advantaged — it should come as no surprise that many Americans do not trust the process,” the committee wrote.

I just don’t see how you can ever have an explicable process for undergraduate admissions and an admissions rate under 5%. 17 year olds are just not that fully formed yet. And if they were, college would be pointless.

I can point to half a dozen countries where they do this every year.

But none of them achieve what you think that it does. Cram school privilege is even worse in Asia than privilege here, you are delusional if you believe otherwise. Public school kids in the UK get huge advantages over private school kids because of the former huge admissions imbalances. What you dream of doesn't exist. In some countries testing schemes exist which do not achieve what you believe that they do.

I try not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. single test admissions is better than "holistic" admissions that allow admissions officers to limit the number of jews to admit or give some races preferences over others or give preferences to country club sports or people who claim to have a burning passion for medieval literature.

Holistic admissions is far superior because none of these schools are or ever have been optimizing for 'peak' academics. They are building a class which fits your priorities, they are not optimizing the training or another crop of engineers which is what the Asian systems you so admire are set up to do. Also, they are private entities and have every right to build a class as they see fit. Public schools admitting based on exam is something that I am perfectly fine with even if it diminishes the rigor of private schools over time. People don't want these schools because of the training, they are looking for prestige.

People in the west overlook all the downsides to Asia’s various education systems- which is surprising, because they’re visibly poor ideas of how to run one. Even china, which is loved on this forum for whatever reason, has such a utilitarian admission policy, because its government is run by and formed by engineers. Engineers have a certain management strategy that reflects well in the modern Chinese government; meanwhile, the US prefers (usually, not including Trump) pretty privileged, highly educated legally trained professionals in government.

The downsides are hard work and stress. The upside is kids that aren't useless.

Japan is filled with useless youth. So much so it’s common for young adults to die alone in their rooms that they won’t leave for months on end

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yale committee concludes that colleges and universities have completely lost the plot:

“High costs, murky admissions practices, uneven academic standards and fears about free speech on campuses, the committee said, are among the reasons for widening discontent over higher education’s worthiness.

The findings reflect misgivings that Americans have described across years of polling and interviews. But the report, from a 10-professor panel at one of the nation’s most renowned universities, amounts to a damning depiction of academia’s role in cultivating the political and cultural forces that are reshaping higher education’s place in American life.”


https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/us/yale-report-colleges-unversities-trust.html?unlocked_article_code=1.bVA._ebw.-PVgolGZ4r5r&smid=url-share

Your landscaper could have told you this.

Any FOX viewer could have told you this.

Hopefully they’re not patting themselves on the back about these conclusions.

You don't have to be either one of those things to see the issues.

What are the solutions? Seems like the fox viewers decided that destroying funding for scientific research was the solution and instead spending it on bombing a country to result in sky high energy prices that suck lots and lots and lots of money out of all of our wallets . Great job Fox viewers.

Sometimes you have to cause a ruckus
if you want to fight injustice.

Injustice my ass. The whining just takes us down a road of more government control.

The left love government control when they control the government just as the right love government control when THEY control the government.
Let MERIT control

Merit as defined by whom? The left will define it by 'equity' while the right will define it by 'wealth and heritage'. Pick your poison.

Merit as defined by the dictionary.

Traits that you are born with and require no effort on your part are not merit based.

Given that intelligence is largely inherited then we must rule out one try test scores…..sounds kind of stupid doesn’t it? But if intelligence is ok then athletic ability and musical ability must also be ok. After all if a school can shoot for excellence in Chemistry why not basketball? Or, orchestra?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:These are private institutions with their own priorities which they have every right to. The idea that admissions is somehow hierarchical in terms of scores and grades needs to just go away. Elite schools want an interesting mix of interests and talents. They are assembling a class. The fact that a kid might have better admissions chances from having collected rare western wildflowers and being able to have a discussion on them or played violin at an incredible level, or being a top volleyball player while keeping high grades than someone at the top of their class in high school with high test scores is fine. Actually, it is more than fine.

Maybe we need to separate the undergraduate portions of these schools from the graduate portions. The grant money is actually for the grad schools and their research anyway so why pretend. Admissions to the grad schools is pretty straightforward and subject based which makes sense for them as well. The undergraduate schools could make sure that they aren't admitting a disproportionate number of their grad students from their undergraduates and the undergraduate schools can do as they please.

But they don't have a right to tax exempt status.
They don't have a right to any federal funding.
They don't have a right to any research grants.

If their private status takes away our ability to control our dollars, we should only be funding state schools. Let the private colleges fund their own research and their own student aid and their own donation incentives.

We could do that and give up the greatest basic research apparatus in the history of mankind.

Or, you could quit conflating the graduate side of the universities with the undergraduate side.

I conflate the two because they are the same. You are making an artificial distinction.

Do you intend to hold all republicans responsible for trump? Why? Can't you make the distinction between trump and the rest of the party?

The distinction isn’t artificial, it just isn’t something that you want to contemplate because it doesn’t fit your narrative. Same goes for your republican comment. I was a republican for 35 years. Anyone that voted for that POS deserves whatever shame they get. They enabled the the grifter. The backlash will be hard.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Unless Yale plans to dramatically increase in size, the only way to end the “murky admissions practices” is to be open about conducting a lottery for everyone over a certain benchmark. There is no fair way to pick a mere 2% from a pool of highly-qualified 17 year olds.

Or the colleges could start demanding more tail end differentiation between students on the SAT.

There are a thousand perfect SAT scores every year. That number used to be in the dozens.

Tsinghua and Beijing do not have trouble selecting the top 0.05% students among 13 million kids based on the Gaokao, which has never seen a perfect score in its history.

The disdain people would have for academia if we changed our system to mirror China’s would be immense.

Pretty much every poor student that doesn’t go to a prep school would be left behind and couldn’t attend an elite college. This would be a step backwards.

How do you think the SES profile at Tsinghua or Peking compares to Stanford or Harvard?

And is HYPSM the only ladder for social mobility?
Sometimes social mobility from the bottom to the top takes more than a single generation
Go describe our college admissions process in any other country, they will think you must be mistaken.

I am pretty sure that it doesn't look as you are implying. But, there might be less representation by China's 1% because they are all trying to get their money and kids out of the country and choosing to educate their kids abroad. What does that really say about their system?

There is less representation of the 1% in asian countries because you can't buy your way into those schools, they don't have legacy preferences and expensive extracurriculars don't matter.
The ones that come here are not "choosing" to come here. They are coming here because they can't get in anywhere good in their home country and they can afford to come here, they are here because our system is corrupt.

It is well known that the party elite get slots. I’m sure that it would be the same for the Ambani’s in India.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the lack of transparency is huge. They really need to switch to just having some basic paramaters (SATs/ACTs above X, top X% of graduating class) and then have a lottery for spots.

That sounds like a recipe for going back to when it was designed to admit even more advantaged students then the current system allows. That's certainly not going to help the Fox News viewers that someone was posting about on here.

But a lottery for students who meet certain clear academic thresholds would get rid of the admissions advantages for expensive sports or starting your own charity (that only your parents donate to - I have a friend whose kids used this to get into an Ivy) or getting an internship at your dad's friends company. With Khan academy a smart kid anywhere can study for the SATs and be in the top of their class if they have the drive.

lottery away for your next future crop of private equity vultures and corporate lawyers. Who cares? Maybe we could take a little more time and attention to find our future nuclear physicists and biochemists, etc. not sure I want my transplant surgeon to be the lottery winner.

THose jobs are not open to only people who went to Yale (or a top college). But if Yale said, there is no meaningful difference among students with SATs above 1550 who are in the top 5% of their graduating class so we will do a lottery I would take that over the current system. if they wanted to, they could run separate lotteries by state or to ensure a class that represents the U.S. by family income. But that takes power away from the school so it will never happen.

There is no meaningful difference between a 1500 and a 1550, where do you draw the line? Private institutions get their own priorities.

There is a big difference between a 1500 and a 1550. And a bigger difference between a 1550 and a 1600. Dartmouth themselves published that if the higher your SAT bucket the better your chance of admission.

The difference between a 1550 and a 1600 typically comes down to the individual exam and a careless mistake or two with zero difference in capabilities. Not sure about the digital SAT but a single careless mistake on the old one could result in a 7890 or a 800 depending on the particular exam. Two misses could be a 770 or a 790 depending on the exam. There is not difference. The GPA differences between admitted students at that level are measured in a few hundredths of a point. YOu could find more correlation in the time of day for a class or the professor than you could in an SAT score.

And yet there is a peer reviewed study saying that there is a statistically significant difference in the average performance of students that got a 1590 vs a 1600.

Please show us that little fiction which you speak of.