[Spooky23]

Just do a random lottery, assign points for objective achievements, whether academic or extracurricular. Pick some low (say 5%) percentage of admissions subject to discretion.

The legacy/z-list stuff demonstrates that the curation/engineering of the student body aspect of the process is bullshit. Kids who are marginally qualified and have rich parents seem to be able to make it.

Introducing a lottery system would eliminate the injustice and resentment where some admission officer is applying a "cool filter" to determine whether chinese/korean/indian people are worthy, or creating the assumption that other minorities were somehow unworthy of their opportunity.

I'm just an idiot who went to a SUNY school. In the 90s, if you met an SAT threshold and were a B-ish student you were in. We used to joke that we were the 13th grade of Massapequa high school -- there was no curation of the social skills of the student body. That said, we had a fine social life, and in rigorous subjects the dopiest idiots were filtered out. Computer Science 201 was a lecture hall with 800 students, and about 40-50% of the population was culled each year. About 40-50 students graduated. It was no Harvard, but we seemed to muddle though.