[jfengel]

More educated and more competitive are not the same thing.

What you want is the most talented, hardest working, brightest students. That's difficult to discern given the differences in the availability of opportunity. Scaling for availability is hard.

But it is clear that just selecting for the students who succeeded in the best environment will leave you missing out on potential. And worse, that rapidly becomes self-reinforcing, since the next generation of students will be influenced by your choices on this one.