[wyldfire]

This kind of competition happens in other areas of academic pursuits too. Is that strictly a bad thing?

The bad thing about UT's policy is that it encourages well-off students to move to a less-competitive school district (usually rural) in order to improve their chances.

[derektank]

This seems like a good thing to me actually, lower performing students generally benefit from having high performers in their social circles

[john-h-k]

If we were really optimising for this, we’d ban colleges using anything other than geographic area. Keeping all the high performers at high performing unis will hurt the lower performers