[msabalau]

The actual purpose of Harvard is to mix the children of the elite (regardless of their ability) with talented children of a broad cross section of the rest of society. One can observe this directly by searching "harvard" on wikileaks: http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/04/20/deborah-friedell/how-to...

or by, say, observing the life of Barack Obama.

The stated mission of Harvard college is to "educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society"

In neither case is their any value is filling up the school with people with highest test scores. The primary use of the test scores is to select from the cream from a broad cross section of society, because the entirety of society is whom the graduates of are expected to lead (serve or exploit). A secondary use is to extort larger sums of money from the elite whose children score exceptionally low.

Working class whites complain that lower scoring african americans get jobs as police or firemen over higher scoring whites. They ignore that purpose of the tests is simply to weed out people who can't do the job.

Scholastic test scores serve a similar purpose. Harvard has an exceptionally high graduation rate. There is no reason to believe that Harvard is admitting students who can't benefit from what is offered. Even if it was, the children of tiger moms pursuing meaningless vanity metrics have no standing to complain about it.

[thrcp971]

I am glad to see that someone understands this. These schools exist for the benefit of the wealthy.

> Even if it was, the children of tiger moms pursuing meaningless vanity metrics have no standing to complain about it.

Perfectly stated.