[at-w]

I agree that much of their use of "holistic" factors is simple discrimination and should be illegal, but considering other non-academic factors (arguably including character) seems reasonable, if not necessary, given the intent of these schools to build future leaders in various fields.

Quantitative measures can only give you so much information about a student. GPA is questionably useful past a point, where it starts to have more to do with grade inflation and gaming the system than differences in hard work or ability.

That leaves the SAT, which is far more of a level playing field than things like extracurriculars or "personal statements" that also end up reflecting your social class and ability to play the admissions game more than ability. Yet admitting students based solely on a single standardized test seems to disincentivize working hard at other pursuits that may actually bring more to the classroom than slightly higher test scores.

[crop_rotation]

If there is a magical way to gauge character in a short amount of time then sure, however I doubt most people will do any better than a coin flip when asked to predict the "character" of someone without having known the person deeply.

[petilon]

> If there is a magical way to gauge character in a short amount of time then sure

This is key. Many universities that claim to do "holistic reviews" don't have the time or resources to actually do holistic reviews. University of Washington is an example. UW gives application reviewers 8 minutes per application. And who are these reviewers? Do they have the knowledge and experience to do a "holistic review" in 8 minutes, including reading essays and personal statements and so on? Nope! They hire grad students, retirees etc. to act as application reviewers [1].

[1] https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/a-look-inside-admis...

[kelipso]

Character gauging is basically does the prospective student show enough characteristics that upper middle class people have.

[scarmig]

The thing is, getting into a top level school requires maximizing all of GPA, SATs, and what might be called "extracurricular appeal"; this crowds out a bunch of different pursuits, more so than grinding test-taking ability (which has rapidly decreasing marginal returns) alone would. You might hope that those different pursuits being crowded out would instead feed into increased extracurricular appeal, but in practice there's a very particular subset of things that universities care about when it comes to extracurriculars. Indeed, some of them (like leadership activities in 4H, ROTC, or Future Farmers of America) actually hurt your chances of admission, which seems insane if you're looking for a variety of impressive individuals who can bring diverse perspectives.

If I were dictator of college admissions across the US, I'd use tests and GPA to coarsely bucket individuals (into basically capable of doing the work or not at each institution), and use a lottery to distribute spots where demand outstrips supply.