But Lumifer has this one right—both are scarce resources, and this particular mix of the two is a scarce resource, but it’s not being burned because it’s not a commons. They are successfully accepting only those they think will do well there and improve the environment for each other.
What’s being burned here is not the benefits of being accepted to an Ivy. It’s the wasteful effort involved in, e.g. the marginal hours of intensive preparation on the SAT, that will affect the final score by a handful of points at best. (No one denies that some amount of test prep can be very useful for anyone, both academically and in terms of improving the test outcome!) To a first approximation, the positive payoff of the former is exactly offset, in expectation, by the negatives of the latter.
What’s being burned here is not the benefits of being accepted to an Ivy. It’s the wasteful effort involved in, e.g. the marginal hours of intensive preparation on the SAT, that will affect the final score by a handful of points at best. (No one denies that some amount of test prep can be very useful for anyone, both academically and in terms of improving the test outcome!) To a first approximation, the positive payoff of the former is exactly offset, in expectation, by the negatives of the latter.