At the start of the post I describe an argument I often hear:
But many people are under the misconception that the resulting “rat race”—the highly competitive and strenuous admissions ordeal—is the inevitable result of the limited class sizes among top schools and the strong talent in the applicant pools, and that it isn’t merely because of the reasons listed in (2). Some even go so far as to suggest that a better system would be to run a lottery for any applicant who meets a minimum “qualification” standard—under the assumption that there would be many such qualified students.
This is the argument that I’m responding to and refuting.
You are wrong. The article does not refute that argument because (2) is about exactly the large dimensions of types of talent demanded. (Since universities want a variety of things)
You are assuming the consequent that there is not a large variety of things a university wants.
Saying if you relax a problem, it is easier, is not an argument that it can be relaxed. That is your fundamental misunderstanding. For the university, they do really find value in the things they select for with 2, so they have a lot of valuable candidates, and so picking a mixture of valuable candidates with a large supply of hard to compare offerings is in fact difficult, and will leave any one metric too weak for their preferences.
At the start of the post I describe an argument I often hear:
This is the argument that I’m responding to and refuting.
You are wrong. The article does not refute that argument because (2) is about exactly the large dimensions of types of talent demanded. (Since universities want a variety of things)
You are assuming the consequent that there is not a large variety of things a university wants.
Saying if you relax a problem, it is easier, is not an argument that it can be relaxed. That is your fundamental misunderstanding. For the university, they do really find value in the things they select for with 2, so they have a lot of valuable candidates, and so picking a mixture of valuable candidates with a large supply of hard to compare offerings is in fact difficult, and will leave any one metric too weak for their preferences.