Is this a fair summary of your view: meritocracy doesn't really measure merit, since parents can use their money to improve whatever scores you get?
My answer: why then do rich parents routinely have some children who can't cut it? Why does parental wealth correlate less well with achievement than parental education levels (i.e. parents who are lottery winners do not have scientifically-advanced children, but highly educated parents do, regardless of wealth?). My view is that a lot of this runs in families, which is why even ww2 refugee elite academics and their children did fine in the US despite poverty/flight/loss of nearly everything. Smartness does lead to wealth since they invent things and are fast, etc. but the behavior of people who have recently gained wealth doesn't seem accounted for in your measurements. Let alone the large number of failed attempts to show that money can actually improve standardized testing scores. [yes, I believe these tests generally can't be well-studied for. It's not as solid as you think. Send links if you can find one which suggests that you can train an average person to have a 99th percentile SAT or similar test. People attack the tests w/out really looking into it at all; they're super correlated with college GPA and many other pro-social lifetime measurements.]
Second: Do you think the new system is less gameable than the old? i.e. relying on recommendation letters, holistic applications, extra-curriculars, the ability to tell stories where you're the victim, race preferences (not origin, literal race i.e. not distinguishing American descendants of slavery from recently immigrated Africans)? I think these things are even more game-able than before. i.e. read the docs on the Harvard discrimination case - the administrators were using a squishy "personality" evaluation score to discriminate against Asians.
Needless to say, SAT is proven to be very correlated with things we value - I strongly doubt that Harvard's replacement system has anywhere near that predictive ability.
To state it in a testable way: good scores on the SAT/MCAT will strongly correlate with good med school class rank, graduation rate, low rate of malpractice, percent chance to get a medical patent or do widely cited research, etc. Squishy holistic admissions will NOT correlate to many good things - best it can do is correlate with socially manipulable soft science PhDs and papers. But it won't help you with anything that's not gamed already.
> SAT is proven to be very correlated with things we value
What do you mean 'we', kemosabe? If you mean the western neoliberal political economic system, then let's talk about whether or not what that system values is really a mark of merit, or of some other social and historic factors.
If you think "we" means <gestures wildly at everyone>, then that's kind of proof that the people who define "merit" are the ones who turn out to – surprise – measure as highly meritorious.
What do you value then? Testing for things that correlate with that would be a reasonable proposal. Also I'm not a "Kemosabe", not sure what that is. I said we because things like low rates of malpractice, success in grad schools, research seems fair to accept as a general trait to select for in admissions. If you have another proposal please explain. My view is that soft skills to get into test-less ivies are unlikely to select for something more valuable than the prior system.
My answer: why then do rich parents routinely have some children who can't cut it? Why does parental wealth correlate less well with achievement than parental education levels (i.e. parents who are lottery winners do not have scientifically-advanced children, but highly educated parents do, regardless of wealth?). My view is that a lot of this runs in families, which is why even ww2 refugee elite academics and their children did fine in the US despite poverty/flight/loss of nearly everything. Smartness does lead to wealth since they invent things and are fast, etc. but the behavior of people who have recently gained wealth doesn't seem accounted for in your measurements. Let alone the large number of failed attempts to show that money can actually improve standardized testing scores. [yes, I believe these tests generally can't be well-studied for. It's not as solid as you think. Send links if you can find one which suggests that you can train an average person to have a 99th percentile SAT or similar test. People attack the tests w/out really looking into it at all; they're super correlated with college GPA and many other pro-social lifetime measurements.]
Second: Do you think the new system is less gameable than the old? i.e. relying on recommendation letters, holistic applications, extra-curriculars, the ability to tell stories where you're the victim, race preferences (not origin, literal race i.e. not distinguishing American descendants of slavery from recently immigrated Africans)? I think these things are even more game-able than before. i.e. read the docs on the Harvard discrimination case - the administrators were using a squishy "personality" evaluation score to discriminate against Asians.
Needless to say, SAT is proven to be very correlated with things we value - I strongly doubt that Harvard's replacement system has anywhere near that predictive ability.
To state it in a testable way: good scores on the SAT/MCAT will strongly correlate with good med school class rank, graduation rate, low rate of malpractice, percent chance to get a medical patent or do widely cited research, etc. Squishy holistic admissions will NOT correlate to many good things - best it can do is correlate with socially manipulable soft science PhDs and papers. But it won't help you with anything that's not gamed already.