[theapportioner]

There is a difference between the valedictorians at Andover and Stuyvesant, and a flunkie (hence, merit?), but how does one compare GPA between school systems? The more elite colleges and universities will often cull people from schools with higher reputations, i.e. Phillips Andover, or a public school system loaded with the tax money of rich parents. Whose fault is it that a kid doesn't get into Yale? The child's, who is to blame for not attending the "right" school, perhaps because, despite being valedictorian of her little high school in Michigan, or her family's fault, for not having enough money to send her to an elite private high school? Or what about that great equaliser, the SAT? The children of affluent parents can afford expensive Kaplan classes, or worse, private tutors, thus increasing the kids' scores by 100 or more points. Sounds hardly fair.

Schools like Harvard and Yale easily get 10x the qualified applicants for the number of spots they can give out. We're talking about 3.95, 1550 SAT kids here. Harvard gets more applications from valedictorians than seats they can give out for the Harvard College class of 2007.

Point is, the admissions process for colleges and universities, and perhaps especially for the ones of higher repute, is a very arbitrary process. Often a crap shoot from the outsider's perspective. Given the structure of the pre-college application process here in the USA, I have never been show a fair way of allocating college spots to worthy candidates based on merit. Since "merit" is itself a vague and hotly contested idea, and will always be one, it is ridiculous for colleges to choose classes based on a single idea, one that no one can come to agreement as to what it means.

You might argue, well, the 1550 SAT valedictorian from Clawson Michigan will get into somewhere good, if not Harvard then maybe Cornell. But the current affirmative action case before the Supreme Court is against one University of Michigan... the people who didn't get in there could have easily gotten in somewhere else, I'm sure (since they were so confident they'd get in), and gotten a scholarship to boot.

Who is more deserving, the poor kid who struggled to success, or the rich kid whose parents paid his way to a more elite university, though the kid didn't work as hard? Before you answer this, think about this: Rhodes scholarships these days tend to be awarded to people who have shown triumph over such great adversities.

Merit is shit.