My youngest knows a guy who scored a 36 ACT, has taken for some 5-6 AP classes a year and gotten all 5’s on the tests, and still got wait listed for Harvard. I get that the competition is psychotic, but pondering it, could politics also not be weighed into the mix? We assume indoctrination happens at the secondary and college levels–and it clearly does–but particularly for the most selective schools, could the ideological in-breeding which is yielding so many intellectual stunted emotional dwarfs not start with the very first weeding? Might it be at some schools that anyone who is not ALREADY a mouth breathing fascist, conditioned to scream “compassion” and “tolerance” at the ring of the “racist” bell, has no chance of getting in?
If these are factories, and “quality” consists in perfect ideological relication–a zero defects model–then why tolerate “garbage”? Why add the additional hurdle of converting them, when the aim is AMPLIFYING and weaponizing them?