I don’t think it’s even as deep as that. Nearly four million kids graduated high school last year, and more of then ever are applying for college. There are, what- 20? 50 top schools? And of these kids are applying to 10 of them at a time. There’s no barrier if you’re getting reduced application fees.
So you get situations where schools want under represented minority female applicants, market to receive those applicants, and then get those applicants- ten or twenty thousand for under a thousand spots.
Add to that something called “yield protection”. Believe it or not, colleges are judged be how many of their accepted applicants actually attend. This leads to otherwise great students getting rejected on the assumption that they’re probably going to get accepted somewhere else and go there. There’s usually a computer algorithm involved here.
If you’ve got bright kids who want to go to competitive colleges, they better be pouring a ton of energy into “demonstrated interest” in addition to all the other BS they have to juggle.
Are you sure about that? One of the biggest problems I'm reading about at American universities is declining enrollments.