East coast Fairfax County, home of the intel community, declare themselves the number one high school in America. That degree of precision is not supported by their possible degree of accuracy. I’ll be willing to bet part of this “number 1” is how many students go to Ivy schools upon graduation.
They are already obviously not “number 1”.
Ask universities what is decided on race ratios and what is decided on merit? Admissions by race ratios but obviously the sports teams are decided on merit and not race ratios.
True; there will always be value in a "well-rounded" education. Our local prep school's debate team had to debate TJ, and they were formidable. Yet, science and technology studies don't always make students uniformly great debaters, so our kids' teams won easily as often as theirs did.