If this were clearly a bad thing, wouldn't the schools that don't do this produce much higher quality graduates?

Honestly, I have no idea. I think everyone is seeking signal when a lot of life is luck. Smart people will overcome except when they can’t (smart people fail despite their best efforts all the time) and those who might be unable to achieve (whether because of lack of intelligence or because of life circumstances) might still stumble into success. It’s a crapshoot, but pulling levers makes everyone look like they’re trying to fix whatever they want to fix.

We’re optimizing for the wrong problems (selective admissions for limited slots), versus working towards universal access to high quality instruction regardless of location.

You make it sound like it's not something that should be fixed. Any alternative ways of enabling lower-middle class kids with fewer resources to achieve opportunities at success?

Universal access (free) to community colleges, remote learning MOOCs from those top in their fields. Commodify higher education and distribute widely, don’t reward artificial scarcity.

Existing colleges do not have incentives to do this. They are incentivized to protect the value of their brand and their institution, and to preserve scarcity and gated access to credentials.

Except Colorado just banned legacy admissions and dropped their SAT/ACT requirement.

Someone will be making a subjective determination for each student based on something that isn’t a test score or legacy attribute (“feels”, their “story”, whatever you want to call it). Not exactly universal access imho (although I agree legacy should’ve never been a deciding factor).

are there schools that do random admission to compare to?

The argument is that dropping SAT/ACT requirements is bad for the school. So if that were actually true, then there should be data showing schools that dropped the requirement being worse off than schools that didn't.

What does 'bad for the school' mean? As long as they continue to rake in the cash from tuition/sports/grants and can keep funding their ever-growing bureaucracies, will they care if educational standards have cratered? The evidence suggests that they don't.

If it were purely about money, they would not be axing legacy admissions.

The legacy kids will all still be admitted. The more vague and subjective the admissions criteria, the easier it is to shoo-in the rich kids and pretend it's about anything other than money. No wonder they're getting rid of the SAT.

> Might as well make it a lottery. Apply, get ticket, random number generator makes selection.

Why not? A lottery could still have the most basic requirements for entry but beyond that what makes you think anyone's qualification system would beat random chance?

It makes it really easy to accidentally favor someone because you happen to know their pop.