They're not concerned with the angle used - any angle that works is acceptable - just that more successful groups are brought down, and they're concerned with the levers used to bring them down (as a matter of cultural control). The idea is to be able to dominate politically through manipulation. For some political machines that's viewed as a critical tool: intentionally segment people into conflict groups (forever subdividing as you go), spur endless conflict and cultural control through the conflict (hate speech controls = end of free speech, and so on).

I think it's more that admissions aren't actually optimizing for academic success. They're optimizing for career success. If you just look at academic signals you'll accept the most academically successful students but that's not the point. It's not unreasonable to punish applicants for spending more time studying because studying skews the metric they're using to predict career success.

> studying skews the metric they're using to predict career success

Which is what? Studying is hard, getting academic success is hard, and there is a positive correlation for both of those and career success, as academic success requires discipline, grit, and hard work, which are all useful for career success.

They've been using academic success to predict career success. I agree it's a good predictor. It's not foolproof though. The issue is that it can be skewed by devoting more resources to academic success instead of for example starting a business or political action or sports. Is someone less likely to have a successful career because they started a business instead of studying an extra hour every day? This is why the most elite schools switched to extracurricular and interview heavy admission criteria which ended up disfavoring asians who tend to spend more time on academic success.

The goal was to actually do a better job of finding the applicants with discipline and grit, not just the ones who have it in an academic context.

What kind of logic is this? So having wealthy and well-connected parents gives you a huge edge on career success, and you are saying admission should take that into account and favor that heavily?

I don't know about should, but they are taking it into account and I'm just saying why they are. Whether maximizing career success is the right choice is certainly up for debate.

Where did you see that in my comment? I don't think that at all.