If Harvard or USC were on the list I'd wager this to be the case, but MIT, Mellon & Pitt are serious schools so I believe them when I say it's in favor of increased rigor.
> MIT, Mellon & Pitt
MIT still requires SAT scores, so it's a non-factor there.
The only reason why Harvard has kept its mythos of being the incubator of the next ruling class is because, well, they accept the children of the current one. Those are most likely to become part of the next ruling class by virtue of having been born into it. It's an old boys club. There's no intrinsic property of Harvard that turns them into this incubator.
And from the other side you have the brain dead equity idiots who are also against true merit systems, for equally twisted, but different reasons.
We're merely discussing whether certain things are used as inputs to a very complicated decision process.
Test scores are no longer being used as inputs in many places, in the name of equity: but I think almost anything you'll weigh higher will favor class, instead.
They're also removing race. And legacy status. The net effect is an admissions landscape that will look very different.
So instead we're in an era of squishy, difficult-to-judge metrics... and of course, the places where one could stand out-- interesting stories on one's transcript or essay-- are increasingly being evaluated by AI.