If folks aren't aware, there are a number of schools in the Bay Area (as well as Massachuesetts, New York, and many other places) where there are 3-5 or more "top students" all of whom have between 4.2 and 5 GPA, near-perfect-to-perfect SAT, as well as sports/music/other activities, and the universities have a selection algorithm that tries to pick no more than one such applicant (like a per-highschool quota) that falls into an equivclass.

College admissions are a second-order planning process (IE, you have to consider whether the applicant is likely to accept your offer, if you forgo an offer to another candidate with lesser creds that was more likely to accept). See https://www.amazon.com/Gatekeepers-Admissions-Process-Premie... for some insight into the process.

Thank you for adding that. I should have added one of the things I heard was a parent strategy recommendation to move to avoid having that competition. If that’s at all rational, it seems like a searing indictment of the whole system.

> His father is a manager at Google, which means we shouldn’t assume that Google’s hiring decision is based solely on merit.

What would that change? If you know how those companies hire, it’s not like his father would be allowed to even interview him, let alone hire him. You still have to make it through several interviews with other people.

See the sentence immediately following the one you quoted. Interviewing is famously prone to subconscious bias, and having someone who is familiar with the process can give people a big leg up: they’re going into it confident that they belong there and familiar with the structure and general types of questions (this is the same reason why rich people pay for test prep classes for their kids even though those won’t fundamentally change their kid’s intelligence) and cultural literacy builds rapport with the interviewers - if they think of you as an in-group member, they’ll rate you more favorably and be more understanding about mistakes.

Again, absolutely none of that is cheating - humans are just prone to thinking we’re far more rational than we actually are and there’s something like half a century of psychology and neuroscience studies showing that it’s both significant and requires effort to correct for.