To take two extreme reference classes, children deprived of oxygen at birth have less merit than children given sufficient oxygen. The result of oxygen deprivation is unfair and sad, but that doesn't mean the brain-damaged child strangled by his umbilical cord is more meritorious than the normal child.
Let me be clear about "holistic" admissions. This is usually just a code word that means "we'd love to just use quotas to let in enough non-asian minorities and keep out those jerky asians, but we can't, so we'll do holistic admissions instead." This is what I'm referring to when I use the term.
To follow your example, if the brain-damaged child strangled by his umbilical cord achieve just as much as the normal child, he has more merit.
That's the 2nd principle of political liberalism: "Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first, they are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second, they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society."
In that case, let both brain damaged and normal children compete.
But I agree with your case, most admissions system are poorly disguised racism. Life sucks sometimes.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rawls#Political_Liberalism
I think you need to start defining what you mean by "achievement" and "merit," because "equal achievement" and "greater merit" are not the same things from my perspective. If a brain-damaged child achieves just as much a normal child, they have equal merit, from my perspective.
Again, I think a lot of people are conflating meritocracy with social justice. I think this attitude stems from the fact that people think meritocracy is "good," and that social justice is also "good," so meritocracy must necessarily be socially just, when that is not the case. Meritocracy alone is neither inherently socially unjust or inherently socially just.
Basically if SAT is your sole criterion then you become Caltech. Caltech is a great school but there are other human phenotypes that would like to go to college and other universities to accommodate them.
What a coincidence - when the supreme court said point-based race discrimination was illegal but discrimination in holistic systems was legal, colleges immediately switched to holistic admissions.
When you say "holistic" admissions, I'm not sure whether you mean holistic in the sense that colleges use it (i.e. taking evidence of talent outside of grades and test scores into account) or as a reference to programs which take race or class into account. Either way, you present standardized tests as the more meritocratic approach, which is silly. A perfect SAT score means a student is great at basic math, reading, and writing in an extremely specific context. That can be an extremely useful foundation, but do you honestly think that indicates this student is the "best?" That someone with lower scores who has published a bestselling book or won an international science prize or started a great humanitarian effort is on a lower tier in the meritocracy? Of course, all of these things are biased even more heavily towards rich students, but that's why class and background must also be taken into account.
I suspect I may have misunderstood parts of what you were saying, so please do clarify (if you can make it through my little word dump :P).