But that's really the case either way, it's possible that having known metrics gives an even greater advantage to those who are economically well off as violin tuition gets more expensive due to rising demand.

The most equitable solution would be to base admissions purely on grades but that isn't possible when you have grade inflation, because more people get straight As than there are places at top universities.

It's more than just grade inflation -- in high schools across the united states the quality of courses vary so much as to be incomparable. Suppose you and I are both taking the most advanced English classes our schools offer. If I get an A and you get a B, but you're in a high school with just 300 people in it and I'm in a high school with 3000 people, I have no idea which grade 'means' more.

Theoretically, those grades should "mean" the same, because they should be measures on an absolute scale. What matters ins the quality of the school, which is not directly tied to the number of students at it.

Agreed that the quality of the school is really the fundamental determiner of grades. In the original comment I considered adding in a suggestion that a larger school could support more levels of classes, but it felt clunky so I just left it out. Of course, schools can be good and bad for many reasons orthogonal to their size. A small school might be a magnet school drawing the top students of a larger area. Or it might be a rural area which has a hard time recruiting teachers.

That, and because public school populations aren't nearly homogenous enough. See Canadian schools and UT for examples of grades not doing a good job keeping incoming student quality uniform (and necessitating remedial programs, which have their own issues).

"I'd blame the colleges using these bullshit proxy metrics."

And your alternative to this is? They're metrics for assessing candidates for a reason, you know. Sure, once they start getting gamed, they're no longer accurate, but that's a different discussion.

The metrics are bad even before the gaming. Take volunteer work, for example. In theory, they're selecting for people who show a concern for others. In reality, they emphasize organized, secular volunteer work. So they give points for the sort of stupid, futile service projects upper middle class kids do for photo-ops in Africa, but not points for taking care of aging family members, community involvement through the church, etc.

Moreover, they create a huge bias in favor of kids who can afford to spend their free time doing unpaid work, and against kids that need to work to earn a little extra spending money, or kids that need to help with the family business. We're not even talking about "poor" people here. The people hardest-hit by these policies are first-generation middle class people, who don't stand out with a sob story about how they grew up in poverty, but aren't in a position where they can do volunteer work and also have their parents buy them a car. Emphasizing these factors also creates a bias against immigrants. A lot of first-generation Americans just don't feel comfortable engaging in the community in that way.

I'd say it's part of the same discussion if colleges continue to use metrics after they have been gamed of predictive value and now measure something else.

Blame is not exclusive. In a chain of idiocy, you can point fingers at every idiot.

Hate the player and the game. Without players, there is no game.

I find these admissions games silly too but what process could you use that is ungameable and can filter or rank candidates?

Standardised tests administered in exam conditions.

Admittedly it's not a perfect system, but if the existing system is admission essays written by ghostwriters, I'd say it'd be an improvement.

Most kids still think the SATs are an IQ test. Rich kids know how much you need to prepare and often start years in advance.