Abeles calls out those who are complicit in maintaining the current system: colleges that compete for rankings based on how many students apply, which makes admission rates low and encourages students to distinguish themselves with higher test scores and more AP classes rather than mastery or purpose

Children, sit down and let me tell you a story. It's a horror story. It's a story of the behind-the-scenes bullshit that happens at Ivy league-level institutions.

Hypothetically.

Through my association with an individual who worked in the admissions office of one of the most prestigious post-graduate programs in the country, I saw exactly what the above paragraph referred to. Gaming college admissions volume is real, and since there are so many quantitative metrics associated with the applications process, a human being may never see your application. Even though a school will accept your application for $50-$75 dollars, and without expressly providing a minimum GPA or SAT or ACT scores, they will applicants by those scores. Anyone below perfection, generally doesn't even get seen by human eyes.

The caveat to this, at least from what I could see, is if you are one of the very first applicants in the process, before the pressure of catching up with the metric ton of applicants is made real to the reviewers.

The reviewers in this school were the faculty; and they, by dint of both their education in this prestigious, ego-driven profession and their position as teachers at an Ivy league-level university, both rejected and reveled in their part of the admissions process. The revelry was based in their opportunity to pontificate at great length during admissions meetings, where individual students are discussed.

If you happen to catch the ideological fancy of one of the reviewers during this early process, your odds of overcoming a not-perfect GPA or SAT or AP scores were significantly better.

There are so many qualified, hard-working, merit-based people who are rejected from this school because the process is so uneven, so inconsistent, and these students believe they weren't good enough to get in. When in fact, it's the fact that the school has so many applications that are processed unmanageably for the volume, with few actual seats available to award.

But are they happy to take your money? Of course. Are they thrilled that their U.S. News & World Report college ranking is effected positively? Absolutely. Are they even aware of how utterly unmethodical and ineffective this process is while requiring near-methodical perfection from their applicants, most of whom will not be accepted? File that under "nope". Anyone involved see the hypocrisy? Negative.

And what is left for the people who are rejected? The reviewers, when aware of the student, console themselves with the idea that other Ivy league or near-Ivy league-level institutions will accept them, without any concept of the systemic toxicity of the admissions process.

Hypothetically speaking.