Ivy League college admissions

They don't want the best students. They want the best graduates. The two require quite different admissions policies.

Being a smart child isn’t a terribly good predictor of success in later life, they conclude. “Non-intellective” factors—like motivation and social skills—probably matter more...It is a wonderful thing, of course, for a school to turn out lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. But Harvard didn’t want lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. It wanted superstars...

It's a lot like branding a product. Malcolm Gladwell wrote about it in The New Yorker.

Thanks to ArtsJournal for the lead.