Why admissions at elite colleges aren’t really about merit

More than 500,000 students who are in the top half of their high school class never get a college degree or complete a certificate program, according to an analysis released Wednesday by Georgetown University’s Center for Education and the Workforce. Those 500,000 students also represent about one-third of students who scored 1000 or higher on the SAT, another way of defining top-performing students, it found. More...