SATs are everything.
Obviously SATs and grades are important, but I can't agree completely.
America's top educational institutions view themselves as having a product — a way of thinking about the world through education — that can influence society for good. They want to admit students with promise who can use that education for the best purposes possible.
Let's forget liberal arts or social science careers for a minute.
Let's say you are an admission officer making a decision on admitting students to a business degree program. You have two applicants:
1) a brainy kid from an upper-class family in an east coast state who loves video games and has high SAT scores but never did anything in his high school life to indicate any particular ambitions in life beyond going back to work for and eventually inherit his father's small business, or
2) a smart but non-genius kid with somewhat lower test scores who is from an inner-city background, worked in high school in his immigrant father's small restaurant, and has a goal in life of starting his own business and then serving as a model helping inner-city residents learn to start their own businesses.
Many conservatives, even those who would never support racial preferences, will say they'd work extra hard to get the second student to enroll in a good conservative college with a solid business program and a philosophy of free enterprise, and they'd be right to do so. The first student is probably going to do okay no matter what school he goes to. The second student might very well get sucked into a liberal college that would harm him, or at least not help him.
Liberal admissions officers at elite schools also work harder with some students than others, and that is entirely appropriate when dealing with the upper levels of education where not every good student who wants to get in can realistically be admitted.