It’s elite college admissions season, which means that it’s also the season for elite media handwringing about how stressful it for high school students to compete for the vanishingly small number of spots available in the Ivy League. These concerns are understandable, of course—any young person who has recently gone through this process, or any parent who has watched—knows that it can be agonizing and arbitrary. But most elite commentary on the subject—which imagines that the best way to slow down the rat race is for admissions offices to de-emphasize academic achievement and instead emphasize character traits like kindness and generosity—misses the mark by a rather wide margin. Take the Atlantic‘s recent contribution to this genre, which approvingly cites a college admissions overhaul agenda championed by the admissions deans of the nation’s most selective colleges and administrators at the most elite feeder schools: