I will take your word on that. I don't socialize with Harvard grads. I don't even know anyone who attended Harvard.
Hard to believe that they get the best students in the world and need to give them easy 4.0 grade inflation.
They get
some of the best students in the world. Others get admitted with far lesser credentials because of other things (donor parents, athletics although they technically do not offer athletic scholarships) and immutable characteristics. Also, '20-'25 - which will go down in history as the peak of this - and other - nonsense - Harvard did not require standardized test scores. With grade inflation at the prep level, you have multiple students in each school with perfect GPAs (some of whom are not necessarily the best and brightest) and Harvard already leaning towards admitting based on immutable characteristics, and you get more students at elite universities who aren't "the best in the world".
Harvard, and many other elite institutions, went back to requiring standardized test scores just this year, because it is freaking obvious that they are the best predictor of academic success in higher education. Anecdotally, I do/have worked with countless Harvard (Ivy, Stanford, Chicago, JHU, etc.) alums over the last 25yrs as I have been in healthcare/clinical research and academia. Of course some of them are brilliant, but it's a crapshoot just like anything else. A LOT of them were not the sharpest, but were legacies and/or athletes. And then there is my sister, who went to Brown. She wouldn't even have gotten into any UC on her academic credentials, but she got into an Ivy to play water polo (although, again, technically they do not offer athletic scholarships). Her skin color and coming from an inner city title 1 school certainly didn't hurt. I also attended one of the top universities in the country for undergrad, but my grades/standardized test scores (and immutable characteristics) were irrelevant because of football. I too am a moron who went to an "elite" school.