> Cherry picking your one Anthony per school is likely harder than showing up to Stanford where they picked cherries 4 years ago.

An interesting idea: pulling from state schools isn't a problem because they're short on talent, it's a problem because recruiters and interviewers are bad at identifying talent.

Colleges get a transcript, SATs, and essays to make a decision on, then do four years of further sorting. That's far from perfect, but given the track record of job interviews (stunningly poor), picking the best state candidates may not just be time-consuming but basically impossible.

If you simply can't tell who's good, then outsourcing that decision becomes an obvious choice.