Seconding what a lot of people have already said here. This is already how it works at the big state universities. For example, California also has a top % admissions guarantee for in-state applicants to the University of California system (prestigious), based on I think a mix of grades and SAT/ACT test scores; and minimum-grades guaranteed admission to the Cal State University system (mid). The UCs I think also require essays in the admissions packet, mainly just to prove your grades and test scores are real--they're purely a formality as far as I know.
I grew up in California, but I went to school in Michigan, and it was similar there. The top two state schools (University of Michigan and Michigan State University) were required to accept everyone who was above a certain % of in-state applicants. The mid-level state schools (with various regional names) had a minimum-grades requirement and you could optionally supplement your grades with SAT/ACT scores.
But the other thing America has is a whole ecosystem of private colleges/universities--which is interesting because America does not have a lot of private high schools (and where they do exist, they're concentrated in a couple of specific regions). The private colleges/universities make up their admissions criteria from whole cloth and wouldn't hesitate to collectively sue if the government tried to regulate them. The private colleges/universities range from very poor academic standards to schools that are universally considered the best in the country. Some of the worse ones are scams, some are just alternate ways of learning (small classes, individual attention) at the same academic level as the (worse among) the much larger public universities.
But, importantly, going to a top private university opens doors that going to a top public university usually does not. I went to a top private college for undergrad--one most people wouldn't have heard of, but a school that professors from around the country sent their children to. The school I went to semi-OFFICIALLY guaranteed that if you passed their pre-med program you would be accepted into med school somewhere in the US--I have NEVER heard of another college guaranteeing that. The school I went to unofficially guaranteed that, whatever you majored in, you would be accepted into a top-20 doctoral program in that subject, probably top-10. (And I, with mediocre college grades, got into what were at the time the 8th and 11th ranked physics programs; and the 11th-ranked program begged me to go there, literally a professor on the admissions committee told me, during the prospective-students weekend, that their program was excited and honored that I was considering them, and offered me a full fellowship for my first year.) And I went to a college you wouldn't have heard of! (Although the professors on admissions committees obviously had.) Imagine the strings that would have been pulled for me if I'd gone to Harvard or Yale or Princeton--schools that are infamous for this kind of thing. I could have been a senator!
Which is not to say there are no opportunities like that at a place like UC Berkeley or University of Michigan or University of Virginia. If you network just right, join the right frat, or befriend the right professor, sometimes you can get these perks--after all, these are also top schools, there are opportunities there to meet the right people, if you know how. But it's hard and far from guaranteed. There are private schools were any student who doesn't completely fail out or alienate their professors gets all of this--and I know because I went to one and was a mediocre student.
In a country where a large portion of the population doesn't want to raise taxes on the rich because what if they someday become rich, there is no stomach for getting rid of these sorts of programs anyway. These schools reserve a majority of their seats for "merit"* rather than legacy applicants (how much depends on the school, last I remember reading, it was something like 70% merit seats at Harvard, but it can be as much as 99% at some of the smaller schools). Which means you can dream that if your child is perfect enough, they can get a seat. And then once they have a seat at one of these schools, they get all the privilege of having been born rich (I mean... not really, but at least some of it). It's a dream of upward mobility that people will cling to too hard to have much hope of reform.
* (Nevermind that all of these private schools combined only have seats for about ten thousand new students per year, and a lot more than ten thousand kids get perfect grades and perfect test scores each year, especially when grades and test scores effectively be bought by sending kids to test prep and cram schools. A nearly-perfect kid from a poor family will be outmatched by a slightly-above-average kid from a wealthier family that could afford to buy perfection for them, before you even get to the kids who had systemic obstacles to academic success in high school and so whose grades and test scores undersell their potential. And that's not getting into the ineffables that these schools use to distinguish among perfect kids, because there's nowhere near enough room to admit all of them so some ranking of perfection has to be done. The ineffables, of course, are often going to be markers of family privilege; for a simple example, that my parents were both professors, and knew the system, so they could suggest and veto application essay topics; for another simple example, that my parents knew of this college in the first place, that most people have never heard of, that would open doors for me in my next life stage. "Merit" is a very loaded concept in a way that the vast majority of people feel disincentivized to see.)
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