You have a point, it's about the priorities, and different choices or distributions can be made. Though, I still think knowing just a small amount of information about a person should not have such a high monetary value and banking has a lot of blame on this.
It's also about the number of applications being made across the campus, so I don't know how much a handful of people can review or improve things. Every department and school has multiple applications written by students or enthusiastic faculty members, or purchased from various vendors.
Seeing an environment like this, one could quickly assume, somehow correctly, they're just hired to be the neck to hang, and not make much changes.