Acceptance into anything, beyond a table-stakes requirement of merit, is essentially a lottery. You work your ass off, you get an interview, your luck of the draw is someone having a bad day, is otherwise biased against you, or any number of other issues. It's naive to think that the people interviewing you are doing so solely on the grounds of your achievements on paper. This is true regardless of whether you're interviewing for an academic program, for a job, for a sale, for an investment...

Society can either do the healthy thing and accept this and embrace it (won't happen, because it's not "fair"), or not, and make the inherent lottery explicit.