Of course, starting your own NPO shows a laudable amount of community service as well as "leadership" so there is that. Really a lot of bang for the buck there.
There is a surfeit of students who can do the academic work at the Ivies. If you accept students entirely according to an academic index derived from high school grades and test scores, applicants will obsess even more over those measures. If you give points for starting a business or an NGO or publishing scientific research, you encourage effort in those areas. Some of the accomplishments will be phony, but some will be real. Overall I think Ivy admissions should be more academically focused, but there are trade-offs to doing so, and the prestige and ever-increasing wealth of Harvard et al. suggest that these institutions know what they are doing.
If you assume that people are self-interested and will try to game any system created, you will not despair and burrow under a scrap heap.
