> legacy admissions
Parents who donate a lot of money to a college will expect preferential admissions treatment for their offspring. Colleges certainly know this, and they want the money.
Parents who donate a lot of money to a college will expect preferential admissions treatment for their offspring. Colleges certainly know this, and they want the money.
We should be optimizing for maximum utility not dubious concepts such as fairness.
Other systems are possible, but they have other tradeoffs. You can for instance pay for everything out of taxes, but this means putting those in control of the tax system in charge, and they have their own interests. The extreme of this was the USSR, and it did great science in some areas. But was far from paradise.