Our best universities involve a symbiosis between the bright and the rich. They're famous for the talents of the brightest, which achieve their full extent because the rich paid... to be around this fame. This has, for a few centuries, been quite a productive system.

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.

Donating $5 million to get one kid into an university allows a new lab to be built. Or more scholarships to be offered for lower income students. Or better quality of life overall for the students on the campus. It feels slimy and unfair in that someone can just buy their way into college, but unless we start funding colleges in a much more sustainable way in the US, I'm okay with donation based admissions.

When a parent donates 1 million dollars to a school with the expectation that their child will gain admission and that 1 million dollars allows the school enough resources to bring on 5 more students than they expected does it really matter?

We should be optimizing for maximum utility not dubious concepts such as fairness.

Many times those colleges are great because of those donations... So maybe it is fair... Perspective

Colleges are also likely to publicly insist they don't do legacy and donation based admissions, but do it anyway. For Rodney Dangerfield's hilarious lampoon of this, see the movie "Back to School".

Who are you to decide what's fair?