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I thought by "pay-to-play" you were going to point out the other opportunities to use money to perpetuate social stratification. It's not just "endow-a-chair" levels of wealth that improve the odds, it's also:

- Live in a rich metro area? Now you have access to things like internships & research opportunities not available in low-SES areas.

- Parents have high-status jobs? Now you have access to experiences offered by your parents' friends and colleagues, for example, to do research at a local university lab if your parents are professors.

- Don't have to work summers? Now you can take a "finding yourself" trip or volunteer to build housing in Africa or whatever it is these days.

It's much easier to engage in extracurriculars that show how great/community-oriented/socially-conscious/talented at music/sports/research/debate/whatever you are when you grow up in an upper- or upper-middle-class family in a wealthy-enough neighborhood to parents with strong social and professional networks.

This is the social stratification that's perpetuated by elite school admissions processes, it's the top-20%, not the top-1%. It's not any less dangerous, and in fact may be more so -- and the income numbers alone don't tell the full story.

Lastly -- those wealthy enough to endow a chair don't need Harvard to perpetuate social stratification, they will simply inherit enough wealth to do so!

It's my impression that the admissions officers (AOs) at these T10 universities are smart and don't care too much "self-discovery" trips to Africa which the applicants' parents have clearly paid for. Volunteer work in general is not good ROI for admissions.

That said, I think AOs do put too much emphasis on research/publications. In my opinion, being able to do research in high school usually means that your parents have connections to whatever labs nearby -- and students do menial work to just get their names on a paper. There are high school students who do conduct groundbreaking, impactful research, but they are much rarer.

like 15-20% of Harvard admits come from top 1% of household income. I think like 35-40% come from households making more than 300k.

Indeed: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/1/25/harvard-income-...

A lottery will never happen as you laid out here. Not because it’s not a good idea but because it tarnishes the pedigree of the school. Being selected to attend Harvard and winning the lottery among those qualified to attend are so vastly different in the mind’s eye that there’s no way they’d take up this system.

Fundamentally, it risks their brand.

I think the real answer may still be the open sourcing of curriculum and teaching through online courses. Completing an education at Harvard should be inherently valuable whether or not you were selected for it. This is meritocratic but also realistic, I think.

The (magnet) elementary school I attended used a lottery to select among the top X% of applicants. It did not "tarnish the pedigree of the school" or anything like that.

There is already a lottery to select which students among the thousands who apply will be offered admission. It's just not uniformly random.

You can't compare the reputation of a local elementary school versus Harvard.

There are pre-schools in NYC that have tuition comparable to the Harvard ones.

The only thing it'll tarnish is Harvard's reputation for accepting the children of the elite.

The education doesn't matter as much as the pedigree. At some point we're defeating the point of the elite schools.

> The reason this won't change, though, is the primary purpose of today's elite universities is to maintain social stratification. If universities did the fair thing and had a lottery for all qualified applicants, it would mean they would have to admit that they are not the objective arbiters of "potential" they purport to be.

This is incorrect, and risks imbuing agency to a thing that is really much dumber than that. Nobody is trying to maintain social stratification. The reason for the byzantine admissions system is that the universities are trying to maintain their own stratification. Harvard is Harvard because it's hard to get in, and the people who go to Harvard tend to get high status jobs, like President of the United States. Harvard has the admissions process that it does, precisely because it wants to maintain its own image, and for no other reason.

If they care about helping rich people or educating students, those things are ancillary to the prime directive: maintaining their brand. This is the axis around which all such decisions revolve.

> For example, Harvard could fill its undergrad ranks with valedictorians alone, twice over.

I think this is a valid argument overall but all valedictorians aren't made the same. My alma mater isn't high tier at all (NC State) but a huge chunk of my entry class was valedictorians...from tiny rural high schools with a graduating class of 50 (mine was a suburban high school with a graduating class of 40).

> the primary purpose of today's elite universities is to maintain social stratification

I think that this is their prerogative. But society should change, not the same ~10 universities.

> I think that this is their prerogative.

If that's their prerogative, then they should come out and say it instead of pretending it's not true. Also, shouldn't we as a society at large take a better look at whether Federal funding is best used to maintain social classes?

nobody who goes through the process believes it to be a true meritocracy

colleges make it very clear that there are certain factors that weigh heavily. one of the legal factors is race. one of the unspoken factors is having donor parents/alum. now we know that another factor is direct bribes to admissions staff, which one could have guessed was happening under the table already

everyone who applies wants to be in that club with, not the smartest or most “meritful”, but the most powerful families/children (sometimes the same, often not) - and why isn’t family money considered a merit?

many of these colleges are businesses/hedge funds and they are looking to increase their AUM and ROI. I agree that advertising this core business as a meritocracy seeking to educate the brightest is false advertising

Professor Alan Dershowitz addresses this issue.[1] He thinks that this is just "the tip of the iceberg" and that we shall find many other "mini scandals" at other colleges and universities. He also briefly comments on grade inflation at elite universities and the practice of giving athletes an unfair edge in the admissions process.

[1] Alan Dershowitz reacts to the college admissions scam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Auvd9daACGg

It sounds that the admission officers have never tried to backup 40Mb of files onto 1.2M or 720K floppy disks.

It is very easy: just keep increasing the minimum cut off point. If you have N spots and 2xN people met the admission requirements, you simply bump up the admission requirements until for the N spots there are only M candidates where M < N. Now you have (N-M) spots and 2xN-M candidates. So you relax the admission requirements until the spots are filled. If at any point you have more people that fill the requirements than you need to fill you repeat the process for the new N.

Or you could do a tennis tournament ( if you have more than 2x applicants). Randomly pick two applications. Compare them head to head. The winner goes to the next round. The loser goes to the 2nd pile. When the total number of the people in a round is less than the number of the spots, everyone in the round gets accepted. Now we repeat the same path for the second pile, etc.

So the question is what is the feasibility of (a) drastically increase the size of the incoming class in. What happens if Harvard leaned into managed, sustainable growth. At least grow at a rate so that selectivity levels and incoming achievement levels are maintained at historical levels versus getting twice as hard to get in every decade. Why not start a Harvard in Silicon Valley and double the campus and double the power of the Harvard network? That said, I think the key is not to try to double the number of students at an existing campus but instead create a similar physically distinct second campus.

Here's how Wharton is using its SF campus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbdxG3kAfCU