BTW- There are a fair number of studies out there suggesting that students who are admitted to top-tier schools but don't go have no effect on longer term outcomes than those who do, so other than short term disappointment it might be a null effect.
Meanwhile, universal pre-k enables families (ane espicially mothers) the ability to return to their own work/careers faster and has been shown to improve long term academic success (although their is some question to scalability).
So between the two, universial pre-k seems like a far more important issue...
In some cases, their parents having gone to the school is the only reason they got in. A lot of schools athletics programs are in similar situations as well.
We should eliminate government support for Harvard like tax breaks, subsidized loans and grants.
Harvard is a hedge fund with a school attached. They should be taxed like one.
I think this is no different from what Harvard has been accused of with their race-conscious admissions where it seems harder for Asian students to get in than White, Black and Latino students. While practices of admittance that include anything other than merit are unfair for the individual student, this makes sense for the university to build its own image for prospective students, and its image for employers looking to recruit college grads. Students don't want to go to schools that don't have diversity and employers are looking for diversity.
University is not just about the academic lessons taught inside the classroom, or building a qualification for a career. Some of the most important lessons are taught between and outside the classroom like the social skills required to build study groups or the management skills to be in the leadership of a club. There are also meta-social learning in the abilities to socialize with people from different backgrounds in various levels of formality.
Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School by Shamus Rahman Khan talks about how in prestigious college prep schools, students learn similar social traits from an environment that shapes them into what is received as a successful elite student.
As far as the educational system goes, I could care less about how the most elite schools go about admissions because it effects such a small amount of the population, and degrees only affect the first job of your career except if you are trying to get into med school or law school. What's more important to me is the failure of the public educational system to provide literacy when teachers are taught to use methods that harm the ability to learn phonics. https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/02/12/582465905/the-gap... What is also important to me is the impact of one bad teacher to ruin a child's belief that they can learn math or a learn a new language or music or just their own self esteem. One of the biggest problems in American schooling is that when a teacher fails accreditation to teach high school or middle school, they generally are able to teach elementary school. Teachers that do not know how to teach a given subject should not be put in front of students at more formative years where damage to an academic self-image can be more significant and impactful.
Ideally a college education would not be required for most of the workforce. Sadly our standards for a k-12 education have fallen due to a lack of care to find how to best teach students and a working environment for teachers that does not attract teaching talent or understanding of how to teach, and allows for mediocrity. There are great teachers in the system, but many of them are burning out due to long hours of teaching, grading, and re-accreditation and low pay.