Ideally, high quality education would be democratized and made accessible to anyone who want it regardless of their means to pay.
It pretty much is. Hardvard undergraduate classes aren’t substantially higher quality than at many other state schools.
It seems like you based what you said on some vague notion of prestige, but if you look at the courses offered/required, the topics covered, and the books used of any of the schools I listed, you’ll see it’s effectively the same education as Harvard and the rest.
Unless you think there’s something magical about the professors at Harvard that enables them to teach undergraduate classes far better than professors at state schools, there’s no reason to assume the classes are any higher quality.
We already have that for the most part, I can find courses from half a dozen of the worlds best universities online for free right now.
I'd argue that college ceased being primarily about education a long time ago. College in my humble opinion is:
• Place to rub shoulders with elites (mostly only applies at Ivies, or at prominent schools within certain niches probably)
• Proving you have sufficient grit and responsibility to endure adversity and get things done - or more accurately, some in society are willing to use it as a decent filter to exclude those who are lazy and unmotivated. Notably, this has a high false-negative rate, meaning lots of hardworking, motivated people don't attend or graduate from college due to money, time, cultural expectations of their social group, etc.
• Least important: A filter to exclude people who apparently can't be taught. Has the same false negative problem, some fall through here because their schooling sucked and they didn't learn how to learn.
Only that first aspect is really related to whether minorities need a boost or legacies need to be brought to an even playing field. Education itself is easy to get at many schools, and is often better than these fancy 'research schools.'
For sure, there are ton of folks who self taught themselves programming and other skills, which seems to occur mostly be an accident.
There's also the time component. You can learn a lot really fast if you can spend a year without needing to be paid, which is really not possible to achieve unless you're already wealthy.