Considering "they paid a lot so we let them in" is perfectly valid and legal selection criteria at private schools and universities, I fail to see how legislation like this is going to matter.
More prestigious private universities use a lot of government funding to fund widely cited research which is what makes them prestigious.
One can reasonably argue that such protected categories are necessary for a just and fair society, but let's be clear about what it is we're advocating.
Just a correction, the unversities are NOT the ones that apply for, and receive funding from e.g. the NIH.
It is individual researchers that apply, and receive, funding. And this money goes towards their salary and research. No funding, no salary, no reseacher.
Universities don't themselves receive government funding.
Each university has its own F&A rate, which can be as much as 60% of received federal funds [2]. This rate has historically trended upward.
An example of funds allocation for a typical small NSF grant: https://austinhenley.com/blog/grantbudget.html
[1] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED517263.pdf
[2] https://financeandbusiness.ucdavis.edu/finance/costing-polic...
This is one reason I'm leaving academia – if I raise money outside of academia, I actually get to keep it.
now... when it is "they paid a lot so we gave them a degree" that is when you have a problem.
No.
Being able to pay tuition and all the other expenses is necessary but not sufficient to gain admittance.
My preference for admission is a lottery system. Have the school set the bar for admission (which can still contain some qualitative criteria) and then after that, it's a lottery for all that exceed that threshold.
Set the bar for admission as you described. Have two options for admissions for those who meet the bar. You can choose one and only one of the two systems per admissions cycle.
Option 1: Lottery. Every student is entered into a drawing.
Option 2: Auction. The highest bidders get admitted.
The proportion of slots available for auction or lottery is the same as the proportion of students choosing auction vs lottery.
This allows the rich to buy their way into the school while keeping the majority of the slots available for everyone without extreme wealth.
Now I know what you are thinking, "why should the rich get to buy their way in?" To which I reply, why not? We only sell a small percentage of the slots, only to otherwise qualified applicants, and only to the highest bidders (meaning they necessarily overpay per the winners curse).
One of the important functions of the current university system is to cherry-pick the smartest, most charismatic, most driven, and most ambitious poor children and give them a seat at the table, indoctrinating them in the ways of the well-to-do and providing them opportunities within polite society. Basically, take anyone who rolled an 18 on one of their D&D attribute scores and make them a lord. By doing this, you decapitate the leadership of any potential revolution. Anyone who has enough charisma, intelligence, ambition to organize the poors into a movement that actually has a chance of success instead has a much easier pathway of going to university, getting a degree and a middle-class job, and enjoying a comfortable existence without the risk of being killed in the revolution. Keep your friends close and your (potential) enemies closer.
Pure lottery admissions doesn't have this property. The biggest threat is that you miss someone talented, who then gets pissed off and overthrows the system. You want to have humans looking over the application packets of everybody, and you want lots of competing admissions departments so that if one of them screws up, that person gets snatched up by another university.
It's not only money. It's a American way to have a class system.
Donor admissions. I’ve literally heard Hamptons parents timing pregnancies to not overlap with billionaires’ kids, the theory being a million can buy a seat in an “off” year that would cost far more in an “on.”
Legacy admissions take 10 to 25 percent of all admissions.
What are you basing this being BS on?
Harvard takes about 2,000 kids a year. The Dean's or director's list is about 200 of those [1]. If a few more kids come from families giving tens of millions, that will absolutely reduce the odds of a family giving high hundreds of thousands making the cut.
[1] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/18/day-three-harv...
Wow, 99% auction again this year, what a coincidence.
a) increase the number of people admitted.
b) increase the bar for admissions so that it matches the admissions.
Private Ivy League's are massive hedge funds that artificially limit admissions.
For example, Harvard takes 1200 per year, receives 50,000 applications. Harvard could easily increase the number of admissions to 10 - 15 thousand and tighten admission criteria little bit.
That means that a high-achieving student with uneducated parents will get rejected, while a low-performing student with a parent who is an alumni still gets admitted.
This, for an institution that is accredited by the state, that offers credentials that are widely treated as societal merit, represents a profound form of economic discrimination. It also completely destroys any illusion that the college's application process is meritocratic, which is a fundamental assumption of the system at large.
This system in inherently racist, because there are plenty of kids getting admitted because their parents or grandparents are alumni. That means that white kids are getting an easy entry to an elite school because their white parents or grandparents, who were born before the end of segregation, attended and graduated from that school before Black Americans were even allowed to enroll.
With our extremist SCOTUS now stripping Black Americans of the benefit of Affirmative Action, the only measure that actively leveled the playing field, tearing down this discriminatory system is more important than ever. Especially since these elite schools largely require familial elitism and socioeconomic superiority to qualify for admission, leading to the demographics of students at these schools to sway far whiter than the general college-attending population (because Black people are actively being discriminated against because of the nature of their familial history).
(b)(1) "'Donor preference in admissions' means considering an applicant’s relation to a donor of, or a donation to, the independent institution of higher education as a factor in the admissions process, including asking an applicant to indicate their family’s donor status and including that information among the documents that the independent institution of higher education uses to consider an applicant for admission.
...
(c) Commencing September 1, 2025, an independent institution of higher education shall not provide a legacy preference or donor preference in admissions to an applicant as part of the regular or early action admissions process."
§ 66018.4(b) and (c) of the California Education Code, as amended today