What Trump Gets Right about Harvard – POLITICO

But that s not the whole story. Another line of attack is about access. It s about who gets to be part of the elite, and whether America has gotten a fair return on the massive investment that it has made in elite colleges. For, difficult as this might be for liberals to hear, almost everything Trump said to the crowd Bobby Knight had warmed up was true.

I ve gotten increasingly incensed at the inequality in American higher ed, another critic of the private college tax exemption told NPR s Scott Simon in 2015. There s a handful of schools that just have too much money. You just have to walk through the Yale campus to see what money will buy you, which is a country club, right? Simon s guest explained that endowments weren t inherently bad they could transform underfunded schools. It s one thing if a school has an endowment of $500 million that they are stretching a million different ways to meet the needs of its students, to say that as a society, we should allow them to escape taxes so they can spend their money on education, he said. But that logic does not hold when you ve got $35 billion in the bank, as Harvard does. (Today it s $53 billion.) I think they have to stand up and say, at the very least, We do not deserve to have tax-exempt status for our endowments.

via www.politico.com

I wouldn’t be so pissed off at my alma maters and other Ivies if they admitted kids based on merit, but they don’t. There’s affirmative action, of course, but beyond that, there’s so many “legacy admits,” basically rich kids, and athletic admits, that Harvard for example, admits only one out of three in its freshman class based merely on merit. This according to what I consider a reliable source. One out of three! If you get one those “Why not Harvard?” letters smarming to get you to pay their extravagant application fees, I would just ignore it, unless the fifty bucks or whatever it is these days means nothing to you. It would be different if it were based on merit. Then the 800/800/800 (or however they measure it these days) from Podunk, Iowa would have the same shot as the son of a Harvard alum at Exeter who gets grade-inflated A’s and substantially lower SATs. But nah. That’s not how they roll. Now the SAT is passe. It’s hard to construct an aptitude test that does not measure aptitude, even a little bit. UC Berkeley seems to play it more straight relatively speaking. So that’s what we did. It was far from perfect. But if you’re rich enough, and you want to give your kids a shot at the bottom rung of the elite professional ladder, probably one of the Ivies is worth it, if you can live with yourself and if your kid can get in. When civilizations decay, as Francis Fukuyama explains, this is one of the things that happens — Elites get chosen by connections rather than merit. We have advanced well down that path, which does not end well.

The UK used to handle this stuff with way more integrity. Dons got in trouble for the slightest breaches of the rules, things that over here were routine. But they seem to be decaying now as the US started to in the 80s and 90s.