At least donating a building gives value to the other attending students that far outweighs the cost of their child going
[1] There are lots of scholarships, grants and other things out there, many go to people who don't need them and there are issues with the system both on that end and with regards to the cost for an education - please ignore those and just focus on the concept of financial aide to an intelligent driven student who genuinely needs it to pay fair value to get an education in terms of reimbursing all expenses given to give this student an education and nothing else.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-01/first-par...
https://iovine-young.usc.edu/about/index.html https://variety.com/2019/music/news/dr-dre-usc-daughters-twe...
Without the first (in aggregate, over generations), the others don't even have the option.
Education is absolutely worth the cost and the need to charity is highlighting the underfunding here[1].
[1] Also, the inefficient use of money, higher education is absolutely guilty of inefficient operation with lots of cushy bureaucrat jobs, but imagine we could make higher education efficient and it still required an additional injection of cash via charitable donations.
This could apply to literally everything in the world, forever.
Unless 1,000 trillion dollars per year is being spent on education, then that educational system would benefit from more charity.
More charity is basically always good.
Nobody at all loses from this. More money gets spent on the university, and this money more than pays for the cost of the student. This allows even more students to benefit from this.
Why should we sacrifice the education of 10 kids, just to stop 1 rich kid from going to a top college?
Whoops, you got that backwards. If a system is dependent on compulsory taxes, it isn’t supported. If nobody cares to voluntarily donate to it or pay for services on their own, then it’s not something really valued by society.
That does not mean admissions would be oligarchic in its entirety. It would not have to affect the "meritocracy" by which the remaining seats are won. Being willing to accept profoundly large donations in exchange for a seat is not the same as turning the whole admissions process into an auction. There are not enough people willing to give such donations for a seat.
Or, maybe a slightly more cynical take? Look at the parental wealth distribution of private colleges, and you'll notice that it already is "oligarchic." I mean in the sense that children of relatively wealthy parents are by far more likely to make the cut to get in in the first place.
It's much easier to say that they'll give a spot only when the donation far exceeds the cost of a seat. That way you don't need any complicated machinery. The exact limit may not even be written down anywhere. It might just be a sort of "I'll know it when I see it," sort of deal, since the number of seats given this way per year should be fairly small, even at a university as famed as Harvard.
Of course, we don't actually know that any of this is happening at all. It's just a cynical presumption, as far as I can tell. All I'm saying is that it would be reasonable if it were done this way, at least from the perspective of all stakeholders who have a say in the matter.
Even if education is publicly funded, allowing these "bribes" would allow even more people into elite institutions.
So by all means, fund stuff. Unless you are willing to spend infinity dollars, it is all better to allow even more funding to come in, and pay for people who wouldn't have been able to attend those institutions otherwise.
I think it would be very interesting to see a plot of the number of buildings named for the donor + how many children of donors were admitted in exchange for these buildings. I would expect that schools can get all the endowment they need without trading admission for it. Anyone seriously trading a building for a spot in the school is not making a trade in the best interest of the school, they are playing favorites to keep particular donors happy. But wouldn't the school be better off as a whole, to stand with integrity, without the cloud of corrupt donors?
I’m happy these parents are being prosecuted, but I don’t think there were any tragedies here.