Plenty of people make donations for reasons of prestige, legacy and even genuine care, which have nothing to do with making sure their kid gets into a certain school.
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.