> If you're smart enough to get into an elite university, you don't have to worry about the cost. Full stop.

This presupposes that you are already in a social position that allows your intelligence to be recognised and that puts you in a position to even apply, or know that applying is an option.

I cannot emphasize enough how true this is. Growing up as rural poor, it was an alien concept to me that there were tiers of colleges with different academic specializations. College was just a single monolithic concept to my people. If you were learned real good, and pass that big test, you could be admitted to college just like all those kids who lived closer to town. There was no difference in our minds between the community college 20 minutes away and the public university an hour and a half way. And once you get to the community college and shake off that fog, realize that college is a granular thing, then it is just all you can do to drag yourself up to that state university. Your family has no understanding at all why you would want to move to the state university. Its much further away, harder for you to help out, much more expensive. It just doesn't make any sense within their understanding of the world. Forget about an elite university, its been two years, and you are only now discovering calculus, formal logic, the scientific method. How will you ever compete with the hoards of whites who have been saturated in this world from the beginning?

As one of the "hordes of whites", who grew up in a family of academics - 3 professors amongst my aunts and uncles; and pretty much "everyone" with at least a bachelor and often masters - even then it is not a given that you will consider an elite university.

I never thought about it. I considered ETH Zurich for a while because Niklaus Wirth is a legend in language development, but without any real idea of how it measured up as a school. In the end I stayed in Norway for university. I don't regret it, per se, but understanding the difference more later was a very strong eye opener for me when it comes to how much of social stratification is not really down to money but more broadly background and expectations.

It takes a very specific background before elite universities will even be on your radar, and a subset of that for you to believe it to be possible, and a subset of that for you to see it as the norm and what is expected of you. And then that needs to intersect with the understanding of your family to either pay or put in the effort to look for other ways of getting in.

Some portion of those will not be rich, sure. There are lots of options. Most top universities are good about grants and bursaries. But proportionally, a far larger proportion of children of wealthy families will go to top universities.

And this is a large part (but not all) of what "privilege" is really about: To grow up in an environment that teaches you to expect certain things that is not even on the radar of others.

> If Warren Buffet had his wealth spread amongst millions of families, would each one be willing to give up 90% of that wealth?

This question doesn't make a lot of sense. Of course they wouldn't be, because any middle- or working-class family can actually conceivably spend 90% of their wealth.

Instead of allowing Warren Buffett to accumulate such a large quantity of wealth and relying on his whim to donate that wealth to good causes -- something which most billionaires don't do -- shouldn't we have redistributive mechanisms in place to ensure this money goes to people who can actually use it?

> 2. The winnowing of the middle makes redistribution more palatable.

More palatable? If we accept that the rich are likely to attempt to hold onto their wealth, then why would they not spend much of their significant resources establishing and entrenching policy that does not affect redistribution?

> If you're smart enough to get into an elite university, you don't have to worry about the cost. Full stop.

Absolutely not. Financial aid is dependent on parents' income and wealth, regardless of parents' willingness to actually bankroll said school. The cost is significant, rivaling the average annual gross household income, but worse because you pay high interest rates on top. Don't kid yourself, worrying about the cost dissuades lots of people.

if you're smart enough to get into an elite university, you're smart enough to get a full ride at an upper tier but not elite university.

And if your parents had a high enough income where you had to pay full tuition, then you already enjoyed an upper middle class upbringing.

It's a slight disadvantage and not the difference between going to Harvard and not going to college at all.

> if you're smart enough to get into an elite university, you're smart enough to get a full ride at an upper tier but not elite university.

[citation needed]. Full-ride merit scholarships are quite rare. Here's an article from 2011 that says that only 20K full ride scholarships are awarded annually across the entire US, and only 0.3% of all students get a full ride (either from any individual scholarship or a combination of them). http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-rare-are-full-ride-scholarsh...

It's one thing when a billionaire gives away their money and are able to direct it at the charities they want. It's another thing when it's taxed and coordinated by the government. The United States government has the bias just as you showed-- to help the american people. But most of these tech billionaires recognize that it's imperative that we help all people, regardless of where they were born.

It's why I'd rather give to GiveWell than to my local shelter.

Yes, I personally would prefer to redistribute internationally (and hence that's where all my personal donations go) but from conversations I've recognized that it's politically unpalatable to the vast majority of Americans. The vast majority of people somehow think that their fellow Americans are more deserving than the international poor (and will quite strenuously argue that things like having toys for local kids is more important than literally saving lives).

The nice thing about our tax system is that you can write off donations. So even if we did adopt stronger tax measures, billionaires could still choose to support more effective causes than the government.

Except say you can donate to a nonprofit, write it off, and that non profit can pay your kid an inflated salary to sit on the board. Happening right now to a presidential candidate.