Lots of policies are easier to make when you have cash. The flip side of being forced to spend down the endowment is an increasing focus on the short term. For an institution that's supposed to have some insulation from whichever way the wind is blowing today, that's not such a good thing.

$20B is much more than "some insulation."

Also helps that they only accept a small proportion of such students.

It's clearly a token effort at disguising their elitist admissions procress. If they let in too many poor people the rich wouldn't send their chilren there. The whole point of these Ivy League schools is to prove membership in the club of the elite.

Admission to all the Ivy League schools is need blind, so I don't think letting in too many poor people is a big concern for them.

When I was in grad school at an Ivy League university in the early 80s, it was reported in the school paper that about 50% of undergraduates were legacies.

Has that changed?

Yes. It was far easier to get into college in the '80s, in part because far fewer bothered to attend; this resulted in more legacies then than now (I believe the percentage of legacies at Harvard is in the single digits).

According to this article, 16% of the Harvard class of 2019 are legacies: http://features.thecrimson.com/2015/freshman-survey/makeup-n... (The survey was voluntary, and there is no mention of the percentage response. Apparently Harvard does not publish the actual number of legacies.)

So yes, things are better than in my day. I would say that the number of people who would not have bothered to attend Harvard in the 80's was very small indeed.

You don't need to come up with a conspiracy here. Ivy League schools simply don't care about providing as many people as possible with a good education.

The goal is rather to be the best in research, education and in the experience of studying for the people that do attend. They achieve that goal by significantly limiting how many people are allowed to attend, especially poor students that take money away from the school.

If you really want to help poor people, ignore what the rich are doing, ignore inequality and identify who those poor people are, what problems they have and fix them. That will be far more beneficial than attacking the "elites".

Source?

The Revisionist History podcast has two great episodes on the subject.

http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/05-food-fight

http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-...

Revisionist History is Malcolm Gladwell's podcast, not a reliable source for anything.

https://www.boston.com/news/education/2016/07/15/bowdoin-col...

Every podcast is someones podcast, that doesn't mean anything nor does it make podcasts in general or this podcast specifically unreliable.

Additionally this critique is laughable and if anything proves Gladwell's point. It's not about the food, it's about spending money on things that aren't relevant to education. Gladwell could have made the very same podcast and talked about expensive sports programs instead of food.

Maybe Bowdoin isn't wasting money on food and that was a bad example to make. They're still spending a lot of money and not on financial assistance. If they felt confident about what they're spending it on, they would have brought that up and mentioned that they're not spending as much on financial assistance but instead have some large education or research project going on but they're not doing that either. Bowdoin is wasting money and they clearly know it or they would have responded differently.