This.

A guy donates an engineering complex, and every engineering student on that campus gets to take advantage of said complex and its resources. Guy donates a new business school building and every student on that campus can take advantage of said building and its resources. In exchange, the university lets in two girls, their daughters or whatever, who might want to major in Art History and French, and coincidentally will likely be inheriting a few hundred million to upwards of a billion dollars in the future. (Future donors.)

It's a fair trade. I'm not wealthy on that level, but if I were calling the shots at a university I'd make that trade every time.

Then the university should advertise the cost of admission and make it fair for everyone.

I think it is well known that anyone can donate a building for easy admission. It is no secret, just something available to only the top 0.1%

> It is no secret

It sounds like you agree, then? It should be public.

It is public. Universities almost always include the donation size when they put out press releases about the new building.

It isn't public - none of these universities publicly say, "You can donate 2 million and we'll let your kid in". Which was the amount at Stanford in 2012 (at least based on what someone I met working in admissions told me).

It's left unsaid because it's better for the brand to pretend that this isn't a thing and that just because your parents gave money or because your parents are famous doesn't mean they'll let you in.

But very rarely how many of the donor's family they lowered admission standards for, and by how much.

And usually the building bears the name of the donor!

Often they take the classy move and name it after a relative, often a parent. Harvard's Maxwell-Dworkin building got that name because those are the maiden names of Bill Gates's and Steve Ballmer's moms.

> Then the university should advertise the cost of admission and make it fair for everyone.

if you have to ask for price ... :)

Not sure that would help. New tuiton - $2M and 99% of students get grants of $1.930M

The difference is that today colleges lie about having "need-blind" admissions. Among the Ivies only Brown openly admits that you can buy your way in.

  I were calling the shots at a university
  I'd make that trade every time.

Me too.

But would you be proud enough of the policy to publicise it and your price list?

Because I'd do it, but I'd also be embarrassed I was doing it.

If that's a reasonable proposition within the system, maybe the system is broken?

Also, in the interest of truth-in-advertising, shouldn't the institutions that practice this not have to rename themselves from "university" or "college" to "degree supermarket"?

What? The building is an asset of the university. They can charge more because they have it. It is not a donation to the students.

Oddly sexist example but OK.

if you put a gun to my head and asked me "Rich parents donated 2 million dollars to get their daughter into Harvard, what is her major?" I would say "Arts/Language/Social" every time. If it was a male, i would say "Business/political science" without fail.

Part of the condition for a donation to be tax-deductible is that you claim you didn't get anything in return for your donation.

Donating for improvement that affects others is one thing, but donating for a quid pro quo might affect this.

Why can't a poor kid from Oakland, or wherever, watch the classes online and self-study, and pay a nominal fee to exam?

In other words, is the concept of creating barriers to entry, limiting competition, not unreasonable? In any market, economists say that is anticompetitive, and should even be illegal.

Are people paying for education? Or for epaulets?

So let's talk about this "materially improving things for other students" in an honest context of what this is.

They're paying for epaulets. I took graduate courses at a "local" state university before starting a full-time program at a big-name-top-low-number private school. The private school was not a better education, but it was undoubtedly better for my career because of the "epaulets."

>watch the classes online and self-study, and pay a nominal fee to exam?

We are already far past the point on using exam scores as a basis for admissions. Many of the Ivies, famously say every year that they could fill their incoming class with students with perfect scores and perfect GPAs many times over forcing these schools to consider other factors. The US DoE says there are 16.9m undergrads, assuming ~4m are freshmen, the top 1% is 40,000 students. The Harvard freshman class size is 2000 students. At this point its only natural, according to the "market", that people would be paying for slots.

The tax question here is what is the fair value of the benefit received, the waiving of admission requirements or the granting of admission. I would expect that to be pretty hard to put a dollar amount on.

Some of these schools have endowments so large that no amount of donating to them will move the needle. They don't need more money: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/malcolm-gladwell-revisi...

This is so true but greed enables them to take and take and take. I find this so hypocritical, these universities are shaping the future educating the next generation of leaders and already have more than what they need with their exorbitant fees.. it seems like there's no limit to this as long as there is supply, there is demand.

It provides them the opportunity to network with a young, impressionable kid whose parents can afford to throw $15k into a toilet and flush.

If you believe the primary purpose of a university is to educate and certify, that is indeed "not much". But if you believe that the education is secondary, and the actual primary purpose is to cultivate a social network of influential graduates and dropouts, and to act as gatekeeper to future opportunities, then that bribe is better than a perfect SAT score.

That kid will end up with seed money or angel investments from mommy and daddy, and will be able to hire some former classmates right out of the gate, and they might build a unicorn, which will forever be tagged with "founded and built by a team of University X graduates".

In that sense, no one is robbing anybody of a spot. There are genius spots, and rich idiot spots, and the only problem is getting a few from each pile into the same rooms, with a reason to talk about their futures. One way is to coerce the rich kid into studying (or cheating) their coursework by paying off the genius kid. Management training.

Also, a bribe goes into one person's pocket.

Buying a basketball team and hiring a coach in order to win is legal. Paying one player to lose a game is not legal.

This is precisely not the reason there's a distinction. The problem is that the $15,000 bribe went to the pockets of someone who was subverting the process (mainly the coaches), robbing the university.