How would you change the incentives to make what you described less viable?
It’s too many trying to get into too few colleges. We need more, smaller universities. Federal funds/grants should be reoriented away from the Ivies. Zero Federal funds for schools that don’t have lower than 30:1 class sizes. That would stop admin bloat overnight.
The Musks, Gates and Bezos’ of the world should be building new colleges, not dumping more into the olds.
Ivies don’t need fed funds - they play a different game since the underlying markets tend to be asymptotic - the upper end of students, the upper end of professors, the upper end of athletes, the upper end of wealthy legacies.
Fund those with few resources or create new ones away from the Ivies. You can’t democratize the Ivies but you can give a lot more people a better education. The status quo is that the Ivies have their cake and eat it too.
> full $41.59 billion of the Ivy League’s money could be traced back to taxpayer-funded payments and benefits.
Traces back.
So part of it is tax breaks to educational institutions- which is natural, they have the biggest endowments combined so the tax benefits will be massive.
They point out that major research happens at these institutions so they have more money from that as well.
This meshes less with the “have their cake and eat it too” line of thinking and more a result of the distortions from reputation and network effects.
Rich whites were less threatened when they could game the system, but once Asian Americans began to become overly represented per capita academically and Affirmative Action lawsuits on descrimination against Asians began working up the courts... problem solved now.
There’s no outright conspiracy, these people know their position and what’s best for them. They’re probably not bad people but they’re not going to give away what they’ve got.