As long as an applicant meets the minimum/lower-end standards for admissions, Ivy League professors in grad schools (law, mba, and PhD-track… not sure about medicine)can and do make by-name requests for admissions that are best not ignored.
Ivy League schools survived for 300 years before a couple decades of the general public thinking that they need Ivy League, due to the corporate sector’s inability to screen a larger working population
Ivy League schools will survive this meme too. Academia as a whole has never adjusted to the underclass’ need to learn for the purpose of making money, they teach irrelevant theory for the sole pursuit of knowledge to this very day
They are for the wealthy to connect with each other and build rapport with each other
The rest of us are just … around
Nobody would accuse Ivy League schools of being bastions of fairness. We all know nepotism & pay-for-play is a core part of their business model.
But I'm not sure you could get away with that today. You'd have to make a sizable 'donation' instead.