In May, the billionaire Robert Smith was widely lauded when he announced he would pay the student debt of Morehouse College’s graduating class to the tune of $34 million. So were Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor and presidential candidate, who gave $1.8 billion to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, in 2018, and Steve Tisch, who earmarked $10 million for middle-class students at U.C.L.A. in October. Ken Langone, a founder of Home Depot, appeared on a TV show last year to celebrate his surprise gift of $100 million to help pay the tuition of medical students at New York University.

Welcome to the world of those I call shock benefactors. While these 1-percenters deserve praise for their generosity, the reality is these donations are also symptoms of an economic system out of whack; this kind of giving does little to alleviate structural problems afflicting millions of others who are not being helped by a theatrical act of philanthropy. Such sudden altruism will likely inspire copycats but, without structural change, the system will continue to indenture college graduates, whose debt burden totals $1.6 trillion. These givers just palliate a small part of it.

In addition, the lucky students are hardly saved from an economic system that remains hostile to them. As Daniel Edwards, a junior at Morehouse, told me, “It’s a Band-Aid fix.” He’s happy for his “brothers who got economic freedom,” but also noted that “in every classroom you sit in, odds are one of the students to the left or right of you is still in financial struggle.” That’s because only a few colleges are affordable for families earning under $70,000 a year. In other words, the issue is inequality.

It’s likely that the billionaires would have had a much bigger impact had they put at least some of that money toward reforming either the astronomically expensive college system, or the tax regulatory one which has allowed them to hoard money, depriving us of tax revenues that would pay for better schools, better health care, better everything.