As the head of one of Yale’s undergraduate residential colleges, I am surrounded by extraordinary students. They are brilliant and energetic and inspiring, and it is a privilege to work with them. But they are not better people and possess no more moral worth than their counterparts who did not get in. Few, if any, think otherwise. And as intelligent observers of the world, why would they?

Views ranging from cynicism to outrage now pass as conventional wisdom among well-informed observers of the admissions process at elite schools. All too often, elite institutions deserve such cynicism. Yale’s usually thoughtful president, Peter Salovey, responded to the bribery scandal by promising in a campuswide email to uphold the university’s “deeply held values of inclusion and fairness.” But elite higher education is neither inclusive nor fair. Inclusive? Top institutions reject nearly 95 percent of their applicants. Fair? Elite colleges and universities reject candidates with almost no attention at all to how morally deserving they are. They are manifestly ill-suited to make such judgments.

Matthew Stewart: The moral center of meritocracy collapses

Still, Salovey’s message offers some insight into how elite institutions see their role in the world. In disavowing their past role as finishing schools for a blue-blood upper class, elite universities have mistaken an ostensibly meritocratic admissions process for their actual social function. The core of a university’s real mission is to produce and disseminate ideas; sorting and ranking applicants is just a means to an end. To fixate on the “best people” is like urging Human Rights Watch to maximize “likes” on social media instead of stopping human-rights abuses, or urging General Motors to value next year’s J.D. Power ratings over its long-term profits.

Scholars and teachers at American colleges and universities do a good job of generating ideas, if one believes the most authoritative rankings of the world’s best universities. Like other organizations in society—philanthropic foundations, business firms, government agencies—elite educational institutions pursue a mission and run themselves accordingly. Notwithstanding their rhetoric about meritocracy, admissions offices already make the pragmatic compromises necessary to cultivate—and pay for—good scholarship.

Universities have rightly increased the number of students of color, first-generation students, and international students among their admitted classes. There is every reason to think that institutions of higher education failed in their mission for too long by being parochial in terms of race, nationality, gender, and sexuality. By turning the corner on some of these failings, universities are expanding our supply of ideas.

By the same token, universities should not be embarrassed about the practice of admitting the children of generous alums or wealthy donors. Secretly, they understand exactly what they’re doing. Producing and disseminating knowledge is expensive. It produces social gains without corresponding revenue streams. If a university’s primary mission were really sorting the best from the rest, then admitting applicants based on cash would be a corrupt lie. But our mission is developing ideas. We should be no more embarrassed about that than the old Congregational churches of New England were when they sold pews to finance new church buildings.

Admitting classes of students because they help us add to the store of the world’s knowledge? Well, that’s common sense. Let’s just quit talking about “the best people.”

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