The middle ground is understanding that the institutions aren't perfect and constantly working to shore them up. I think you are rejecting the idea of a middle

The middle ground is understanding that the institutions aren't perfect and constantly working to shore them up. I think you are rejecting the idea of a middle ground completely. Holding institutions to their stated values is table stakes for me. I don't think you have to reject the ideals in order to recognize that the world is not meeting them. For example, a university could be quite open about the pressure to allow lower merit students from privileged backgrounds. What if they said "look, we can't completely withstand the political and other pressure put on us. So we're going to allow 5% enrollment of students who do not meet our regular thresholds, so long as they pay 5x (10x?) full tuition. This extra tuition will be used to create N full scholarships and M partial scholarships for students that meet the academic requirements but do not have the financial ability to attend. All students will be treated equally academically throughout their programs" To some degree you cannot stop this from happening (see prep schools, etc.) but you can bring it out in the light.