Why are legacy admissions irresponsible? The author points out the schools have every incentive to maximize profit centers, and legacy admissions are a great wa

Why are legacy admissions irresponsible? The author points out the schools have every incentive to maximize profit centers, and legacy admissions are a great way to do that. You admit four of five generations of a family, you'd better believe that they're going to pony up every year come donation time. Ivy League Universities have always existed to provide a finishing school for the elite, rather than providing some sort of public good. While I don't think that's a particularly noble endeavor, it's not an especially malicious one either given the abundance of top-notch (and lower cost) public universities in the U.S. If some rich parent wants to spend an order of magnitude more money on an ivy league school to give their kid more or less the same education they could have gotten at a state school, what's the big deal?