A lot of noise has been made about the admissions policies of elite colleges. Are they really selecting the most deserving? Do they prioritize the wealthy and well connected? Should they be selecting students by race?

I think it’s important to understand what colleges are actually for, and why they behave as they do.

Despite what colleges might claim, the purpose of a college (at least the elite ones) is not to teach students. If the purpose of elite colleges was to teach students then they would heavily reward the professors who did the best teaching, recruit professors based on teaching ability, and teach as many students as they could - but by and large they don’t do any of those things.

Instead, the purpose of an elite college is to select a group of people who will collectively go on to hold positions of power in the world, to do what is necessary to cause those people to hold positions of power, to present that power as legitimate, and to extract as much money out of those people as is practical. These are all things that colleges definitely reward employees for.

Broadly speaking, to get accepted into an elite college, you need to be either smart, rich, well connected, or useful for making the college’s power seem legitimate. To someone who expects colleges to select based on meritocracy, this might seem corrupt, but it is arguably a more useful social function than merely selecting the smartest or most deserving people. To make important things happen, you need to bring together the people with the ideas, the people with the connections, and the people with money.

If you created a college that was only for smart people, then the smartest people wouldn’t want to go there, because they want to form connections with the well connected people and the rich people. More importantly, if we didn’t have mechanisms for the smart people, the rich people, and the well connected people to find each other, it would be much harder for society to get things done. And of course, if colleges didn’t introduce the smart people to the rich people and the well connected people, it would just mean that the world was controlled by the rich people and the well connected people, with it being even harder for smart people to enter the ruling class.

However colleges also need to appear legitimate. If it seems that colleges are merely giving power to the rich and well connected then the rest of the country will see that power is being illegitimate, and express interest in limiting their ability to grant power. Similarly, if colleges selected only the smartest kids without paying attention to race, then they would produce a mostly Asian elite that would be resisted by the rest of the country.

This leads to the challenge that the colleges find themselves in. It’s not clear what the right solution is, but it’s at least useful to be aware of the nature of the problem.