You're completely correct on your first point. One point that a lot of people miss about elite colleges is that their true clientele is an entrenched socioeconomic elite. The smart middle-class students are brought in to keep the U.S. upper-crust from falling into aristocratic irrelevance, but the future academics and scientists are definitively not the blue-blooded colleges' clientele. If they were, they wouldn't have to work so hard in high school to get in.
Harvard College (not to pick on Harvard; you can sub in any elite college) is relatively separate from the University, with quite disparate goals and values. The former's an "experience" and the latter is a leading research institution. They have almost nothing in common aside from shared resources. As for elite East Coast colleges, although admissions officials are well-intended, their job is to maintain a system that serves the WASP "old board", and the extracurricular component of admissions, especially legacy admissions, exists for this purpose.
If you think of Ivy League admissions as a reward for hard work in high school, the system's obviously unjust, because the rich kids play by a different set of rules. But if you recognize these colleges and their social purposes for what they are, it's still unfortunate, but not really an injustice worth getting pissed off about. In truth, the "social injustice" preventing middle-class students who supposedly "deserve" admission to Ivy League schools from getting in is extremely mild as far as social injustices go, given the very high quality (Ivy-comparable, sometimes better) of education available at the next 50 or so "runner up" colleges.
All this said, I've come to the conclusion that the brokenness of U.S. undergraduate admissions is probably (paradoxically) a good thing for American society. Many other countries, such as in the E.U., have much better, academics-only, admissions systems. (This is why foreign grad students are shocked by the mediocrity of average Ivy undergrads.) So the bulk of the brilliant minds are concentrated at a few colleges, unlike in the U.S., where they're spread out among a couple hundred. The result of this is that, in Europe, it ends up mattering a lot more where one went to college; whereas in the U.S., it's held to be fairly irrelevant after age 23.
Harvard College (not to pick on Harvard; you can sub in any elite college) is relatively separate from the University, with quite disparate goals and values. The former's an "experience" and the latter is a leading research institution. They have almost nothing in common aside from shared resources. As for elite East Coast colleges, although admissions officials are well-intended, their job is to maintain a system that serves the WASP "old board", and the extracurricular component of admissions, especially legacy admissions, exists for this purpose.
If you think of Ivy League admissions as a reward for hard work in high school, the system's obviously unjust, because the rich kids play by a different set of rules. But if you recognize these colleges and their social purposes for what they are, it's still unfortunate, but not really an injustice worth getting pissed off about. In truth, the "social injustice" preventing middle-class students who supposedly "deserve" admission to Ivy League schools from getting in is extremely mild as far as social injustices go, given the very high quality (Ivy-comparable, sometimes better) of education available at the next 50 or so "runner up" colleges.
All this said, I've come to the conclusion that the brokenness of U.S. undergraduate admissions is probably (paradoxically) a good thing for American society. Many other countries, such as in the E.U., have much better, academics-only, admissions systems. (This is why foreign grad students are shocked by the mediocrity of average Ivy undergrads.) So the bulk of the brilliant minds are concentrated at a few colleges, unlike in the U.S., where they're spread out among a couple hundred. The result of this is that, in Europe, it ends up mattering a lot more where one went to college; whereas in the U.S., it's held to be fairly irrelevant after age 23.