Legacies of different types.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling striking down affirmative action in university admission as violative of the 14th Amendment, which it clearly was, attention has suddenly been focused on "legacy" admissions into Harvard.

It should be, and frankly the inordinate influence of Harvard should be in focus as well.

Let's start with legacy admissions.

Legacy admissions are the admittance of the children of prior graduates.  Perhaps it's cynical, but the reason for it is obvious.  If graduates of Harvard go on to earn big bucks, and most will, Harvard, a private schools, wants some of those bucks to come Harvard's way.  The grads buying into admission for their children, so they can also have their ticket's punched and be rich, are what legacy admission is all about.

If you take Legacy admissions away, some of those grads will keep their money instead.

Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc, are all private schools and can do pretty much what they want in this category. So contrary to what some are now suggesting, legacy admissions are clearly not illegal.  The same Constitutional provisions that preclude race from being a factor in admission don't apply to rich parents.

It is unfair, of course, and it does just what its critics claim it does.  It reinforces the WASP demographics of these WASP institutions and gets students in who aren't of the same academic caliber as some of the other applicants.

Well, that's unfair, but that's life too.

Also unfair, however, is that graduating from one of these schools is just graduating into wealth.  You can pretty much choose to do not much and make a really good living just because you went to them. And they have a lock on government appointments.

Of the current U.S. Supreme Court justices, only Amy Coney Barrett, Notre Dame, is not a Harvard or Yale Law School graduate.  Are Harvard and Yale really that much better.  I really doubt it.

There's all sorts of left wing hand wringing and angst over the Supreme Court right now.  People like Robert Reich (Yale Law School, 1973) are full of cries that the right wing justices suffer from ethnics deficits.  While Reich, to his credit, did write an article awhile back wondering what the crap had happened to the Ivy League as some of the big annoying figures on the political right are also Ivy League grads (Ted Cruz, Harvard Law School), what you simply don't hear is something you should.

Let's have a twenty-year ban on government appointments out of the Ivy League.

Yes, I mean that.  

Thirty would be better.

If you want diversity on the Court, for example, appoint some justices who came out of state universities.  We've had them before, and low and behold they were just as bright as the Ivy League grads.  They'd also be more likely to have a diverse view on things compared to those who gradated from The Golden Ticket school.

And frankly, I feel the same way about other government appointments.  Harvard?  Yale?  The old boy network will take care of you just fine.  It's private business for you.

Of course, this won't happen.  The Ivy League has a lock on this.