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Consider what harvard graduates do. They become doctors, surgeons, chemistry professors, CEOs, judges, politicians. Each of these (except perhaps the last) greatly contributes to the well-being and/or advancement of society. Better surgeons mean you're less likely to die on the operating table. Smarter chemistry professors mean that, via convoluted causal channels, in twenty years your computers will be faster and your consumer products will be cheaper. CEOs, again, more capable society and cheaper consumer products. All of these matter much more even by sum-hedonistic ethics than the individual effect of Harvard on a student. Take the best individual tutor in the world and he can probably raise a 105iq person's SAT score more than the top scorer (who has a perfect score), but that's a waste of society's resources. Who benefits more from college-level mathematics, a child young tao or a randomly-selected underrepresented minority?
The claim is that the most 'meritorious' people are smarter and more capable, and will be better able to create, understand, and improve society than the less intelligent. G, IQ, intelligence, whatever you want to call it, some people are clearly more capable, generally, than others. And much of the cause is genetic.
Consider, from the parable of the talents, Scott Alexander's brother, who
Of course it's framed, in the story, as an example of how different people have different talents, a personal berkson's paradox. But, absent a strong genetic effect and some shared cause of general capability, how plausible is it that Scott, a talented writer followed by some of the smartest people in the world, just happens to be the brother of a world-class musician? Clearly Scott's brother had something that made him generally capable, and whatever it was was shared somehow. I think the marginal treatment effect of piano classes was larger for Scott's brother than the average child. This is why merit matters! And why society-wide tracking of skill and targeting the most skilled for training is very useful.
Why should Harvard care about that? What they want is people who will donate generously to their alma mater and who are likely to bring additional prestige by doing something important and/or unique. They don't really want to admit Amanda Chang who will become a CFO of a Fortune 500 company, own three homes and a yacht and bequeath the rest of her fortune to her children.
Not sure I understand your point? The super-rich love making donations to their alma mater. Ken Griffin's $300M to Harvard made the news, but it's pretty common, it's where half the buildings get their names. This article names a variety of others of various occupations.
And professors / judges / politicians 'are likely to bring additional prestige by doing something important and/or unique'.
What I meant is that Harvard calibrates its admissions to increase the benefit to itself, not to the country at large. If Asian applicants have shown themselves to be generally unremarkable and tight-fisted as alumni, Harvard will deprioritize them. Wealthy Nigerian applicants might be equally intellectually unremarkable and tight-fisted as alumni, but they pay well for their education and legacy students like to study next to well-spoken Black people and not next to grade-obsessed Asians.
Sure, but that kind of partial incentive misalignment is legion. Capitalism cares about the personal wealth of capitalists, not social benefit. Individuals care more about status than doing valuable things. People will gamble or play video games or drink instead of working or 'pursuing meaning' or whatever. But capitalism, individual labor, and Harvard are all still useful to society.
The system still mostly works, and both in education and connection-making Harvard and other top unis provide valuable services to society! Not that they couldn't be provided better in other ways, but existing institutional knowledge and inertia isn't nothing
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