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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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