THE PROPER COURSE OUGHT TO BE OBVIOUS. Robert VerBruggen finds something by Matthew Yglesias to agree with.

People who are plausible admission candidates at Harvard and don’t quite make the cut end up at Columbia or Penn. People who don’t get into Berkeley go to UCLA. And they all end up fine. There’s just absolutely no need to cry for someone who got into Bryn Mawr instead of Wellesley thanks to affirmative action or legacy preference or structural bias in the SAT or anything else. This is a made-up social problem. Every single American teenager who winds up at a selective college of any kind is in very good shape in a country where (a) most people don’t have college degrees and (b) most colleges aren’t selective.

Mr Yglesias suggests that philanthropy go to "non-fancy non-selective colleges with a proven record of helping kids from low-SES backgrounds succeed." It's simpler than that. Nobody (apart from USC sports fans?) rips on UCLA (motto: On! Wisconsin!) for admitting Berkeley's rejects. A Wisconsin-Milwaukee that now enrolls more Wisconsin residents than Madison does is a university where somebody ought to be asking how to serve commuter-first-generation-nontraditional-diverse students in a way that doesn't shortchange Madison's rejects. (Such a conversation might be taking place; I don't have sources on the Milwaukee campus privy to it.) Let me repeat the Cold Spring Shops position: in an environment of excess demand for perceived prestige, there are incentives to meet that demand. It doesn't have to involve rich donors or legislators.