本文探讨了精英大学的真实目的，指出其并非仅仅为了传授知识，而是为了筛选和培养未来社会权力阶层的成员。大学通过吸引聪明、富有、有背景以及能提升其合法性的人才，构建了一个能够汇聚资源、促进社会运作的平台。文章认为，这种选拔机制虽然可能不完全符合传统意义上的“精英主义”，但却能有效地将社会各方力量连接起来，推动社会进步。同时，大学也需要平衡各种因素，以维持其在社会中的合法地位和权力。

🎓 精英大学的核心功能并非教育，而是筛选和培养未来社会权力阶层。大学通过吸引具备不同特质（聪明、富有、有背景）的学生，为他们提供一个汇聚和发展的平台，从而影响社会未来的权力结构。这与单纯追求学术卓越的教育模式有所不同。

🤝 精英大学的选拔机制旨在整合社会资源和人才。它不仅看重学生的智力，也重视其财富、人脉和社会背景，以及对大学声誉合法性的贡献。这种多维度的考量，有助于将拥有不同优势的人才聚集在一起，共同推动社会事务的进展，并为有才华的普通人提供进入权力阶层的途径。

⚖️ 大学在选拔过程中也需要考虑社会合法性，避免被视为仅仅服务于富裕和有权势的群体。例如，在考虑种族构成时，大学需要平衡多元化需求，以确保其选拔过程和最终培养出的精英群体能够被社会广泛接受，从而维持其权力的合法性。

💡 理解精英大学的运作逻辑，有助于我们认识到其在社会结构和权力分配中的作用。大学通过其选拔和培养机制，在一定程度上塑造了社会精英的构成，并影响着社会的发展方向。认识到这一点，有助于更深入地理解社会运作的深层机制。

Published on July 26, 2025 10:20 PM GMT

A lot of noise has been made about the admissions policies of elite colleges. Are they really selecting the most deserving? Do they prioritize the wealthy and well connected? Should they be selecting students by race?

I think it’s important to understand what colleges are actually for, and why they behave as they do.

Despite what colleges might claim, the purpose of a college (at least the elite ones) is not to teach students. If the purpose of elite colleges was to teach students then they would heavily reward the professors who did the best teaching, recruit professors based on teaching ability, and teach as many students as they could - but by and large they don’t do any of those things.

Instead, the purpose of an elite college is to select a group of people who will collectively go on to hold positions of power in the world, to do what is necessary to cause those people to hold positions of power, to present that power as legitimate, and to extract as much money out of those people as is practical. These are all things that colleges definitely reward employees for.

Broadly speaking, to get accepted into an elite college, you need to be either smart, rich, well connected, or useful for making the college’s power seem legitimate. To someone who expects colleges to select based on meritocracy, this might seem corrupt, but it is arguably a more useful social function than merely selecting the smartest or most deserving people. To make important things happen, you need to bring together the people with the ideas, the people with the connections, and the people with money.

If you created a college that was only for smart people, then the smartest people wouldn’t want to go there, because they want to form connections with the well connected people and the rich people. More importantly, if we didn’t have mechanisms for the smart people, the rich people, and the well connected people to find each other, it would be much harder for society to get things done. And of course, if colleges didn’t introduce the smart people to the rich people and the well connected people, it would just mean that the world was controlled by the rich people and the well connected people, with it being even harder for smart people to enter the ruling class.

However colleges also need to appear legitimate. If it seems that colleges are merely giving power to the rich and well connected then the rest of the country will see that power is being illegitimate, and express interest in limiting their ability to grant power. Similarly, if colleges selected only the smartest kids without paying attention to race, then they would produce a mostly Asian elite that would be resisted by the rest of the country.

This leads to the challenge that the colleges find themselves in. It’s not clear what the right solution is, but it’s at least useful to be aware of the nature of the problem.

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