Legacy Admissions

As a means of supposedly securing verifiable knowledge about reality, college of any kind is absolutely, obviously irrelevant, since everyone can look to reason directly, starting with logical axioms, and some degree of autonomously revisiting logical proofs one was prompted to think of by others is at the very least necessary to have true knowledge, though for many logical truths, no such social prompting is required whatsoever.  Not only is college and any formal education unnecessary and indeed useless if it is not in accordance with the transcendent truths of reason, but these metaphysically inherent, epistemologically certain truths are not what many colleges are known to focus on.  On the contrary, secondary and unverifiable matters of history or science, as well as arbitrary moral frameworks held to because of petty conscience or societal pressures, are what most universities will trend towards emphasizing.

As a means of potentially securing a job, the philosophically lower objective but pragmatically beneficial purpose of college is genuinely important in its own way.  Higher education is supposed to facilitate finding jobs, and higher paying options in particular, for graduates who can apply the information or skills they became acquainted with during their undergraduate or postgraduate programs.  Prohibitively expensive for many people, artificially prolonged with bloated classes for maximum financial gain, and, most importantly, philosophically trivial on its own in all regards (see the first paragraph), the higher education of college is overall more about siphoning money from people who might be in the worst position to repay their loans: students who have little to no time to work because of their course loads, little to no personal savings, and scarce access to livable compensation because they have not yet completed the education requirements for their pursued careers.

It does not follow that there will be a decent job waiting after graduation or that a student will obtain it, of course, in spite of everything.  On top of this, there is the problem of legacy admissions, where the children or perhaps broader family members of a college graduate have a higher likelihood of entrance to the same school because of family connection.  It is not just the family tie, though, that is a factor here.  The real or perceived wealth of the families and their hopeful willingness to donate to the school are more likely to be the more underlying factors here.  Entrenched alumni dynasties with deep "pockets" have the power to fund a college more than students with purely academically merited admission (which does not mean someone is rational, as only being philosophically rationalistic, not good at memorizing or vulnerable to belief in hearsay or appeals to scholastic authority that many colleges bask in, makes someone intelligent).

Just offering legacy admissions does not mean that every legacy applicant, or child/grandchild of an alumnus, will enter, nor does it mean that they are all unmerited for admission based upon factors having nothing to do with family or school connections.  Still, wealthy graduate families, the ones that least benefit from advantages like more probable/automatic admission to a given school because they do not need them, might be given the priority just because the school will have more money to pull from.  Sustained over many generations, one family can be quite the financial provider for a university.  Applicants from families like this could also attend a college possibly moreso than others simply to continue family traditions, conform to community expectations (no one is special for college attendance, so this is an asinine pressure), or casually pass time.

As for the philosophical/moral legitimacy of this, it is not problematic if someone hires their own child or some other family member over someone else if they are at least equally qualified, if the family member is not more qualified, the same being the case with college admissions.  The issue is not that wealthy or well-connected students get into universities at all.  Rather, the means by which they could do so is where the real potential for immorality or other stupidity arises.  Legacy admissions in themselves are about money and/or tradition, or else the children of alumni would be able to get into many universities (given that there are sufficient slots) without relying on their family name or ancestry.  When this is not what happens, those of a less socially established family or lower economic class are more likely to be excluded in spite of being qualified.