Ok, so folks with more money than most, but not the uber rich, wanted to give their kids a "leg" up and used their resources to get their kids "in" to the colleges of their choice. Capitalism at its best? The haves working to ensure their offspring also have? Whatever and certainly not conflicts of interest, overtly, by the boards of these institutions who are being oh so offended while recognizing that their offspring don't have these worries because they themselves are alumni and already are in-line to open gates.
But let's take a moment to look at what I would pose to be much more institutionalized breaches of conflict. Here's a part of a Wall Street Journal Opinion piece that sheds much more important (to me) light on "gaming the system" as the "rich buy their kid's access" story has been referred.
With deep pockets and the élan of wealth, the new financiers also have assumed pre-eminence on the boards of their private university alma maters. I uncovered this transformation by working with Albina Gibadullina to build a data set from profiles of board members published online by the top 30 private universities and top 30 public universities since 2003. We linked our data with lists of the board members for the top 23 private universities in 1989 that were gathered by legal scholar Garry W. Jenkins, who has found an increase in representation of financiers of all types on nonprofit boards.
By tracking the type of financial firm for each financier on universities’ boards, we’ve found that private equity and hedge fund managers together went from just 3 percent of board seats at the top private universities in 1989 to 17 percent in 2014. That drove an increase in the share of board seats going to any kind of financiers, including traditional bankers, from 17 to 32 percent. Private equity and hedge fund managers gained an even larger share of board officer positions, rising from just 4 percent to 32 percent of board chairs, vice chairs and secretaries. This drove an increase in the share of board offices held by any kind of financier from 32 percent to 67 percent. Tellingly, no comparable transformation has occurred at public universities.
Private university board members are explicitly expected to donate generously and raise money from their peers. For example, private equity billionaire Robert Bass joined Stanford’s board in 1989 having previously attended its business school. By 1991, Bass had given $25 million to the university. Steyer similarly has given tens of millions of dollars to Stanford, where he served on the board from 2012 to 2017, as well as millions to Yale. Harvard alumnus and hedge fund investor John A. Paulson, who serves on the Dean’s Advisory Board of Harvard Business School, gave the university a record-setting $400 million donation in 2015, just a few years after he made billions by betting on the collapse of mortgage-backed securities.
So now who's being unfair? Come-on, wealth disparity simply means not everyone has the same opportunities and that includes who sits as a decision-maker be it in the public, private and/or nonprofit sector.