Schools, in other words, loom larger in the neoliberal imagination than they did in the liberal imagination because schools have become our primary mechanism for convincing ourselves that poor people deserve their poverty. Or, to put the point the other way around, schools have become our primary mechanism for convincing us rich people that we deserve our wealth. Everybody gets that people who go to elite schools have a sizable economic advantage over people who don’t; that’s one reason why people want to go to them. And as long as the elite schools are open to anybody who’s smart enough and/or hardworking enough to get into them, we see no injustice in reaping their benefits. It’s OK if schools are technologies for producing inequality as long as they are also technologies for justifying it. But the justification will work only if, as the Crimson hopefully asserts, there really are rich people and poor people at Harvard. If there really aren’t, if it’s your wealth (or your family’s wealth) that makes it possible for you to get into the elite school in the first place, then of course the real source of your success is not the fact that you went to an elite school but the fact that your parents were rich enough to give you the kind of preparation that got you admitted to the elite school. And if going to Harvard is more a reflection of your family’s wealth than it is of your merit, if it’s a sign of privilege rather than a cause of it, then of course the legitimating effect disappears. So the real point of eliminating the unneeded class differences at Harvard is to conceal the needed ones, the ones that got all the kids from the top quarter into Harvard in the first place. The function of the (very few) poor people at Harvard is to reassure the (very many) rich people at Harvard that you can’t just buy your way into Harvard.