The American obsession with race in this specific case translates into focusing on a more superficial problem and polarizing the debate, as opposed to finding an easier solution to the bigger problem of ALDC admissions (namely: ban them), which I assume would be less controversial.

Do I have a right to say "Only my friends can join my debate club"? Do I have a right to say "Children of past participants are always welcome here"? Do I have a right to say "Max occupancy: 1800"?

Most people would say "Yes" to these things.

What if I hire some marketing experts, and eventually my debate club has a really good "brand" and all sorts of companies want to hire participants at enormous salaries for highly influential positions? Once my debate club is a gateway to money, power and influence, do I still have the right to admit who I want? Or does my branding success somehow create an obligation to make admissions meritocratic, rather than some other kind of -cratic (e.g. autocratic, "My debate club, I decide, and that's the end of it," or aristocratic, "Children of members have an easy path to membership", or plutocratic, "Money talks")?

At what point does Harvard become different from my debate club?

What exactly creates a moral (and perhaps legal) obligation that trumps "My debate club, my rules," and necessarily places corresponding limits on Harvard's freedom of association?

One is that all students go there for a quality education. Since the early 19th century if not the very beginnings, faculty have had to acknowledge that a primary function of these institutions is to serve as a holding place for the (often not very bright) children of the rich until they are old enough to get married and do other grown-up things.

Another is that the quality of instruction there is atypically high. Lend an ear to complaints about Ivy League grade inflation and you will realize this is bollocks. While Ivy League graduates do tend to have higher career trajectories, this is attributed to admissions being selective for highly driven people, and for networking opportunities with similar others.

Finally, he assumes the benefits of Ivy League education could be scaled up. For example, suppose Harvard College increased undergrad enrollment from 7K to 40K. What would happen to the networking effect?

This is often said but doesn't seem to be realistic if one digs into the numbers.

Endowments aren't one big slush fund that the university can use however they want; they are a collection of individual donations, many of which can only be used in accordance with the donor's wishes. These are called restricted endowments. Harvard is cited as having the largest total endowment and their latest financial report (https://finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/fy22_harvard_fin...) on page 12 shows that 70% of their total endowment are restricted endowments with 20% of the total already composed of restricted endowments that are specifically for financial aid. In theory, the 30% of the total endowment that is unrestricted could be redirected to financial aid, increasing the amount of financial aid by 1.5x from endowment revenue only (the overall increase would be much less than 1.5x since financial aid comes from other sources as well) but it's unclear what other impact that would have on university operations.

tl;dr 1) universities are already using some of their endowments to help students, 2) there are legal limitations on how much more of their endowments they can use to help students even if practical considerations are ignored, 3) if they did so, it wouldn't be enough to "sharply" increase student numbers, and 4) people should really dig into things instead of repeating hot takes from internet pundits at face value.

1) Students have to live somewhere. More students living off campus will drive up apartment rent in the area. You can build dorms to increase the housing supply for students and reduce the demand for off campus apartments, but that requires large building projects.

2) Similarly, increasing the student population means more class rooms, teaching labs, and possibly larger lecture halls for the most popular classes (e.g., calculus courses taken by every STEM student). That means more building projects.

3) You need to hire more faculty. While you might be able to get away with adjuncts or postdocs teaching a few things, people that want to go to these schools want to have the opportunity to interact and learn from the top experts in their field, i.e. faculty professors. Expanding the faculty is not an easy thing to do overnight. Even if the will is there to grow, departments are highly selective when it comes to hiring. The person you are hiring is joining the university potentially for life. Moreover, if you choose wrong and deny them tenure, the result blows back on the department. Hot tenure track candidates get many offers, and they don’t want to risk moving somewhere and building a lab for 5-7 years only to be denied tenure and having to move their life elsewhere (they’ve already done that quite a bit throughout their student and postdoc days). Moreover, those candidates need to be courted with resources like spaces for their research lab, so, again, more construction is needed.

4) Where do you build all these buildings? Many of the Ivies are located in major cities (e.g., Boston, New York, Philadelphia). There isn’t a lot of open space to build big new buildings. Moreover, while they often own buildings adjacent to campus and lease them to businesses and tenants, decimating a city block to displace these people in favor of building more lectures or residential halls is a bad look politically and a hard sell to local governments. These schools already draw complaints from the locals about their expansion gentrifying areas and driving locals out through the resulting rise in rents and taxes. Even suburban Princeton has been rapidly consuming their green spaces lately to build new facilities. An option might be to start opening separate campuses, but that’s unappealing to their prospective students.