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Notes -
Social status is highly heritable, and test scores are a noisy measure of phenotypic social status (there's more to life than taking tests).1 It makes sense for universities to use other predictors of social status such as parental income in order to select the highest quality students.
I'd be surprised (although not that surprised) if the universities used income directly for judging applicants. Aren't they using more oblique evidence like essays and "life experience"?
The part of this that seems a bit immoral is that parental income is commonly believed to be random, and not an indicator of student quality. A few questions here:
My stance here is that people are smart and they accord status to people who are actually valuable to society, so any predictor of future social status is valid for admissions.
1 See Gregory Clark's works
Test scores are not meant to be a measure of social status. They're meant to be a measure of academic aptitude.
I, and probably most other people, believe universities should admit students based on academic aptitude, not social status. Rule by an entrenched hereditary aristocracy is generally considered to be a bad thing.
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