Ending legacy admissions

Get out the world's smallest violin and play it on a Broadway stage. Tony, Emmy, Grammy and Pulitzer Prize winner Lin-Manuel Miranda's kids will have to get into Wesleyan University on their own. Ditto the children of U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, football's Bill Belichick, "Sopranos" and "Mad Men" creator Matthew Weiner, and a host of other notables.

That's because their alma mater, Wesleyan, just ditched legacy admissions, canceling the policy that gave the kids of alumni a leg up on other applicants to the highly selective private school. (Wesleyan says in their case it's a small one.) May every other American higher education institution follow suit.

As for financial support, ending legacies shouldn't hurt alumni giving if grads truly love their schools.

Wesleyan is no trailblazer, given that schools from Johns Hopkins to Amherst College have already done away with the legacy preference, while places like MIT and NYU never had it. Rather, the elite Connecticut college is quite obviously reacting to the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to constrain the explicit use of race in admissions to help build a diverse student body. Still, however it happened, ditching affirmative action for the already privileged is a step toward making elite colleges — which in far too many cases have ceased to become engines of economic mobility — live up to their higher calling.

Some universities are great at catapulting poor and working-class American youngsters into the middle class and beyond. City University, America's largest public urban higher education system, educates lower-income kids from a wide range of backgrounds, preparing them ably for careers without loading them down with debt.

Too many top colleges have increasingly become finishing schools for the well-to-do. To be sure, some not-so-well-off young people get in with the help of very generous aid packages, and go on to lift up themselves and their families. But they're the exception by far, and since COVID, college enrollment declines have only accelerated.

Many things need to happen to fix the problem. Public elementary and secondary schools need to rigorously educate their kids, aspiring to make them equipped to go on to college no matter their background. That doesn't mean giving short shrift to vocational and career education — that's vitally important too, since advanced degrees aren't for everyone — but there need to be high educational standards for all youngsters.

The federal government and states must boost aid, especially for families that now tend to fall through the cracks.

In the wake of the Supreme Court's invalidation of President Joe Biden's first debt relief program, the feds need to keep looking for new ways to lighten the load that loans place on people's backs for decades.

Colleges themselves need to shuffle their offerings to ensure that they deliver solid returns on investment for their graduates. The liberal arts must remain a strong foundation, but there's no shame in pragmatic offerings either.

And on the admissions front, since the Supreme Court barred schools (with the awkward exception of U.S. military service academies) from using race as a factor, schools must lean into considering class, not race, as a factor in who gets in — and once and for all scrapping the practice that's a thumb in the eye of fairness, legacy admissions.