The Price Of Admission by Daniel Golden.

Golden points out that at top undergraduate universities in the US, ~50% of freshman admissions are pre-allocated to students with connections to the school: children of donors, alumni, or just plain famous.

Golden wants to pave over admissions to make them more meritocratic. However he falls into the trap of assuming that everyone will agree on the metrics of success, while there's a long tradition of schools vehemently disagreeing on that very matter, e.g. the Harvard Man vs the Princeton Man.

Given the difficulty of policing these institutions, Golden should have considered trying to create more elite meritocratic schools -- i.e. how is it that the Throop College of Technology became Caltech in just 50 years?