The eight Ivy League schools have less than 1 percent of U.S. college students but almost 17 percent of all endowment money. The top 3 percent of schools ranked by endowment size have more than half the funds. Five schools (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford University and one public institution, the University of Texas) had endowment increases last year of more than $1 billion, exceeding the total endowment of more than 90 percent of the schools (including virtually all the larger ones) publicly disclosing information…

A student graduating from Yale or Princeton, with their roughly $2 million endowments per student, has a ticket to a well-paying job, while one graduating from the College of St. Joseph in Vermont, with its $29,000 endowment per student, does not. Only 12 percent of the Yale and Princeton students have Pells, compared with 71 percent at St. Joseph.

The federal government subsidizes this academic aristocracy (made more exclusive by elite highly endowed schools giving admission preferences for children of alumni) in several ways. Big endowments such as Harvard’s probably often reap at least $1 billion annually from capital gains. They pay no income taxes on those gains; individuals pay 23.8 percent. They also pay no income taxes on dividend and interest income. The donations that form the endowments are deductible against donor income taxes, giving rich people the incentive to give to their already rich colleges, which in turn give preferences to alumni children.

I am no liberal and I’m not preoccupied with the consequences of income inequality. But I can’t figure out why the liberal elite that purports to care about inequality isn’t asking these questions: Why do we provide favorable tax treatment that primarily benefits these wealthy schools? Why not at least phase out tax preferences to donors and to schools with more than, say, a $200,000 endowment per student? Why allow schools that show legacy admission preferences the right to claim special tax privileges?