It is certainly one of the lens through which it can help to analyze US college admissions, not least private colleges.
Outside of a few Constitutional restrictions, US private colleges are largely free to use admissions to try to create their own vision of the best possible college community. And at least in the US, this often goes well beyond purely academic issues and includes all sorts of broader social issues. Although I note that those who believe in what is sometimes called the Liberal Arts and Sciences Tradition would usually resist that being a hard line, on the theory that a more holistic approach to the development of young adults benefits them academically too.
Anyway, for long periods in the history of many of these colleges, that shaping of their college community consciously involved all sorts of exclusionary practices in admissions, which you could see as a sort of rejection of “outgroups” in favor of certain “ingroups” (or maybe just one ingroup).
But in recent decades, many admissions practices have dramatically altered. Exactly why institutions change is often complicated, and there were all sorts of pressures and incentives, from the public, governments, donors and potential donors, students and potential students, faculty and potential faculty, and so on. But at a high level, most of these institutions determined that in order to meet their institutional goals, they would have to become far more inclusive.
And of course there are some very obvious exceptions. Some colleges are still religious colleges. Some are still women’s colleges. A few are still men’s colleges. And so on. But the most common model became embracing lots of forms of diversity, often forms of diversity they had not embraced before.
Nonetheless, one of the big issues that has not at all gone away is economic class diversity. I think it is fair to say that in recent years there has been more attention being paid to, indeed more criticisms being leveled at, various private colleges when it comes to economic class diversity. And many are making adjustments. But still, the students they admit and enroll are often not at all a representative cross-section of college-bound students in terms of economic class.
And of course that is maybe not a reasonable goal for what are perhaps the most expensive undergrad programs in the world. But for sure many people are still critical of them.
All this is complicated by the fact these colleges are very much in competition with each other. And one person’s ingroup favoritism is another person’s strong alumni network. And if you have to have the latter sort of thing to compete, then it is going to affect how you run admissions, as those are your future alums.
Again I think there are a lot of people who reflect on all this as practiced today, even without some of the most obvious exclusionary practices of the past, and still think it is basically bad for society that these institutions exist and function like this. And I am not at all sure those criticisms are always ill-founded.
But the point that I keep returning to is that if you don’t like all this, you can opt out. What does not make so much sense to me is to, say, really want to go to one of these colleges precisely because of things like their strong alumni networks, but at the same time think ingroup favoritism is inherently bad if it means you as an individual don’t get to be one of those alums.
Because that is all part of one big thing for these institutions, you can’t pull it apart and like the benefits without accepting the costs. Including when it comes to admissions practices that focus not just on academic merit, but on how you will not only fit into their college community when you are a student, but are also de facto looking ahead indefinitely beyond.
Of course if you think they are doing something illegal you can sue. But otherwise they are still free to pick their best bets to fulfill these institutional strategies.