Is that a good thing? This premise of this article is based on the concept of American exceptionalism.
There are sooooooo many other institutions in the world conducting amazing research. There are countries with exceptional higher education and better living standards (almost anywhere in Scandinavia comes to mind) and young people don’t need to go bankrupt to access it.
There are a million good things about the US, but legacy admissions isn’t one of them. Imo, the article is representative of the tunnel vision that many Americans have about this country and higher education here.