Gregg Easterbrook, ESPN’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback, continues to highlight a pattern: wealthy donors giving to already wealthy universities and colleges:

Don’t Give to Harvard! A running TMQ cause is that rich people give money to schools such as Harvard, Yale and Stanford, places already possessing gargantuan endowments, rather than to schools where money is needed. The rich underwrite elite schools for ego reasons — at cocktail parties they can say, “I just donated $10 million to Harvard, now a shower stall will be named after me.” At colleges and universities that serve average people, donations can change lives. If you’ve got money, donate to noble Berea College, which accepts only poor students and charges no tuition, or to gallant Bethune-Cookman, a historically black school that mainly serves the underprivileged. Alumnus Charles Johnson just gave $250 million to Yale — which is already sitting on a $19 billion endowment. At a place like Berea College, $250 million would have been a transformative event in the lives of the deserving. At Yale, it’s a rounding error in the lives of the privileged.

Reader Jon Miller of Beaumont, Texas, notes that despite having a world’s-best endowment of $32 billion — nearly double the GDP of Honduras — Harvard just kicked off a capital campaign, asking for another $6.5 billion. Rich people, show a little class: Don’t give to Harvard. Or Yale, Princeton or Stanford. Make your donation count.

This gets back to an old question: do elite universities perpetuate social inequalities? If giving patterns changed as Easterbrook suggests, perhaps there might be a shift…