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I think this is a great idea, but for a different reason. "Elite college" is a relative and somewhat zero-sum term, since it refers not to the quality of education but the quality of job and networking opportunities that are available once a person graduates. The embarrassing truth of these elite colleges is that there's not a whole lot of value-add. The classes are good--well, some of them--but you can find classes that are just as good at a decent state university. Elite colleges don't give anyone the ability to beat the job market; they select those who are likely already to beat it.

They also offer a fog of war. Rich dumb kids seem smart because they went to the same place where a lot of smart poors like us went; smart poors experience enough of the wealthy dumb's aura to project themselves as possibly rich (now or in the future). This requires a certain balance. If you let in too many "meritocrats" (smart poors) then the ultra-rich dumb kids who bring the networking opportunities are going to be overwhelmed and go somewhere else.

So, frankly, I don't think this reform would do much for undergraduate education. We already have a great number of schools that are just as good as, or better than, the Ivies... but that lack proximity to power and whose graduates get regular shitty jobs. (Actually, most of the smart poors who graduate from Ivies get regular shitty jobs too, but that's another topic.) Instead, I support it because it would improve the state of research. There are far too few professorships to go around. Whatever these massive endowments are doing, it's not funding a healthy academic job market, and we've become third-rate at everything, and soon China's going to drink our milkshake. Academia's dead and it's dead because it killed itself, and the first step toward reviving it is to fix this gross misallocation of resources.