Where's the special admission program for lottery-winners, con-artists and pickpockets? Those also function in "the real world" - so why not at Stanford?

In the real world, individuals can't do much. It's only through the collective cooperation and the trust behind such cooperation that allows things to happen. Social Elites come with a wealth of trust from the legacies of families and connections that slowly built them up over hundreds of years. And such bonds survive even without the state, predate it and ultimately build it.

That is the "real world". Everything else is just an abstraction, propped up by a system that has only existed for a definite period of time and will not exist outside of that.