The Economist has published a review of Daniel Golden’s book,”The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges:and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates.”The Economist review has as its subtitle: “Not so much palaces of learning as bastions of privilege and hypocrisy.” Here are the first few paragraphs of the review, which focus on attributes of “privilege”:
AMERICAN universities like to think of themselves as engines of social justice, thronging with”diversity”. But how much truth is there in this flattering self-image? Over the past few years Daniel Golden has written a series of coruscating stories in the Wall Street Journal about the admissions practices of America’s elite universities, suggesting that they are not so much engines of social justice as bastions of privilege. Now he has produced a book:“The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges:and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates”:that deserves to become a classic.
Mr Golden shows that elite universities do everything in their power to admit the children of privilege. If they cannot get them in through the front door by relaxing their standards, then they smuggle them in through the back. No less than 60% of the places in elite universities are given to candidates who have some sort of extra”hook”, from rich or alumni parents to”sporting prowess”. The number of whites who benefit from this affirmative action is far greater than the number of blacks.
The American establishment is extraordinarily good at getting its children into the best colleges. In the last presidential election both candidates:George Bush and John Kerry:were”C”students who would have had little chance of getting into Yale if they had not come from Yale families. Al Gore and Bill Frist both got their sons into their alma maters (Harvard and Princeton respectively), despite their average academic performances. Universities bend over backwards to admit”legacies”(ie, the children of alumni). Harvard admits 40% of legacy applicants compared with 11% of applicants overall. Amherst admits 50%. An average of 21-24% of students in each year at Notre Dame are the offspring of alumni. When it comes to the children of particularly rich donors, the bending-over-backwards reaches astonishing levels. Harvard even has something called a”Z”list:a list of applicants who are given a place after a year’s deferment to catch up:that is dominated by the children of rich alumni.
University behaviour is at its worst when it comes to grovelling to celebrities. Duke University’s admissions director visited Steven Spielberg’s house to interview his stepdaughter. Princeton found a place for Lauren Bush:the president’s niece and a top fashion model:despite the fact that she missed the application deadline by a month. Brown University was so keen to admit Michael Ovitz’s son that it gave him a place as a”special student”. (He dropped out after a year.)
Most people think of black football and basketball stars when they hear about”sports scholarships”. But there are also sports scholarships for rich white students who play preppie sports such as fencing, squash, sailing, riding, golf and, of course, lacrosse. The University of Virginia even has scholarships for polo-players, relatively few of whom come from the inner cities.
These are important issues, and I’m glad the book explores them, and that it promises to generate some public conversation on these topics. The very next part of the review, however, in which Golden apparently focuses on purported “hypocrisy,” made me quite angry:
You might imagine that academics would be up in arms about this. Alas, they have too much skin in the game. Academics not only escape tuition fees if they can get their children into the universities where they teach. They get huge preferences as well. Boston University accepted 91% of”faculty brats”in 2003, at a cost of about $9m. Notre Dame accepts about 70% of the children of university employees, compared with 19% of”unhooked”applicants, despite markedly lower average SAT scores.
The prvileges and employment conditions of academics vary greatly. Faculty members at the University Of South Carolina do not get ONE PENNY toward tuition for family members. We don’t even get free tuition for ourselves! The only way to for a faculty member to take a class without cost here is to get the instructor to agree to let her audit the course. She still has to buy the texts and materials herself, and will reap the benefits of classroom instruction and learning for its own sake, but will not receive academic credit toward any degree from an auditing experience. And as a general matter, not even the auditing option is open to the family members of academics.
I can say with a high degree of confidence that each and every one of my colleagues and I would like to see our tuition lowered and our scholarship funds increased, and not only for the sake of our own children, not even close. We suffer as much as anyone from the lack of diversity within our institutions, and from a structural inability to enroll students strictly on the basis of “merit.” We certainly admit students on the basis of merit, but we are unable to finance the educations of very many aspiring attorneys, regardless of how brilliant they are. Public universities in poorer states are harshly punished by ratings and rankings systems that measure us against far wealthier schools, and find us inferior in part due to our paltry endowments. We could purchase higher rankings by “buying” top students with modest means if we had more financial aid funds available, but we will never have the resources to compete with wealthy schools in this regard. I love my job and appreciate the many benefits it offers, but neither free nor even discounted tuition for myself or for any of my family members is among them.
–Ann Bartow
