Behind Biased Admissions
A new book proves you can buy your way in.
By Ryan Bradley, Northwestern University
Wednesday October 11, 2006
Just weeks into the school year, a journalistic potboiler about college admissions has arrived on bookshelves. Like its predecessors, I Am Charlotte Simmons and Prep, The Price of Admission has a scintillating cover: a well-polished silver spoon.
Another similarity is the critical eye The Price of Admission turns on our bloated and broken college admissions process: bloated because thousands upon thousands of exceedingly qualified, paper-perfect students are rejected each year; bloated because the amount of money parents spend each year on various stratagems (tutors, trainers, private high schools) with an elite college or university as the end goal is in the billions of dollars; broken because, according to Daniel Golden, the Pulitzer Prize winning Wall Street Journal reporter who wrote The Price of Admission, entry into America’s elite schools can be bought.
Admissions officers hate to admit it, and they are the targets of Golden’s deepest enmity. A few other deserving and conventional targets (politicians, celebrities, millionaires) also see the sharp end of Golden’s critique, but none as much as the gatekeepers to our institutions of higher learning—the poor, inept admissions officers who Golden says allow the rich and famous to buy their progeny into top schools.
The arrival of Golden’s book coincides with Harvard and Princeton’s decisions to eliminate early admission, and Golden’s criticism dovetails seamlessly into the present media storm over the elite schools’ announcements. Derek Bok, Harvard’s interim president, said that early admissions programs “tend to advantage the advantaged.” Princeton President Shirley Tilghman, a week later, echoed Bok’s words: “We agree that early admission ‘advantages the advantaged.’” The Price of Admission is a book about the many advantages the advantaged have in the admissions process (the big three: fame, money, and legacy).
None of this is exactly shocking news, but Golden’s book is a good read nevertheless. At his best moments, Golden comes off as particularly catty, dubbing the multitudes of high-achieving Asians “the new Jews” for the difficulties they face in gaining entry to a top university.
But there is little likelihood you will find The Price of Admission in bookstores, since it is sorted and sold in the education section, an area that at most Barnes and Noble stores is immediately to the left of the family and childcare section. You can usually only get there by walking through the entire children’s books section. This is, the categorization suggests, a book for parents, for in many cases the college admissions process is their largest emotional and financial investment in their children before they leave the house and are replaced by a dog.
So what do young people, the repositories of these great investments, have to gain by reading this book? It exposes the structure of privilege in our lives.. And it makes Golden really angry. He’s angry because college admissions are not based on merit. This is the scandalous stuff that won Golden a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the subject in The Wall Street Journal.
It may not be surprising, but give the guy credit for digging up the illuminating numbers. Take Harvard’s $26 billion endowment, a fun number to compare to things like, say, the GDP of Burkina Faso: $16.9 billion; or Tajikistan: $8.7 billion; or Mongolia: $5.2 billion. Other facts Golden has dug up involve far more number crunching, but are equally astonishing. Harvard (here it is worth noting that Golden holds a bachelor’s from Harvard and perhaps feels some deeper responsibility for its system of entitlement) “admits fewer than one in 10 undergraduate applicants, turning down more than half its applicants with perfect SAT scores.”
It is very hard to get into Harvard. But for the children of members of Harvard’s COUR (Committee on University Relations, which, Golden writes, “consists of Harvard’s biggest donors”) it is much easier. According to Golden, “336 children of about 340 eligible members” have attended Harvard. Of course, Golden’s not the first to point out that the Ivies are notoriously committed to retaining the loyalty of wealthy families (see Malcolm Gladwell’s “Getting In” in the October 10, 2005 issue of The New Yorker) so as to cushion their endowments.
Where Golden falters is in ignoring some of the deeper dilemmas that plague our education system, such as under-funded public institutions, union issues, and over-reliance on standardized testing, to dissect what he may believe is the biggest crime—that admissions officers aren’t doing their job. This is perhaps a shrewd move on his part. Rather than opening the door to a Pandora’s box of education problems, he bites off something he and his readers can chew. But criticizing anti-meritocratic practices is a bit too narrow a lens through which to view education. After all, if universities went completely “meritocratic” and let in everyone that had 4.0 GPAs and 2400 SAT scores, would Golden be happy? I know I wouldn’t.
The greatest crime of biased admissions, and Golden’s greatest point, is that the advantages afforded the elite cripple our choice in political leadership. “Voters unhappy with their choices for president in 2004 could blame Yale University,” Golden writes, and while this is slightly absurd, the system in its current state does “stifle talent and exalt mediocrity,” which hurts all Americans through limiting access to politics, the economy, the sciences, and the arts. Everything suffers when the best and the brightest cannot attend the best schools. But what if the Harvards and Princetons and Dukes aren’t actually the best? It’s a sentiment that other columnists (see Michael Wolff and Dorothy Wickenden) have hinted at: that the college you attend is of less important than what status-conscious students—and their parents—believe. This is a very nice thought, and Wolff and others can point to a string of CEOs and other successful people who did not attend a top institution. But an alma mater is as powerful as its alumni network, and as long as old and young alike salivate over the cache of an elite diploma, where we went to college will continue to matter.
Which is why I propose that we, right now, take a stand. We need to not care where we went to school, or where anyone else went to school, or where our children go to school. Burn our degrees, start life in our early 20s with a clean slate, eschew all networking opportunities, and never mention, ever again, where we attended college.
Ryan Bradley is a graduate of Northwestern University.
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Comments
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The combination of the last paragraph and the credit is purposely funny, right? Juuust checking.
— Christina - Oct 12, 08:59 PM - #I do not deny the accuracy of what you are saying but would just like to make clear to anyone reading this that we are talking about the elite institutions here. Too many parents think that there must be some conspiracy when their child does not get into a college because they hear about things like this- that is simply not the case and we need to be careful not to let what happens at a small percentage of universities influence the perception of college admissions in general.
And while I respect this article, I do find it somewhat amusing that the author is a graduate of an elite institution himself…
— Robin Zazove - Oct 13, 10:12 AM - #In response to Robin Zazove above, the comment that the author attended an elite institution himself is an Ad Hominem attack and has no relevance to the content of the article. I imagine that if he weren’t from an elite institution, someone else could jab at him from the opposite end: he’s just trying to bolster a diploma from a non-elite school. Where Mr. Bradley went to undergrad is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand, and it amuses me that the second commenter thinks “respect” can entail these below-the-belt tactics….
— Conor K - Jun 4, 08:44 PM - #