<p>The head of Harvard Admissions, Bill Fitzsimmons is proud to have been a scholarship student at Harvard. He never lets anyone forget his working-class background.</p>
<p>A little calculation on the cost-benefit of admitting Harrison Frist: one less admnissible student (rated 1-4) admitted; 125+ four-years scholarship funded by $25million. Of course, the $25million went to fund the Frist center, which is absolutely central to Princeton's social life (and pointed out to my S as an alternative to eating clubs). Harvard students have been agitating for just such a center.</p>
<p>I haven't read the whole thread, did the OP with 1 post reappear?</p>
<p>Of course lots of people will be angry, that's what Golden's PR machine is counting on to sell a book with an old story. I just don't know why it was released now insted of in April when anger is hightened by rejection letters!</p>
<p>I too benefited from 6 years at two amazing schools I couldn't afford. I thank all the families who made that possible. It's reality folks. These schools, private entities, could still be made up of 90% rich kids.</p>
Regarding Frist's rating of 5 -- wouldn't that have been applied after all of the "automatic rejects" had been removed? Wouldn't he have been rated within the context of kids capable of doing the work?</p>
<p>It seems a little funny here, that some arguments never die. The idea that Ivy's are only good for networking and are populated by not-so-bright rich preppies who only got in through connections is one. </p>
<p>I have to say that my son doesn't seem to know any of these, and they apparently aren't taking the same classes since he doesn't have a 4.0! The kids he's met (which may be a result of living in a substance-free dorm) are all really bright. Many come from academic families, with parents involved in research or teaching. He knows a couple of SAT scores, and they are all excellent. </p>
<p>If the point is social networking, I'm going to have to get after him to find all those rich kids he's supposed to be connecting with. :)</p>
<p>I so disagree that the Ivies represent diversity "of color only." First of all, I think you way undervalue diversity of geography, NMD. Geography is also culture. An African-American from Georgia may bring something quite different to a campus than one from Denver or Boston or Chicago. My d so values the different regionalities in college & feels she is getting much more of a cultural education in this regard than even having previously resided in a major metropolitan region -- which appears not nearly as diverse as her college campus. </p>
<p>And "mostly upper-class backgrounds?" [African-Americans] Tell that to ohlookasquirrel, a former CC poster who got into a rash of Ivies + Stanford 2 or 3 yrs. ago. Since he came from an underperforming public, I so doubt that he would describe himself as "upper-class."</p>
<p>You keep bringing up the so-called lack of economic diversity, & I'll just keep telling you that nothing of the sort is true. It is in fact the Harvards, the Princetons, the Yales, and even the UPenns actually, that are in a position to give <em>gap</em> aid, and do so. The Ivies are so not homogeneously rich (with the occasional token poor student). There are a variety of economic backgrounds represented, including the middle-middle class. The same is true, I understand, for MIT.</p>
<p>Now, I cannot deny (because I have no knowledge to accept or not accept your information) that there is some "recruitment" or "special treatment/invitations" to students of some "priviledged" groups. I'll take your word for it. But that is not the same thing as <em>excluding</em> students from non-privileged groups. Believe me, my d was given no special invitations, private conferences, consulting sessions of the "wink/wink" variety. Yet, with the "old-fashioned" avenues of application available to every other student, she was admitted to several upper-level schools with significant aid, and so were many CC students who apparently are also not wealthy. No legacies, no wealth, no inside tracks. She cannot be unique.</p>
<p>I loved the part about wrestling being an expensive aristocratic sport. Wrong on both counts.</p>
<p>Whoever leaked the confidential information on Frist's academic rating should be fired and sued. Most people graduate Princeton without honors, and lots of people from St. Albans (a very elite academic high school) get in top colleges without being in the top 20% of the class. You have to go much farther down the class rank before dropping below Ivy-level academic performance.</p>
<p>And of course lots of families who are in the COUR have Harvard affiliations. Why else would they give that much money to Harvard, instead of to the places where their kids did go to college?</p>
<p>afan --- No, wrestling in Golden's book is discussed as a cheap, working-class, mostly men's sport that is cut while womens' equestrian is added to balance gender ratios in college athletics. In this way, athletic diversity benefits rich women and hurts working class men.</p>
<p>I read the WSJ excerpt yesterday, and my alma mater (Brown) was the other case study. While I grudgingly accept the acceptances of development cases and celebrities, I am not pleased to hear that every other applicant from the HS is sometimes accepted "considering context." I could rant about that for awhile, but I don't feel like expending the energy.</p>
<p>Upthread, I commented on Stockmarket's belief that "Ivy League (Elite colleges) is a country club whose main function is to help it attendees make connections." I am glad to report that my husband said he never considered that when he applied (and got into) a handful of Ivies. And as I predicted, my daughter did give me the "huh" look and said that never occurred to her. And she does not know the SATs or GPA of any of her friends or classmates -- no, they don't discuss it, because they know that some kids do better and some do worse and they are sensitive to hurting people's feelings. </p>
<p>This is OT, but I'm getting it out -- I take breaks from CC and rarely read any board but this one because I just get creeped out by the obsession with prestige and with sentiments that education is secondary to hobnobing with the rich and famous.</p>
<p>I agree with you on the privacy issue. Unfortunately we live in an era where ALL information is and can be bought, stolen, misplaced, mishandled, requested, surveilled, tracked, by just about anyone and certainly from the Government either legally, illegally, or interpreted legal... We still have a very interesting issue with Where in the World is the precursor for WMD's in the Plame outing. </p>
<p>I would disagree, in that son Frist is part of a very powerful family. The Frist family can affect us nationally thru Senate Majority Leader Frist and thru the Frist family management of their healthPlans and the hospitals. In addition, the millions of $$ that Harvard gets from our government ultimately is approved by Senator Frist. The Frists should welcome the scrutiny as the price of power.</p>
[quote]
And "mostly upper-class backgrounds?" [African-Americans] Tell that to ohlookasquirrel, a former CC poster who got into a rash of Ivies + Stanford 2 or 3 yrs. ago. Since he came from an underperforming public, I so doubt that he would describe himself as "upper-class."
[/quote]
</p>
<p>epiphany -- I know this is a little dangerous to say considering Golden's entire book is based lots of case studies, but I've noticed a lot of your posts on this issue are based on anecdote. "I once knew a disadvantaged black guy who got into lots of Ivies" is certainly not a counterpoint to "Most black students who get into Ivies are privileged." It might be (in fact is) the case that most are privileged (i.e. high middle and upper class), and every now and then there is even an example of a working-class African-American kid who gets in.</p>
<p>epiphany wrote:
[quote]
Now, I cannot deny (because I have no knowledge to accept or not accept your information) that there is some "recruitment" or "special treatment/invitations" to students of some "priviledged" groups. I'll take your word for it. But that is not the same thing as <em>excluding</em> students from non-privileged groups.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Sure it is. It's exactly the same in practice. Every spot given to a Frist (or worse yet, an athletic recruit from a rich-people-only sport) based on tip factors related mostly to family wealth is one spot that's not available to a hardworking kid who didn't happen to win the genetic lottery. We might call it "giving preference to the rich" as opposed to "taking spots from ordinary folks" but the two things are identical in all but label.</p>
<p>newmassdad -- re #137: exactly on target! Direct discrimination/favors happen rarely nowadays (though enough to write a book about them, clearly). But subtle manipulation is king and happens A LOT:</p>
<p>
[quote]
- want more prep school kids? Weight prep school sports more heavily.
- want fewer asians? discount common asian ECs like music.
- want more middle and lower income kids? Start giving weight to part time jobs that help support the family (Yea, like this will ever happen...)
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I would add</p>
<ul>
<li>want more girls? weight "creativity", "flair" and the verbal aspects of the application more.</li>
<li>want more guys? emphasize sports like football, etc.</li>
</ul>
<p>I think these are brilliant ways to shape the class without having to be explicit about it.</p>
<p>Yes. But, like Golden, I don't really buy the argument that selling spots to marginally qualified people is the only way or even a good way to fund a university.</p>
<p>Small example: Caltech (not to toot our own horn too much) has a huge endowment to student ratio, more generous financial aid than most of the Ivies, and lots of great facilities. The people who give money for these things apparently don't need to buy spots for their kids. They're just happy to support an excellent, idealistic place. MIT, while maybe a tiny bit less "pure", is another good example.</p>
<p>I'm not claiming that Caltech has everything you could ever dream of. It just demonstrates that you can be a truly top-notch school with a lot of money and a lot of resources for financial aid without selling spots to pay for it.</p>
<p>Maybe it's time to take a hard look at the cynical fiction that selling spots is a good or legitimate way to fund top institutions of learning.</p>
<p>Ben, you will find if you were to read my posts against others in PF, that generally I am far <em>less</em> anecdotal than many frequent (& more frequent than me) posters here. But beyond that, an appropriate & accurate use of an anecdote is to deny universal statements. There are many implied universal statements here on this thread. When not universal, their implication is at the least massive. I brought up ohlookasquirrel because, if you were to read CC student forums on the Accepted threads over the last several years, you would see that he is not as much an oddity as you seem to assume. I did not bring him up as a lone example; there are many like him, many who have posted on CC. Not all of them are his ethnicity; there are a variety of ethnicities, but many of them have come from challenged, disadvantaged backgrounds & have beat out more wealthy competitors to the same privates you so accuse of favoring the rich. </p>
<p>Because you claim authority by having worked on <em>an</em> admissions committee does not give you universal knowledge of all admissions committees at all top universities. </p>
<p>I will agree with you that "most are privileged (i.e. high middle and upper class), and every now and then there is even an example of a working-class African-American kid who gets in." I would just qualify "privilege" by broadening it to include educational privilege, not just economic. (Or social privilege in possibly having educated parents who give a damn.)</p>
<p>I certainly agree about the last bit -- it seems to correlate strongly with material privilege (for obvious reasons), but the two are not always found together.</p>
<p>Just to be fair, I never claimed to know all. :-)</p>
<p>I also like the fact that marite brought up the calculus because I think mathematics continues to be the primary operating principle in college admissions.</p>
<p>Quantitative category of highly qualified applicants to highly selective institutions = HUGE</p>
<p>Quantitative category of available spots at highly selective institutions = TINY (relatively)</p>
<p>Differential = THOUSANDS OF QUALIFIED APPLICANTS UNHAPPY AND GOING ELSEWHERE. (<strong><em>Many of those rejected applicants will be rich and privileged, many will be middle class, many will be underprivileged.</em></strong>)
Subset = THOUSANDS OF UNHAPPY PARENTS OF SAME GROUPS.</p>
<p>Said parents read magazines, buy books. Love material which supports their sense of outrage & displeasure.</p>
<p>The upper privates cannot win. When they tried to do things "the old-fashioned way," they met displeasure because they were accused of being meritocracies. (Although it would seem that some parents on PF strongly prefer a return to strict meritocracy. And if you don't think THAT will favor the rich, you've been living under a rock.) When they try to create a diverse class economically, racially, socially, academically, artistically, they get accused of "manipulating admissions."</p>
<p>I'm one of the suckers who bought this book....just finished the Harvard and Duke chapter. </p>
<p>So far, the story is not new; but Golden does re-aim the light on some troublesome issues. For me, one of the most disturbing issues IS the developmental admit 'dirty little secret'. That there is no wall of separation between the fundraising office of a university and the admissions office should disturb us all. In the case of one school, (allegedly) the fundraising office actually submits a list to the admissions office of kids from wealthy families with no previous ties to the university. Any of these applicants rejected on their merits by admissions is placed in a box and the dean of admissions is required to literally cart that box upstairs so that these candidates can be reevaluated by the university powers that be. This special consideration might not be so irksome if the number of developmental admits at this particular school hasn't grown from a couple of dozen to hundreds over the years. How many truly deserving candidates have to be turned away to make way for low performing developmental admits when a school's endowment fund is already in the tens of billions of dollars? Where is the justification for this level of greed?</p>
<p>ldmom,
I agree that if there are hard facts & figures to support an assertion of exponential growth of (strictly) developmental admits who would otherwise not be qualified/competitive for admission, that does, would also concern me. But a couple of things about that: Is there proof that this is a consistent trend among all, or most similar privates? Or are such trends of limited location? (One or 2 schools, which are then extrapolated to include all or most peer schools?)</p>
<h1>2 - I think what tends to bother me more, because I see it so much face-to-face as a parent, & additionally I work in K-12 education (public & private), is the percentage of developmental admits in the K-12 privates. In my experience it has been 50% in every K-12 private I have encountered. That is extremely high & extremely significant. And, unlike in higher institutions, those developmental admits do not nearly support financial aid in the proportions that college admits often do. Generally in fact (in my region) scholarships for needy students at those schools are not generated from fundraising of those admitted families. Their donations tend to go into other funds -- such as capital campaigns, regular annual contributions to support ongoing school needs, etc. Scholarship funds tend to be taken from other sources not directly connected with current school families, their tuitions, their donations.</h1>
<p>Why is #2 important? It's important because so many of these private schools are feeders to top private colleges.</p>
<p>"Although it would seem that some parents on PF strongly prefer a return to strict meritocracy. And if you don't think THAT will favor the rich, you've been living under a rock."</p>
<p>For what it's worth I'm a parent and an academic and I strongly prefer a pure, academic meritocracy and don't care if it favors the rich. If the criteria really are very strongly correlated with objective measures of academic success I don't care if the only students are blind Inuits. I am not opposed to having different merit criteria for different elite schools. But I certainly oppose any criterion that is not designed to promote strict meritocracy and I oppose criteria which are not universally applied and which can be manipulated for non-academic social or ideological ends.</p>
<p>I don't favor regulating anyone but I think absolute transparency is the best policy. I want my university to flat out state: So and so was not the best candidate for the slot, but standards were bent or lowered because X was a legacy/AA/developmental admit/athlete.</p>
<p>Many Asian countries make extreme use of narrow test criteria in admissions. In my view this is not because they don't recognize that other criteria might matter but because they DON'T TRUST the authorities to implement other criteria in an objective, even-handed fashion. I think Golden's book will help fuel further distrust of self-serving statements made by the Elite adcoms.</p>
<p>Let's assume some colleges need to sell spots to increase their endowments. At what point is this practice no longer necessary? Is it always going to be necessary in the eyes of college administrators? We aren't talking about schools with endowments of a few million. With $11 billion does Princeton need another $25 mill for a Frist kid or the equivalent?</p>
<p>Top five schools by 2005 Endowment Value (source-NACUBO)
1 Harvard U $25,473,721,000
2 Yale U $15,224,900,000
3 Stanford U $12,205,000,000
4 U of Texas System $11,610,997,000
5 Princeton U $11,206,500,000</p>
<p>Duke, the subject of some of the book, was #16 with a 2005 endowment of 3.8 bill. The rich get richer and yet they keep selling off spots to the highest bidder. Just wondering.</p>
<p>Well, NQO, you will not get the style of transparency you seem to want (naming names, providing stats) because we have this thing in the United States called privacy rights, and further we have confidentiality agreements & assumptions. (Which is why some people are not pleased with the Frist example.)</p>
<p>To be fair also, I think you and some others misunderstand the purpose of what I will call differential or comprehensive admissions. I don't think the purpose of it is social, ideological, etc. (Although I agree there would be results in those categories, while limited results. You can "force" people to be enrolled in common classes, but not force them to mingle outside of class.) I think the purpose of differential, varied, or wholistic admissions -- however one puts it --is to recognize varieties of learning strengths that cannot be measured strictly by uniform, standardized tests, for example. I don't think it's essentially to reward people for being "different." I think it's a result of experience & concrete research that has determined that artists can be brilliant & intellectual, & that their ability to construct creative proposals, perspectives, solutions, is extremely valuable even in scientific classes (often). But those same artists do not necessarily dazzle on the standardized tests. These statements of mine are based on research I've read over the last 10 years. (And no, LOL, don't ask me for my citations because I don't have them,EEK.)</p>
<p>A recent example of a college actually experiencing that, is that MIT has revised its admissions process/application because the college has discovered that the "strictly" scientific, high-scoring variety of student without creativity is not doing well in the important creative dimensions of science/technology.</p>