<p>This is a serious question (even though a hypothetical one)</p>
<p>How much would someone have to pay to get into a top Ivy league school?</p>
<p>enough to buy a building or two.</p>
<p>It depends on your existing credentials.</p>
<p>I would say about one building, my cousin did that and got into one of the ivies and is currently attending there.</p>
<p>I would guess at least 5-10 million dollars. I don't think one million dollars would do anything.</p>
<p>Harvard's admissions of gilt
By Alex Beam, Globe Columnist | September 4, 2006</p>
<p>Can you buy your way into Harvard? Of course you can, if my friend Dan Golden's new book, <code>The Price of Admission," is to be believed. You can also buy your way into Duke -- home of the notorious</code>development admits , " where fund-raisers collaborate on admissions decisions -- and many other top-tier universities in the country.</p>
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Sign up for: Globe Headlines e-mail | Breaking News Alerts Golden's book is a well-reported critique of what amounts to affirmative action for rich people, who enjoy a panoply of preferences in the college admission process that outsiders could never dream of. The best-known examples are <code>legacy" admissions for alumni children; scholarships reserved for upper-class sports, such as rowing; and the ultimate preference: dough. When you read how Harvard treats the children of its fat - cat Committee on University Resources -- who enjoy such perks as sit-downs with the director of admissions, personal campus tours, and access to the coveted</code>Z-list" of deferred applicants -- suddenly real affirmative action for people who need it doesn't seem like such a bad idea.</p>
<p>The most egregious example of pay-for-Crimson - play is that of Jared Kushner , now the youthful owner of The New York Observer. While Jared was applying to colleges, his dad, New Jersey billionaire developer Charles Kushner , pledged $2.5 million to Harvard, to be paid in installments. (Kushner pere pleaded guilty to tax evasion and other counts in 2004 and recently completed a prison sentence.) An official at Kushner's high school told Golden: ``There was no way anybody in . . . the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard. His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it. We thought, for sure, there was no way this was going to happen." Kushner graduated from Harvard in 2003.
A spokesman for Kushner said he would not be available for comment. In a prepared statement, Harvard admissions dean William Fitzsimmons affirmed that ``all students admitted to Harvard are fully qualified to be here."</p>
<p>A modest proposal
There is another rich people's preference that I would like to see abolished: the use of high-priced consultants who sometimes manage high schoolers' careers, and then more or less complete the college applications for them.</p>
<p>Although these services have spread like wildfire during the past 20 years -- indeed, I am a former customer -- the public got a rare glimpse of one during the recent Kaavya Viswanathan brouhaha. She was the Harvard undergrad who wrote -- well, actually, didn't write -- a book about a young woman like her who successfully gamed the college admissions process. It was revealed that when she was in high school, her parents retained a private college counseling service called IvyWise that charges as much as $30,000 for its work.</p>
<p>Here's my idea: Make applicants sign a statement saying they received no outside counseling in preparing their application. Or take the IRS Form 1040 route, which requires that you identify your tax preparer. If a high schooler used a consultant, say who it was. If one of the elite universities required this, the others would follow suit, and these consultants would be out of business.</p>
<p>College admissions types like to play down the value of these consultants. Could that be because one of the few lucrative job opportunities for former admissions officers happens to be as a $500-an-hour college admissions counselor? Just asking.</p>
<p>Yale dean of admissions Jeff Brenzel addressed this question at some length. He pointed out that applications used by both Yale and Harvard require the student to certify that the submission <code>is my own work," and added:</code>It is unfortunate that these consultants have gotten a foothold due to parental anxiety among the affluent. If parents are willing to have their children's high school careers managed on the basis of a false notion of what might appeal to a handful of selective colleges, then there's something seriously awry with the parental outlook."</p>
<p>Brenzel stopped short of signing on to my campaign to eliminate these parasites -- my word, not his -- altogether. <code>It's an intriguing idea," he said.</code>But I would be reluctant to get into the business of managing how students apply to college."</p>
<p>Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is <a href="mailto:beam@globe.com">beam@globe.com</a>. </p>
<p>© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.</p>
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<p>With that kind of money I'd start my own Dennys</p>
<p>Today, 05:54 PM #521
neutralnuke
Junior Member</p>
<p>Join Date: Jul 2005
Posts: 91</p>
<p>i'll just post it here:
"Poison Ivy"</p>
<p>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 bookThe Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Collegesand Who Gets Left Outside the Gatesthat deserves to become a classic.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The American establishment is extraordinarily good at getting its children into the best colleges. In the last presidential election both candidatesGeorge Bush and John Kerrywere 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 lista list of applicants who are given a place after a year's deferment to catch upthat is dominated by the children of rich alumni.</p>
<p>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 Bushthe president's niece and a top fashion modeldespite 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.)</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Why do Mr Golden's findings matter so much? The most important reason is that America is witnessing a potentially explosive combination of trends. Social inequality is rising at a time when the escalators of social mobility are slowing (America has lower levels of social mobility than most European countries). The returns on higher education are rising: the median earnings in 2000 of Americans with a bachelor's degree or higher were about double those of high-school leavers. But elite universities are becoming more socially exclusive. Between 1980 and 1992, for example, the proportion of disadvantaged children in four-year colleges fell slightly (from 29% to 28%) while the proportion of well-to-do children rose substantially (from 55% to 66%).</p>
<p>Mr Golden's findings do not account for all of this. Get rid of affirmative action for the rich, and rich children will still do better. But they clearly account for some differences: unhooked candidates are competing for just 40% of university places. And they raise all sorts of issues of justice and hypocrisy. What is one to make of Mr Frist, who opposes affirmative action for minorities while practising it for his own son?</p>
<p>The poor left behind
Two groups of people overwhelmingly bear the burden of these policiesAsian-Americans and poor whites. Asian-Americans are the new Jews, held to higher standards (they need to score at least 50 points higher than non-Asians even to be in the game) and frequently stigmatised for their characters (Harvard evaluators persistently rated Asian-Americans below whites on personal qualities). When the University of California, Berkeley briefly considered introducing means-based affirmative action, it rejected the idea on the ground that using poverty yields a lot of poor white kids and poor Asian kids.</p>
<p>There are a few signs that the winds of reform are blowing. Several elite universities have expanded financial aid for poor children. Texas A&M has got rid of legacy preferences. Only last week Harvard announced that it was getting rid of early admissiona system that favours privileged childrenand Princeton rapidly followed suit. But the wind is going to have to blow a heck of a lot harder, and for a heck of a lot longer, before America's money-addicted and legacy-loving universities can be shamed into returning to what ought to have been their guiding principle all along: admitting people to university on the basis of their intellectual ability.
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