The indisputable fact is that kusher’s father ponies up 2.5 million to a school he has no ties to, and 2 of his children get in. It’s possible both would have gotten in solely on their merits, but it really seems like Dad had doubts and bought an insurance policy.
If we are talking about private universities like HYPSM, they get their funding sources largely from private entities. I think we need to respect their admission policies if they really want to favor kids from wealthy families (personally, I doubt the scope of it given the amount of financial aids they have been provided to many of their students).
If we, the people, do not like these private universities’ admission policies, we ought to nurture/create our own elite public universities that can be even better/stronger than these private universities. To do so, we need to be willing to adequately fund public universities.
While those colleges give excellent financial aid to those middle and lower income students whom they admit, their admission processes and criteria do produce admission classes that are highly skewed toward scions of wealth. Typically close to half come from families wealthy enough to get no financial aid, which means the top few percent in monetary terms.
For that to happen, there will need to be a fundamental alteration in our society in what we want out of education and the means to carry it out.
For instance, in many countries where the public universities are the best universities with some comparable to our elite private colleges(i.e. Oxbridge, LSE, etc) for undergrad education, higher education is administered in a much more centralized fashion and the cultural ideas are often flipped regarding public vs private run educational institutions.
Many such societies have cultures where its the publicly run colleges which are elite and provide the best educations for the highest academic achievers and the private colleges are lower-tiered and meant for those who don’t make the cut. Granted, a large part of this is a difference in cultural perceptions where most of the public regard public spending on education from K-university is a good thing and should be highly supported.
Not that it’s a “waste of taxpayer money” and that one should expect increasingly high performance/outcomes while cutting education budgets to the bone.
The father gave to many educational entities. It’s been said, $100mm. Someone else can dig for details. But so far, you’re jumping to the conclusion he gave to buy a seat and thus his kid got in with marginal worthiness. And from that, leaping to conclusions about other rich parents and their subpar kids . “Must be!! I smell a rat!”
There are lots of wealthy kids at various colleges. Are they all just there because they’re rich? Is it possible they’re also qualified?
The flip side is many posters who also “assume” URMs are not qualified. They don’t know this , but they…well…just know. How?
It’s not jumping to conclusions to say that Jared Kushner turned down the opportunity to apply to Harvard the usual way. He faced the choice between sending in his application like everyone else and having Daddy reach into his pockets to game the system and get an advantage. As a matter of policy, I wish colleges would either 1) reject outright or 2) make completely transparent this kind of development / bribery. As a matter of personal principle, I want my kids to get into college without multi-million-dollar bribes.
Huh? What do you really know about this? You think he didn’t apply, he just got the secret handshake?
Don’t go on hearsay, if you have hs kids. Or purported experts, making $ off others’ gullibility. Better informed is worth it. As it is, too many just go on what someone else heard someone else say.
If I were applying to Harvard and a relative of mine offered to put up 2.5 million to “help” my application, I’d be insulted and I’d reject the offer out of hand. It’s obviously an attempt to gain an extra advantage.
Speculation. Assumptions. Outrage. And all about nearly 20 years ago, some vague statements. "If he’s admitted. " Didn’t “apply to Harvard the usual way.” Now, that he “chose” to game. You smell a rat, so it must be.
Incorrect. In trying to justify the Harvard bribe the spokesperson said:
“more than $100 million to universities, hospitals and other charitable causes”
No mention or proof of a single additional gift to another school.
The pay for play was targeted for Harvard.
A good friend of mine is a Harvard professor. He is also very dynamic. From time to time, he is called upon to give a visiting major donor a tour of his lab or a talk about the field more broadly. Sometimes the donor is being trailed by a young person of college application age. I am sure this is purely coincidental.
From QuantMech’s Emporium: A Cyber Monday Special! Top-Quality Admissions Staffer Specs. Slip on a pair of these babies when you look at the application from Throckmorton Q. Throckmorton IV (no resemblance intended to any real person, living or dead), and you will never have to deal with the embarrassment of mistaking an application from a rare hexagonal ice crystal for an application from a completely ordinary special snowflake.
But, seriously, you probably don’t even need those specs in order to discern what Tom Wolfe called the “Masters of the Universe” mindset in the thinking that Throckmorton’s application reveals. Why bother with “pricey” service trips to Central America, and risk writing a total yawner of an essay about how you learned that people are the same everywhere, and that they can be happy with far fewer material goods, when instead you can engage Halliburton to completely revamp the infrastructure of a village–which you don’t even have to visit yourself–and then you can write a unique essay that shows much more adult thinking. Furthermore, you don’t consider those trips “pricey,” and if you want to see how people can get along with fewer material goods, you can visit the home of the scholarship kid at your boarding school whose family barely makes it into the top 1%.
To quote from The Price of Admission, Jared Kushner’s father donated to NYU, Cornell, and Princeton.
You may not have noticed, but many hospitals are closely associated with universities. Thus, a gift to a hospital could well be considered a gift to the associated university. Of course, the hospitals associated with universities and medical schools are also the sites for a great deal of medical research.
However, given that the current Harvard Capital Campaign recently passed $7 billion, I don’t think a small gift of a couple of million would have made a difference. http://harvardmagazine.com/2016/09/harvard-capital-campaign-7-billion
Is it not the case that “development applicants” (i.e. children of major donors) get special attention from most of the highly selective universities?
I don’t think it is worthwhile to ask whether a student can do “the work,” when most universities have very large number of courses (mine has about 6,000), and there are many routes to a degree, with quite different levels of demand for understanding and effort. I do not mean STEM vs. non-STEM. There are highly demanding degrees in both areas and less demanding degrees in both areas. The ability to complete a degree on the easiest route through the college–that’s not the admissions yardstick for most applicants, is it?
Caltech maybe has “the work,” but even there, some options are more difficult than others.
Finally, I’d like to take issue with the use of “wealthy” in the title of the thread. I don’t know where other posters set the cut-off line for “wealthy,” but I’m guessing that the ability to donate $100 million or more is well above that line, in the terminology that most of us would use. This level of wealth needs a different designation, in my opinion.
So he bribed 3 schools with one off donations? Interesting new strategy for building a college list …
The young Jared won a place at Harvard despite poor grades, according to Daniel Golden, author of The Price of Admissions: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges. The year of his admission, according to Mr Golden’s book, Charles Kushner donated $2.5 million to the university, along with similar one-off donations to Cornell and Princeton.
Re Periwinkle’s post: While I agree in part with post #53, our development office has the concept of “giving capacity” (maybe not exactly that terminology, but you get the idea). So if someone gives $2.5 million, and he has completely wiped out his retirement savings, that gift doesn’t have the interest-generating power of a gift of $2.5 million from someone who has given $100 million and has the capacity to give a great deal more.
Well, so, becoming curious about Charles Kushner, I’ve discovered through the internet this morning that he was a major philanthropist, especially in Jewish circles, before his arrest. http://forward.com/news/5002/garden-state-philanthropist-arrested/
Some of his donations:
http://www.liquisearch.com/charles_kushner/philanthropy
In context, I would regard the donations to Harvard and the other institutions as indications of family interest in allowing their children to attend, if accepted. As Kushner himself graduated from Hofstra, according to Wikipedia, his accompanying donations to Hofstra signify a deep connection to the university. The donations to Harvard, NYU, Cornell, Princeton, etc. do not seem to be on the scale Kushner could have given, were he really trying to “bribe” the schools.
I admire the charitable impulse that leads some posters to resist the assumption that any particular Harvard admit didn’t get in on his own merits. Certainly, it’s true that you can’t know for sure that any particular hooked candidate (including development cases, recruited athletes, legacies, and URMs) wouldn’t have gotten in without the hook. But statistically, you can have a pretty strong idea that many, if not most, of them would not have done so. Indeed, for a specific example, the Ivies crafted the Academic Index to limit how many students get in for athletic prowess who would not have gotten in otherwise. My grasp on reality tells me that it’s the same for development cases–the ability to give millions of dollars is highly likely to result in the admission of some candidates who would not otherwise have been admitted. Not all, though. (As for Kushner, who knows? Although to believe that he got in entirely on his own merits pretty much requires that you think the quotes about him from a high school official were lies.)
But this whole conversation is, to me, like one in which the chief of police is shocked, shocked to learn that gambling is going on in this establishment. It’s been common knowledge for as long as I can remember that rich people can get their kids into college by giving money, or by promising to give money. This isn’t news, and it doesn’t affect that many people. (I’ll bet there are ten times as many, if not more, athletic recruits with sub-par stats than there are development cases at Harvard each year–for some reason, people don’t crusade against them very much–and since Yale beat Harvard this year, that’s unlikely to change.)
One other note: some have asked why an alumni parent would stop giving to his alma mater if it rejected his own kid. My answer to this is that I give to my college because I like it. If it rejected my kid, I wouldn’t like it nearly as much. There are plenty of other charities vying for my cash.