The Rich Have Bought Their Way Into Elite Colleges for Decades
White House senior adviser Jared Kushner's admission to Harvard has long
been a subject of controversy. (Michael Sohn / AP)
This story was co-published with The Washington Post.
My 2006 book, "The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its
Way into Elite Colleges - and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates," was intended
as a work of investigative journalism.
But many of its more affluent readers embraced it as a "how to" guide. For
years afterward, they inundated me with questions like, "How much do I have
to donate to get my son (or daughter) into Harvard (or Yale, or Stanford)?"
Some even offered me significant sums, which I declined, to serve as an
admissions consultant.
They may have been motivated by a tale I told in the book about a youth
whose admission to Harvard appears to have been cemented by a $2.5 million
pledge from his wealthy developer father. The then-obscure Harvardian would
later vault to prominence in public life; his name was Jared Kushner.
Those requests from people who misunderstood my aim in writing the book came
back to mind on Tuesday when I heard about the latest and most brazen
scandal involving upper-crust parents - including chief executives, real
estate investors, a fashion designer and two prominent actresses -
manipulating college admissions.
One would think that the rich and famous would care less than the rest of us
about foisting their children on elite colleges. After all, their kids are
likely to be financially secure no matter where, or if, they go to college.
Yet they seem even more desperate - to the extent, according to a complaint,
that dozens of well-heeled parents ponied up six or seven figures for bogus
SAT scores and athletic profiles for their children to increase their
chances at Yale, Stanford and other brand-name universities.
The parents allegedly paid anywhere between $200,000 and $6.5 million to
William Rick Singer, who ran a college counseling business in Newport Beach,
California. Singer in turn bribed standardized test administrators and
college coaches in upper-class sports like crew, sailing and water polo,
even staging photos of the applicants playing various sports, prosecutors
said.
The parents "chose to corrupt and illegally manipulate the system," Andrew
Lelling, U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, said at a press conference
Tuesday. "There can be no separate college admissions system for the
wealthy."
Perhaps these parents were pining to boast at Hollywood cocktail parties
about their Ivy League imprimatur. Possibly their offspring, like those of
many successful families, lacked the motivation to strive and excel
academically, and without a substantial boost would have been consigned to
colleges of lesser repute.
In any event, such allegedly criminal tactics represent the logical, if
extreme, outgrowth of practices that have long been prevalent under the
surface of college admissions, and that undermine the American credos of
upward mobility and equal opportunity. Although top college administrators
and admissions officials were apparently unaware of the deception, their
institutions do bear some responsibility for developing and perpetuating the
system that made it possible.
I began looking into this issue in 2003, at a time when the U.S. Supreme
Court was considering the fairness of affirmative action for minorities. I
documented another form of affirmative action - for the white and
privileged.
According to one poll after another, most Americans believe that college
admissions should be based on merit, rather than wealth or lineage. Through
their own intelligence and hard work, students with the best grades, the
highest test scores, the most compelling recommendations and other
hard-earned credentials achieve a coveted ticket to higher education - and
with it, enhanced prospects for career success and social status. So goes
the legend perpetuated by elite colleges, anyway.
But decades of investigating college admissions have led me to conclude
that, for rich and famous families, it's more like a television game show,
"Who Wants to Be an Ivy Leaguer?" complete with lifelines for those who
might otherwise be rejected. Instead of phoning a friend or asking the
audience, the wealthy benefit from advantages largely unavailable to
middle-class and poor Americans - what I described in my book as "the
preferences of privilege."
The best-known and most widespread of those preferences is conferred on
alumni children, known as "legacies," who tend as a group to be
disproportionately white and well-off. But rich applicants whose parents
didn't attend the target university, like Kushner, still have a leg up.
Rich candidates can enhance their standardized test scores with test-prep
and tutoring. They don't have to rely for college recommendations and advice
on an overburdened public high school guidance counselor with a caseload of
hundreds of students. Instead, their parents can afford a private counselor
who discreetly advises the desired university that the family has a history
of philanthropy and, in case of acceptance, would be inclined to be
especially generous.
Similarly, inner-city schools often don't field teams in patrician sports
like crew, squash, fencing and the like. But prep and suburban schools do,
giving their affluent students an opportunity for the significant edge given
to recruited athletes, even in upper-class sports limited to a relative few.
Colleges favor recruits in these sports at least partly for fundraising
reasons; they're important to wealthy alumni and donors who played them in
college or enjoy them as leisure activities.
So the parents charged in the current case followed customary practices of
the entitled: hiring a private counselor, getting test help and
participating in a patrician sport. The difference is that they allegedly
took blatant short cuts: The counselor was unscrupulous, a stand-in secretly
took the tests and the applicants didn't actually play those sports. But,
without the tilted system of preferences already in place, the parents would
have had to choose a different route - or actually let merit determine their
children's college destiny.
Daniel Golden / ProPublica
