Praise for

  THE PRICE OF

  ADMISSION

  “An ivory-tower expose.”

  —ATLANTIC MONTHLY

  “Provocative and stimulating… A tough investigative reporter, Golden does not hesitate to name names…. In his final chapter, Golden issues a series of sensible and hard-hitting recommendations.”

  —JEROME KARABEL, Washington Post Book World

  “I didn't want to believe that rich families and celebrities buy places for their children in America's best colleges. But Daniel Golden's evidence is overwhelming. This book should be read by everyone who cares about pre serving higher education as a route for developing talent, not rewarding privilege.”

  —DIANE RAVITCH, research professor of education at New York University and author of Left Back

  “An explosive new book.”

  —NEW YORK POST

  “Golden has fun making trouble in the best journalistic sense…. The Price of Admission is a powerful reminder that the public will increasingly require selective colleges to defend their preferences; that not all are prepared to make their complex case well; and that some of their practices, finally, seem indefensible today.”

  —HARVARD MAGAZINE

  “The Price of Admission is a muckraking morality tale with many villains and few heroes … [Golden] names names. Duke University comes off especially badly, followed by Brown, Harvard, and other Ivies.”

  —NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  “An important new book … With clarity and moral force, Golden shows that our greatest universities have been sacrificing their highest ideals on behalf of base pursuits unworthy of their names.”

  —EDUCATION SECTOR

  “Provocative … [B]lows the door off traditional notions about affirmative action and explains how whites benefit from relaxed admissions standards.”

  —SAN FRANCISCO DAILY JOURNAL

  “If you did not attend or do not teach at a prestigious university, do not play polo well enough to pass it on, and do not have a cool million lying around to buy a place in the freshman class, your child might not make it into the school he or she deserves to attend. Daniel Golden explains why in this passionately written and bitingly acute book.”

  —ALAN WOLFE, professor of political science at Boston College and author of One Nation, After All

  “This report's abundance of juicy stories of outrageous favoritism makes for an absorbing read.”

  —KIRKUS REVIEWS

  “Fascinating reading … As a body of reporting, The Price of Admission is a tour de force…. Behind-the-scenes admissions practices have probably never before been documented in such persuasive detail…. Immensely readable and enlightening.”

  —WEEKLY STANDARD

  “A chilling story of double standards and double crossings. Daniel Golden reminds us that when elite college admissions go to the highest bidders, we all pay the price.”

  —LANI GUINIER, Bennett Boskey Professor at Harvard Law School and author of Lift Every Voice

  “Makes a trenchant and convincing case that admission to America's elite universities has too often turned into a system for reinforcing wealth and privilege, rather than opening new opportunities … In the wake of this book, the university establishment has some explaining to do.”

  —JAMES FALLOWS, national correspondent of The Atlantic Monthly and author of Blind into Baghdad

  For my family

  CONTENTS

  A Note on Academic Records

  INTRODUCTION

  The Tennessee Waltz

  1 HOWTHE “Z-LIST” MAKES THE A-LIST

  Harvard's Payback for Big Donors

  2 RECRUITING THE RICH

  Development Admits at Duke

  3 THE FAME FACTOR

  Celebrity Children at Brown

  4 ENDURING LEGACIES

  Notre Dame's Other Tradition

  5 TITLE IX AND THE RISE OF THE UPPER-CLASS ATHLETE

  Fencing, Crew, and Polo Scholarships

  6 A BREAK FOR FACULTY BRATS

  Free and Easy Entry for the Children of Professors

  7 THE NEW JEWS

  Asian Americans Need Not Apply

  8 THE LEGACY ESTABLISHMENT

  Taking On Congress and the Higher Education Lobby

  9 THE CHALLENGE OF WEALTH-BLIND ADMISSIONS

  How Caltech Raises Standards—and Donations

  10 ENDING THE PREFERENCES OF PRIVILEGE

  Suggestions for Reform

  EPILOGUE

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on Academic Records

  Since college admissions offices pay considerable attention to applicants” SAT scores, this book does too. The purpose of revealing students” test scores (as well as high school grades and class ranks) is not to embarrass individuals who fall below the norm of the colleges they attend but to document the extent of admissions preferences for alumni children and other favored groups.

  SAT scores in this book are based on the old SAT, which awarded 200-800 points on math and verbal scales for a maximum 1600 score. The current SAT also includes a writing test, worth 200-800 points, for a top score of 2400. Whenever possible, SAT scores used in this book were confirmed by documents or sources besides the students themselves. The book takes no position in the long-running controversy over whether SAT scores are a useful way to evaluate college applicants and predict future achievement.

  Private high schools, which many of the college applicants described in this book attended, do not formally rank students. However, many prep schools induct students with the best grade point averages—usually the top 20 percent—into an organization called the Cum Laude Society, which is roughly comparable to the National Honor Society. Hence, this book frequently uses Cum Laude status as a mark of whether college applicants ranked in the top fifth of their prep school class.

  Introduction

  THE TENNESSEE WALTZ

  The United States would never develop an aristocracy, Alexis de Tocqueville declared in his classic 1835 study, Democracy in America. The fledgling democracy, he wrote, lacked primogeniture—the European custom of parents leaving all their wealth to their firstborn son. Without that practice, family fortunes in America would be divided among multiple descendants and gradually dwindle to nothing.

  But the great French historian underestimated the ingenuity of America's upper classes, which have all too often enhanced their wealth— and power—across generations. Elite families, it turned out, didn't need primogeniture. They developed an indirect method of preserving their status: college admissions.

  Despite the popular notion that top colleges foster the American dream of upward mobility and equal opportunity, the truth is quite different. While only a handful of low-income students penetrate the campus gates, admissions policies channel the children of the privileged into premier colleges, paving their way into leadership positions in business and government.

  Even without primogeniture, the firstborn sons of former Senate majority leader Bill Frist and former vice president Al Gore could count on a valuable inheritance: easy entry to America's foremost universities. Although their fathers are political foes, William Harrison Frist Jr. and Albert Gore III have a great deal in common. Both bear the full names of their famous fathers along with the pressure of public expectations and media scrutiny. Both have Tennessee roots but attended expensive Washington private high schools that cater to children of power. Both are stocky and played the same position—center—on their prep school football teams.

  Both were middling students who preferred partying to homework and the company of jocks to scholars. Their academic records—and, in the teenage Albert Gore Ill's case, brushes with authority—would ordinarily have destined them for second-tier colleges. Yet both were admitted ahead of thousands of stellar candidates to their first and only choices, two of the nation's best and most selective universities, Frist to Princeton and Gore to Harvard, where their fathers had gone before them.

  The two Tennesseeans waltzed into the Ivy League less on their own merit than on the basis of their paternal pedigrees. Princeton accepted Harrison Frist not because it believed in his intellectual potential but because his family had lavished tens of millions of dollars on a new student center, and his father was both a national figure and a former trustee of the university. In fact, Princeton's admissions staff gave Harrison the lowest ranking on its scale for evaluating applicants” academic credentials. Albert Gore III applied to Harvard in the fall of 2000; America's most prestigious university wouldn't pass up the son of an alumnus and former member of its board of overseers who stood several hundred disputed Florida votes away from being president of the United States.

  Once enrolled in these premier universities, the two youths hardly distinguished themselves. Harrison may be best known at Princeton for joining a rowdy, hard-drinking social club, and both were arrested on substance abuse charges. If they appeared not to value an elite college education, it may be because they didn't earn their admission; it was delivered to them as a birthright.

  Said Brandon Parry, a high school and college classmate of Frist's: “I don't think anyone ever doubted Harrison would get into Princeton.”

  THE IVY LEAGUES’ embrace of the sons of Bill Frist and Al Gore underscores a reality elite universities pretend doesn't exist—that money and connections are increasingly tainting college admissions, undermining both its credibility and value to American democracy.

  In a 1997 article, �
�The Pitfalls of a Pure Meritocracy,” a Harvard senior admissions officer named David Evans portrayed the admissions process as such universities want it to be seen—wise graybeards assembling a talented freshman class of all viewpoints and backgrounds. “Subjective evaluations” giving “some bearing” to applicants” “personal qualities,” he argued, are far superior to a “strictly merit-based system.” To explain why these universities often pass over top candidates—high school valedictorians, students with perfect SAT scores, and the like—for seemingly lesser applicants, Evans compared a college to a symphony orchestra. Just as an orchestra cannot be composed solely of violinists, he argued, so a college should be a “symbiotic whole” where “the poet converses with the scientist and the conservative philosopher debates topics … with the liberal activist.”

  This appealing vision permeates the public perception of admissions and almost all of the dozens of books and thousands of newspaper and magazine articles written about the process. It provides a convenient excuse for arbitrary decisions: asked why it rejected a student, a college can say that he or she looked wonderful on paper but didn't fit into the mix. The image of a fair but fickle process also pumps up the applicant pool: every year, hoping against hope that they might be the right match, hundreds of thousands of high school seniors with impeccable academic records seek admission to ultraexclusive colleges that take fewer than one in five candidates, while their parents spend millions of dollars they can ill afford for tutors, test-prep classes, extracurricular activities, or fancy private schools to help beat the odds.

  But this version of college admissions is fundamentally deceptive, as the orchestra analogy unwittingly reveals. To assemble its diverse array of musicians, an orchestra typically picks the best players on each instrument through blind auditions, eliminating any hint of favoritism. Imagine if the New York Philharmonic adopted the same selection criteria as Harvard, Yale, or Stanford. It would turn down a top violinist with a sublime sound in favor of a second-rate one with a screeching bow because his father had played in the orchestra himself, had endowed a rehearsal space (or was expected to do so once his son was chosen), was a famous screen actor, or controlled federal appropriations for the arts.

  Like Harrison Frist and Albert Gore III, thousands of wealthy, well-connected applicants slide into elite colleges each year with little regard to merit or diversity. They benefit instead from what I call the preferences of privilege. Although how-to-get-into-college books, college-night recruiters, and college administrators ignore or downplay their importance, the preferences of privilege aren't just pivotal in close calls. They routinely allow an academically weak applicant to leap over a strong one and can represent an admissions boost equivalent to hundreds of SAT points at Ivy League schools and other elite colleges. The children of wealth and influence occupy so many slots that the admissions odds against middle-class and working-class students with outstanding records are even longer than the colleges acknowledge.

  The preferences of privilege are nonpartisan: they benefit the wealthy and powerful across the political and cultural spectrum, Democrats and Republicans, supporters and opponents of affirmative action, left-wing Hollywood movie stars and right-wing tycoons, old-money dynasties and nouveau riche. They ensure each fresh generation of upper-class families— regardless of intelligence or academic qualifications—access to the premier colleges whose alumni hold disproportionate sway on Wall Street and in Fortune 500 companies, the media, Congress, and the judiciary. Once in college, moreover, these wealthy students are often tapped to join socially exclusive groups—eating clubs, fraternities, secret societies— where they hobnob with influential alumni and prospective employers. Recent members of Princeton's rarefied Ivy eating club, for instance, have included the niece of President Bush; the daughter of John Edwards, the 2004 Democratic vice presidential candidate; and the son of Senator Jay Rockefeller.

  This book reveals the double standard that favors rich and well-connected students applying to the one hundred or so colleges and universities, mostly private institutions, that admit fewer than half their applicants and serve as the gateway to affluence and influence in America. These students fly first-class on the college admissions journey, enjoying direct access to admissions deans who accept them outright or sneak them in through side entrances such as deferred admissions, transfers from other colleges, and “special” status. They're forgiven transgressions that would doom other candidates, from missed application deadlines to drunken driving.

  Top colleges and universities like to boast that they are “need-blind”— that is, they offer enough financial aid so that the students they admit can afford to attend. But they are not wealth-blind. They take a disproportionate number of students from prep schools, and have been known—as Duke University did under its late president Terry Sanford—to instruct recruiters specifically to pursue rich students. Motivated in the short term by the allure of gifts, colleges also fear that enrolling too many low-income students would create a poorer alumni base—and therefore reduce contributions—down the road.

  Even as admission has become increasingly competitive in recent years, premier universities still extend special preference to alumni children. Children whose parents have given big money in the past or are likely to pony up upon admission are ushered to the head of the line. At nearly all top universities, the fund-raising office furnishes admissions with a list of these “development cases,” who are often accepted even if they rank near the bottom of their high school classes or have SAT scores 300-400 points below some rejected applicants. University presidents generally have a right-hand man, from Joel Fleishman at Duke to the late David Zucconi at Brown, whose role, whatever his title, is to gratify key donors and alumni, including facilitating the admission of their children.

  Colleges also fawn on the offspring of famous people who can raise a school's visibility, from Hollywood superagent Michael Ovitz to author David Halberstam and former New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. They conciliate key faculty members with free tuition and an admissions break for their children. And while it's widely believed that the admissions preference for recruited athletes favors minority and low-income students, it actually tilts toward the white and wealthy. Offsetting minority participation in basketball, football, and track, prestigious colleges give an admissions edge to athletes in sports played mainly by upper-income whites; for instance, crew, squash, horseback riding, skiing, sailing, fencing, golf, and even—at Cornell University and the University of Virginia—polo. By spurring colleges to field women's teams in these sports, Title IX, the federal gender-equity law, has widened socioeconomic inequity and spurred an admissions and scholarship bonanza for rich women.

  Put together, these preferences of privilege amount to nothing less than affirmative action for rich white people. As such, they should be part of any debate about affirmative action for racial minorities.

  Like most Americans, I have mixed feelings about racial preferences; it is easier to justify lowering standards for an impoverished minority student from a single-parent home and inner-city high school than for an upper-middle-class minority applicant from a premier prep school, or for the student who is considered Hispanic only because he happened to be born while his father, perhaps a banker or diplomat, was posted to Latin America. But whether one is for or against affirmative action, it is important to frame that issue in context. Even as conservative critics paint affirmative action for college-bound minorities as giving African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans an unfair advantage over more capable white candidates, the truth is the reverse.

  The number of whites enjoying preference far outweighs the number of minorities aided by affirmative action. At least one-third of the students at elite universities, and at least half at liberal arts colleges, are flagged for preferential treatment in the admissions process. While minorities make up 10 to 15 percent of a typical student body, affluent whites dominate other preferred groups: recruited athletes (10 to 25 percent of students); alumni children, also known as legacies (10 to 25 percent); development cases (2 to 5 percent); children of celebrities and politicians (1 to 2 percent); and children of faculty members (1 to 3 percent). Some applicants benefit from multiple preferences, that is, a legacy may also be an athlete.