Book Review: Daniel Golden's "The Price of Admission"
Daniel Golden's "The Price of Admission" (2006)
Fitz E. Barringer
December 2006
A Master Card commercial for college admissions might read something like this: “SAT Prep book: $24. Private English tutor for a better application essay: $490. Getting into the college of your dreams: Priceless.” Right?
Wrong.
According to Daniel Golden’s The Price of Admission, if your dream college is a prestigious private institution like Harvard, Yale, or even Duke, a more appropriate tagline might list a very hefty price, in some cases north of $3 million. America’s elite universities, Golden says, are showing favoritism towards the country’s most wealthy sons and daughters, many of whom are not academically qualified to attend some of America’s worst colleges – let alone leading institutions in the Ivy League.
Indeed, if we accept Golden’s account of the situation, wealthy students in our Master Card commercial might not want to waste their money on efforts to improve their SAT scores or application essays. Increasingly, a parent’s substantial donation to a private university’s endowment fund or building campaign – not a student’s academic merit – is the determining factor of admission to the country’s top private universities.
Golden, an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal who covers education, documents dozens of cases where prestigious universities passed over exceptionally qualified students in favor of students whose parents are wealthy alumni or generous donors. Using his journalistic flair, Golden employs a wide range of literary tactics to take the reader behind the scenes of the college admissions process. And in so doing, he effectively weaves interviews, admission statistics, and narratives into a readable and noteworthy exposé of elite universities’ sordid admissions processes.
Each of The Price of Admission’s chapters focuses on a different university and points out how that college’s fund-raising department tweaks – or simply overrides – the admissions process to allow the most wealthy, connected, or famous students to enroll at the school at the expense of more qualified students.
One chapter, for instance, focuses on how Harvard admits under-qualified students through creative admissions practices. Wealthy parents with academically weak children, Golden writes, are encouraged to join Harvard’s advisory group, the Committee on University Resources (COUR). COUR members, many of whom are alumni, must give a minimum of $1 million to join the group. In return for their substantial contributions, however, parents buy their children something that even hard work will not guarantee: admission to Harvard University.
While Harvard regularly turns away nine out of ten applicants, Golden reports that over half of COUR members have had at least one child enrolled at Harvard. And because some COUR members do not have children that apply to Harvard, while others have no children at all, Golden estimates that over the past ten years Harvard has admitted one child for every major donor – a figure he calls “astonishing.” Based on Golden’s calculations, therefore, having a parent in COUR is statistically more important than having a perfect score on the SAT.
Other chapters of The Price of Admission, meanwhile, explore how colleges use athletics, special waitlists, legacy privileges, and deferred enrollments to allow wealthy students to enter their freshman classes. But while Harvard, Yale, and some of the other Ivy League schools receive a good portion of The Price of Admission’s criticism, Golden saves some of his most forceful evidence for his discussion of Duke University’s admissions process. He details how former Duke presidents Terry Sanford and Nannerl Koehane targeted wealthy applicants by sending university recruiters to the nation’s elite prep schools – often for private visits with wealthy applicants and their families.
Although many of these applicants came from successful families, Golden states that the would-be students were often well below average when compared to typical Duke applicants. Some wealthy applicants had poor SAT scores while others were struggling through high school – yet all were recruited to attend Duke. Indeed, according to a former Duke admissions director, Sanford insisted that he receive final say on the fate of wealthy applicants. Whenever the admissions department intended to reject an applicant flagged by the fund-raising department as the relative of a potential donor, Sanford himself personally reviewed the application, and often chose to override the admissions department’s rejection.
If such tactics are morally questionable, Duke’s strategy has been enormously successful from a financial perspective. Using their creative admissions process, presidents Sanford and Koehane helped boost Duke’s endowment from just $135 million in 1980 to a staggering $3.8 billion by 2006. While most universities have prospered in the years since 1980, Golden points out that Duke has been more successful than some of its peer institutions whose admissions rely more heavily – although by no means exclusively – on merit. Since 1980, after all, Duke’s endowment has risen from 25th in the nation to 16th today.
Money aside, Golden effectively weaves an important question throughout his book: “What is the cost of this financial favoritism to America’s academic system and the ‘American Dream’?” America, after all, has for a long time seen itself as a meritocracy. As a culture we expect those who work hard will be rewarded for their efforts. But as elite colleges increasingly opt for the richest – rather than the most qualified – applicants, the United States risks loosing a piece of its valuable heritage and its emphasis on hard work.
Golden also points out that the decision to favor wealthy students has come at the expense of those students who strive for academic success. For every wealthy student admitted to the likes of Harvard and Yale, Golden gives examples of countless students who are rejected from the same schools – often for no other reason than that they do not possess that asset which elite universities so covet: money.
The true lesson that America’s elite universities are teaching the nation, therefore, is that money, status, and connection are the new determinants of success. A person’s wallet, not his effort, is the great distinguisher of the twenty-first century.
Golden rightly sees this result as a great danger to America’s continued success. While many rejected applicants often find success at other wonderful universities, Golden points out that the wealthy students accepted to Harvard or Yale are the ones who get the first crack at the best jobs and internships. When elite universities favor those who do not deserve to be at the school, therefore, they undermine the merit based system that has made America great.
In his conclusion, Golden points out some possible solutions to the problem. He argues that Universities should end legacy preferences and create barriers between a university’s fund-raising and admission departments, for example. Unfortunately, after reading Golden’s 280-page exposition on the rampant greed and favoritism present in the nation’s top academic institutions, it is difficult to find his recommendations to be anything less than utopian.
Given time, of course, even the likes of Harvard and Duke could reform their admissions practices. But for that to happen, such universities will have to break their addictions to big donations and return their focus to instructing America's most worthy students. Until then, fair admissions practices will exist only at the elite universities of our dreams.
