Unfair Harvard

...But that is surely preferable to cynical tribalism...

...behind-the-scenes admissions practices have probably never before been documented in such persuasive detail...

...Writing about Brown, which seems to have turned somersaults to enroll celebrity kids—think Amy Carter, the late John F Kennedy Jr., and the children or stepchildren of Ringo Starr, James Taylor, Marlon Brando, Steven Spielberg, and more—Golden tells a depressing tale of the college's efforts to woo the son of Michael Ovitz, a lackluster candidate who ultimately enrolled as a "special student" and left the university within a year...

...Yet by the time his oldest child was applying to colleges a few years ago, an entire lore had sprung up around elite college admissions, full of tales of string-pulling and preferences based on everything from wealth and race to alumni status and athletic prowess...

...For the record, Golden's sources tell him that a sliding scale prevails: A mere $20,000 will draw a second look from a modestly endowed liberal arts college, while families will need to cough up at least $100,000 to get on the radar of a top-25 school, and $250,000 or even a million-plus to crack the top 10...

...A noteworthy study in conservative contrasts: William F Buckley Jr., has defended legacy preferences, while former Senator Bob Dole opposes them...

...These startling numbers, combined with Golden's passionate opposition to discrimination against Asian Americans in the admissions process, might seem logically to lead to an across-the-board stance against preferences of all kinds...

...How much, one magnate asked him, would he need to donate to assure the admission of his academically undistinguished daughter to an Ivy League college...

...A lot more alumni children are well-rounded kids, probably because they come from more stable families," one daughter of privilege tells Golden, after observing in similarly charming fashion that the college once had "too many Asian American students...

...to legacies (sons and daughters of alumni...

...Nor, despite all we read about the growth in the ranks of the super rich, are "development admits" a significant proportion of the student bodies at elite schools...

...While he cites useful data throughout the book, it's a shame he didn't do more to wade through the available evidence about how much of a leg-up members of each group typically get, which would have grounded his anecdotes in more systematic analysis...

...Golden's chapter-by-chapter catalogue of these preferences makes for fascinating reading...

...Thus, his account of what he terms "nothing less than affirmative action for rich white people" details the preferences given to the children of celebrities and politicians...

...Had he known more about the practices documented in Golden's compelling brief against admissions breaks for the privileged, I suspect he would have had an even stronger reaction: disgust...

...to development cases (applicants whose wealthy families either have given large sums of money to the college in the past, may plausibly be expected to do so in the future, or both...

...So he is left with a scattershot reform platform: no to legacy and donor preferences...

...But while Golden expresses ambivalence about racial preferences, a throwaway line in his final chapter declares that it is too soon to jettison them for blacks and Hispanics...

...Another key tip: Proposing a direct quid pro quo during admissions season is considered gauche...

...its admissions dean told Golden that the average SAT score of its legacies is only a few points below the school's mean...

...and yes to racial preferences for blacks and Hispan-ics...

...Still, the biggest weakness of The Price of Admission might be that it lacks perspective about the scale of the preferences it critiques...

...The cumulative weight of the legacy, donor, celebrity, and upper-crust-sports preferences he decries is significant...

...As a body of reporting, The Price of Admission is a tour de force...

...Building on, and adding substantially to, a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize), Golden, the newspaper's deputy Boston bureau chief, depicts an admissions spoils system that extends far beyond the racial preferences often denounced by conservatives and disliked by most Americans...

...better to take the genteel path and negotiate through an intermediary...

...A public school graduate whose parents never went to college, he received a bachelor's degree from one of California's premier state schools, went on to work in Washington, D.C., earned a doctorate at night, then forged a successful career at the International Monetary Fund, all without benefit of money, celebrity, or connections of any kind...

...Golden reveals the existence of plugged-in "fixers" at top universities, who serve as wranglers and handlers of families with fame, political connections, money, or some combination of the three...

...And if his case for a more level educational playing field is not always rigorously consistent, it is immensely readable and enlightening—not a bad combination when dealing with a too-little-examined set of practices that can only benefit from more public discussion...

...yes to football and basketball scholarships...

...As Golden notes in his introduction, by far the three largest groups subject to admissions preferences are recruited athletes, legacies, and "under-represented" minorities, i.e., blacks and Hispanics...

...But his willingness to name names and to discuss individual students' SAT scores and high-school grades is vital to his account...

...And because athletic prowess is not simply a matter of birth but rewards "a candidate's own hard work and excellence," he is willing to preserve an admissions boost in the popular sports that are available to most American children...

...It is hard to see the underlying principle that makes this a coherent package...

...and even to the offspring of faculty members...

...At Harvard, for instance, Golden musters The Price of Admission How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates by Daniel Golden Crown, 336 pp., $25.95 evidence that, in recent years, a disproportionate share of the children of big donors managed to graduate without honors, an especially dubious accomplishment at a school where only one in 10 graduates failed to receive some kind of graduation honor in 2004...

...Perhaps Harvard isn't representative...

...News & World Report, recently served as a consultant to the federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education...

...by Ben Wildavsky As I read Daniel Golden's impressive new book on the many ways in which meritocracy is honored in the breach at the nation's top private universities, I couldn't help wondering what my late brother-in-law would have made of it...

...I recall my brother-in-law's impatience as he observed this process...

...Their comments, akin to those sometimes heard from black and Hispanic students, struck a chord for me because of my own unease, as an Ivy League undergraduate two decades ago, as to whether my father's grad-school degree from the same institution might have contributed to my admission...

...His discussion of legacy preference, which he argues "strikes at the heart of American notions of equal opportunity and upward mobility," includes soul-searching quotes from students troubled by the admissions breaks they received...

...Golden also recounts some appalling interviews with legacies that suggest old-fashioned snobbery is alive and well even in the bien-pensant Ivies: "It's important to Harvard to have people who know what it means to work hard, make good friends, and go out at night...

...The story Golden tells here is one in which the high-minded rhetoric of first-tier universities, whereby applicants are told that they will be selected on the basis of some elusive but legitimateBen Wildavsky, a senior fellow in research and policy at the Ewing Marion Kaufman Foundation, and former education editor of U.S...

...Indeed, Golden acknowledges ruefully that some readers of his original Journal series viewed it not as an expose but as a roadmap...

...Golden, himself a Harvard graduate (and a friendly acquaintance of mine from education/journalism circles), has been accused of naivete and self-righteous-ness—a New York Times reviewer called his book "dishy" and "mean-spirited...

...For instance, when former Princeton president and affirmative-action supporter William Bowen studied a group of elite institutions for a book promoting greater socioeconomic diversity in college admissions, he found that recruited athletes enjoyed the biggest admissions advantage, followed closely by minorities and, at a middle distance, by legacies...

...Nevertheless, Golden is on to something important, which is why his wide-ranging book deserves to be taken very seriously...

...Critics may say that Golden is guilty of naive idealism...

...He relates Duke's assiduous courting of the children of prospective donors, including two sons of Ralph Lauren, who later made a six-figure donation to the university...

...Everybody knows what they're buying," the private college counselor hired by the Lauren family told Golden...

...An applicant whose academic qualifications alone would dictate an admissions probability of 40 percent, for example, could expect to see his or her odds shoot up to 70 percent if a recruited athlete, to 68 percent if black or Hispanic, and to 60 percent if a legacy...

...He describes such little known phenomena as Harvard's "Z-list," whereby 25 to 30 well-connected but sub-par candidates are admitted to the insanely competitive university each year on the sole condition that they take a year off before enrolling...

...Nobody should underestimate just how difficult it is to pry this sort of concrete information on admissions preferences from colleges and universities that are notoriously thin-skinned about even mild forms of public scrutiny...

...After all, there just aren't that many children of politicians and celebrities applying to college...

...sounding combination of academic and extracurricular talents, is compromised not occasionally but all too frequently...

...Colleges and wealthy families are on the prowl for mutually advantageous deals...

...no to admissions breaks for squash and polo players...

...And while those admissions breaks may be perfectly legal, nobody should doubt for a minute that they offend the meritocratic sensibility...

...Golden estimates their numbers, without citing a source, at 2 to 5 percent...

...While being clubbable apparently still increases one's chances in the admissions lottery (particularly when legacy status and family money are combined), it doesn't always translate into academic success...

...to recruited athletes (Golden zeroes in on how Title IX has, improbably, boosted the prospects of young women playing preppy sports such as squash, sailing, crew, fencing, and water polo...

...The code words you use are, 'This is a development family...