The Study of Racialism

"affirmative action for rich white people,"

CLA$$ SELECTION AT IVY HALLS

INJUSTICE LEAGUE REVEALED
By WILLIAM GEORGIADES

August 27, 2006 -- The country's most elite colleges turn away deserving students to admit the less talented offspring of alumni and of wealthy and powerful parents, according to an explosive new book.
"One of the last taboos among America's aristocracy is talking - or writing - about pulling strings in college admissions," writes Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden in "The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges - And Who Gets Left Outside the Gates."

In what Golden calls "affirmative action for rich white people," colleges like Brown, Princeton and Harvard ignore poor SAT scores and other factors in favor of alumni connections, celebrity parents and generous donors.

An advance copy of the book, being published by Crown and due in bookstores Sept. 5, cites the following examples:

- Christopher Ovitz, son of Michael Ovitz, "had a mediocre academic record and a middle-school suspension for swinging a baseball bat at a female classmate." Brown University admitted him as "a special student." He didn't last a year.

- The now-disgraced New Jersey real-estate developer Charlie Kushner pledged $2.5 million to Harvard in 1998. A year later, his son Jared, who recently bought The New York Observer, was admitted to Harvard despite having test scores "well below Ivy League standards." Then "Kushner gave $3 million to endow an undergraduate deanship at NYU in July 2001; his daughter, Dara, enrolled that fall." In 2003, Jared went on to NYU Law.

- Model Lauren Bush, niece of President Bush, applied to Princeton in February 2002, a month after its application deadline had passed. She was granted a "special dispensation" despite "SAT scores considerably below the typical Princeton student."

- David Zucconi, a Brown administrator, "helped guide Jane Fonda's daughter, Vanessa Vadim, through the admission process." Later, the actress "gave $750,000 anonymously for minority scholarships."

Golden details how "university presidents generally have a right-hand man, from Joel Fleishman at Duke to the late David Zucconi at Brown, whose role is to gratify key donors and alumni, including facilitating the admission of their children."

How unfair is it?

The sons of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and former Vice President Al Gore, "both middling students who preferred partying to homework," according to Golden, were admitted to Princeton and Harvard, respectively, "where their fathers had gone before them."

Elite offspring who do get in say there's a reason for the uneven selection system.

Frances Cashin, who followed her dad, Richard, an investment manager and big-time donor, into Harvard, told the author that "any college has to be careful about the students it lets in from a social perspective . . . It's important to Harvard to have people who know what it means to work hard, make good friends, and go out at night. A lot more alumni children are well-rounded kids, probably because they come from more stable families."

But so many spaces at elite universities are reserved for well-connected students, lamented a Notre Dame official quoted by the author, that "the poor schmuck who has to get in on his own has to walk on water."

Funny and true.

Affirmative action is seen as okay as long as it helps the privilleged keep their privillege.

When AA helps the non privilleged, especially those of African ancestry, then it's cause for outrage.

Not that I think AA is an entirely good thing. It's too often applied in a way that's wrong headed or excessive, and winds up doing more harm than good.

Still, none of those preppies are turning down their Ivy invites because it's bad for their character, or because it stigmatizes them as inferior.

(Brownie, yer doin' a heckuva job! )

The article implies, at least to me, that most rich (white) people get into Ivy League schools this way or that most whites in the Ivy League are wealthy.

Do most well off whites get into Ivy League schools because they are legacies with lower test scores than other applicants? Are most black students at Ivy League schools, though officially "underprivileged", truly disadvantaged?

Pointing out the fact that some well-off whites get into these schools with grades and scores below what is acceptable in these institutions doesn’t justify lowering the academic standards for minorities as a group, if that is what’s happening.

What article explains is that wealthy whites have benefited from Affirmative Action for generations with no stigma associated. Instead, their admittance into Ivy League schools without the academic merit is shrugged off. Note how one of the admittees explains that her coming from a stable family is what is really important.

What the article implies is that those wealthy whites whose test scores are sub-par, but are legacies or the children of the influential, are representative of all wealthy whites who attend these schools. Hence the conclusion that wealthy whites have benefitted from affirmative action for generations.

There is no evidence that these kinds of wealthy whites are representative of wealthy whites who get accepted to these schools. And the preferential treatment they receive should not be used to justify accepting black students with similar scores, most of whom are not from low-income backgrounds.

I don't think that it matters whether White legacy students can be shown to have lower standardized test scores or not. The issue is that, given any test score, a White legacy student does not have to justify his or her existence at said university. Their accomplishments, or lack thereof, are not seriously questioned or challenged. This is obviously not the case with non-White students, legacy or not. Basically, unless I pay for a building to be erected on Harvard's campus, my daughter's presence there will be questioned because of her appearance even if her test scores are on par or above White students (legacy or not).

Affirmative action did not cause the perception that non-Whites don't "deserve" to go to university. The perception that they did not belong there was well-established and part of academic culture. As evidence, see the admissions policies and decisions of most institutions around "non-desirable" populations (i.e., non WASP) at one point or another.

What if all Black and Latino students at elite institutions scored 1500+ on their SATs and has perfect GPAs? Would the questions of who "deserves" to be there go away? Look at what is happening with Asian students and think about it.