News Briefs
Where affirmative action is green
Oct 18, 2007 6:44 PM
At elite colleges, contrary to popular belief, it’s not low-income applicants of color who are the main beneficiaries of preferential admissions treatment, but rich white kids with cash and connections who elbow the worthier competition aside, argues Peter Schmidt, deputy editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education and author of “Color and Money: How Rich White Kids Are Winning the War Over College Affirmative Action” in an op-ed.
According to Schmidt, researchers estimate that some 15 percent of freshmen enrolled at the nation’s highly selective colleges are white teens who failed to meet their institutions’ minimum admissions standards.
Who are these mediocre white kids getting into institutions such as Harvard, Wellesley, Notre Dame, Duke and the University of Virginia? Some are recruited athletes, but a larger share are students who gained admission through their ties to alumni, donors, faculty members, administrators and politicians, “getting into exclusive colleges the same way people get into trendy night clubs, by knowing the management or flashing cash at the person manning the velvet rope,” writes Schmidt.
And while some colleges treat a candidate’s “legacy” status as the child of graduates no more unfairly than as a tie breaker, it’s more often the ability to pay that trumps admissions to most elite schools, in spite of efforts toward “needs-blind” admissions, Schmidt argues. Most scholarship aid, he writes, now goes to “potential recruits who can enhance a college’s reputation or appear likely to cover the rest of their tuition tab and to donate down the road.”
The Boston Globe, Sept. 28
