Daniel Golden wrote in his 2006 book, The Price of Admission, that at least a third of the students at elite American universities got special treatment in the admissions process, and the figure was at least half at liberal arts colleges.
A typical student body, according to Golden, is:
- 10 to 25 percent children of alumni (“legacies”)
- 10 to 15 percent minorities
- 10 to 15 percent athletes
- 2 to 5 percent children of potential large donors (“development cases”)
- 1 to 3 percent children of faculty members
- 1 to 2 percent children of politicians and celebrities.
Preferences for minorities seem to generate a lot of outrage, other preferences not so much. Why do you think this is?
Click on Poison Ivy for a review of Golden’s book in The Economist.
Click on The Best Education Money Can Buy for a review in the Washington Post
Click on Daniel Golden’s “The Price of Admission” for a review in the University of North Carolina’s Carolina Review.
Click on A Response to Daniel Golden for a lame attempt at rebuttal in the Brown University Spectator.
I don’t think anything has changed since Golden wrote his book (which I haven’t read). The moral I draw from these figures is that graduating from an elite university is not a guarantee of superior intellect.
I don’t favor the government interfering with admissions policies at private universities, except to forbid them to exclude people on the basis of race, religion or national origin. I do favor restoring the state university systems so they once again can provide a good and affordable college education to anyone capable of doing college work, while rejecting the myth that you need a college education in order to be qualified for a decent job.
Hat tip to Christopher Hayes in his article Why Elites Fail.
Edited for clarity 7/9/12.
Tags: Affirmative Action, Christopher Hayes, College Admissions, Daniel Golden, Preferential Treatment, The Price of Admission, Why Elites Fail
June 24, 2012 at 6:10 pm |
I’ve read these statistics before, and they always make me wonder: How did my brother, son of an Iowa State graduate and a middle-class family in Iowa, non-celebrity, etc., get into Harvard? And why, a generation later, did they reject his legacy daughter, a straight-A student from a private school, when he would have been a development case? Methinks there’s more to this story.
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