@austinmshauri – 34/ths of the top 100 private schools admit they give preferences to legacies. At the Ivies, about 34-40% alone are legacies, which include major donors.
Then add the non-legacy donors (like Jared Kushner, as an example) and you quickly come up to the 50% mark often mentioned as being reserved for the rich/legacies. In fact, at Harvard 67% of students come from the top 20%. Roughly Five Ivy League schools – Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Penn and Brown – get more students from the top 1 percent of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60 percent.
I’ll add that I’m not among those who are upset about this. As long as talented kids have access to good universities without having a lot of money, I’m OK with the status quo. I don’t care what Harvard does or whether Princeton accepts a dim socialite and gets a building out of it. I do care whether Johnny Smith down the street from me can get into the State U. And it upsets me when the State U isn’t affordable for Johnny’s parents.
@shawbridge says:
“I don’t agree with much of what @parentologist wrote, but that one statement seems factually correct. There was at least one article (and I think more) in the Harvard Crimson stating that the vast majority of African-Americans students at Harvard were West Indian or African and not descendants of American slaves – can’t find those but here are a couple of supporting articles“
This is Harvard, I’m not sure this is applicable to all the schools. I just happen to know a ton of African Americans that attend, graduated from, sending their children to, selective colleges. I know Carribeans as well. I haven’t done a study admittedly.
The Stanford team does not help getting equipment. The coach should and could have directed the person to development officer. The only reason to obfuscate is there had to be an end around in the works. You would not risk your career and good name to buy a few more sails at one of the richest schools on the planet earth. Occam’s razor.
A national public uni officer visits my area evrty month to meet with grads. Thrilled if you give 5k to help fund a special scholarship. For 500k you have lunch with the provost.
Stanford Yale USC UCLA and Wake are all equally implicated and victims as well. For now.
As a side note. The sailing coach himself graduated from St George’s in Middletown (think Newport). This is a near Exeter level boarding school. 50k a year. What was he thinking?
@katliamom Is it possible you have crossed up your numbers? Take Harvard, for example. Harvard reportedly accepts around 33% of its legacy applicants, but it’s student body is reportedly made up of only 14% legacies, which is far short of the 34-40% you claim.
@Wizardingage – “Seems like we’ve become a culture so divisive, so in thrall of the material” I hate to be a cynic, but I would say we’ve ALWAYS been in thrall of the material. That’s the very definition of the American Dream! There’s nothing new in this.
What IS new is the aspiration of the middle class to live like the rich. And that has to do with easy credit and rapid consumerism propelled by mass media, television (and now social media) in particular.
“Also, it’s true that the vast majority of US raised college applicants go to public schools. In fact, I think the percentage of American high schoolers going to private schools is in the 3-4% range. Yet about half the kids in the HYPS schools graduated from private schools.”
No that’s not the case… Over half of incoming frosh at HY were from public HS schools.
I saw the Harvard Crimson survey that resulted in this high 29 or 30+% number. It asked if the student had ANY relative at all (uncle, grandparent) who attended ANY school, as opposed to whether they had parents who attended the undergraduate college. So, the survey defined “legacy” more broadly to include kids who hadn’t applied as and weren’t considered as legacies. Yes, the figure speaks to a possible privilege, but not to the actual legacy admit rate.
@tonymom to be fair to the OP. He said about half. So it’s 42 percent or so.
The major point not being the exact percentage. But the probability for private schools - that account for 5% of total high school enrollment (as has been mentioned), to populate the Ivy League at over 40 percent is staggering.
From a statistical perspective, that’s astounding.
I don’t personally mind as these prep schools are no joke. It still is a revelation.
Even if there were no cheating, no athletic preference and no development preference, all those kids would still be disappointed because, as Harvard keeps reminding everyone, they can fill their class many times over with these wonderful high stat kids. There simply are not enough seats for all the high stat kids who “deserve” them. Those kids should not be working so hard in order to get into Harvard or any other specific school. They should be working for the benefit of learning, growing as a person and giving themselves many options for higher education. None of those high stat kids are going to lack an excellent option for higher education. It doesn’t have to be Harvard or Yale.
@privatebanker Respectfully, I don’t think that is necessarily “the simplest route” because I don’t believe it is a simple matter for a coach or athletic administrator to embezzle hundreds of thousands of dollars from his or her university. And if it is a simple matter, then that in and of itself implicates the universities in question.
I find these payment arrangements to be the most perplexing yet unaddressed aspect of this scandal. It looks as if some of the coaches and administrators were trying to benefit their programs, at least in part. (Didn’t a Texas coach even mention, in an FBI recorded call, funding a new facility?) So at least some of the coaches apparently were risking their careers and good names for the benefit of the schools. Why? Were they under pressure to raise funds for their programs? Was administrative support contingent upon financial development support for their program? Did bringing in loads of cash somehow justify the existence of a sailing program at a school like Stanford? Did it engender respect for the coach and program? Were they merely internally justifying their wrongdoing by only occasionally skimming the bribery money for personal use?
As you can see, to my mind the fact that the universities were apparently benefitting financially from these arrangements raises all sorts of questions. Surely when a half million dollars gets donated to a sailing program, someone in financial development or in the administration noticed, even at a wealthy school like Stanford. So what happened then, internally and administratively? Did they turn a blind eye, or did they properly account for the flow funds into and out of the university?
During the college search we were often encouraged to repeat to ourselves, as many times as necessary, “Colleges are businesses” and expect them to act as such.
I was not naive about Backdoor Admissions and I suppose I don’t really have a problem with it – it’s how the world works.
But Singer’s Sidedoor Admissions is a whole other matter. Nay to that kind of illegal wheeling and dealing with the lies and the cheating.
This scandal has mostly stirred up, within me, despair about inequities in our criminal justice system. (The spark in this thread was the link to the Ohio case of the AA woman found guilty of two felonies for defrauding the school system by using her father’s address in a different district).
The school doesn’t need supplies courtesy of the donor as the coach said. That right there is a lie. It’s just not true.
Why would a fairly renowned sailing coach at one of the worlds best schools risk his livelihood, reputation and potentially jail for supplies he didn’t need.
What he needed were good sailers for his program. Why would he sacrifice the team, a team he was so desperate to help on the supply front, by adding unqualified kids to help fill the cash bucket for supplies?
Like they need a bake “sail” for equipment for the Stanford sailing team. Stanford. Sailing. Come on.
Win a few more national championships instead. And believe me most companies would probably sponsor the team.
So the simplest route is in fact what I suggest. He did it for personal financial gain.
Or he was so incredibly stupid that Stanford should be ashamed for hiring the bum.
And how he pulled it off. Maybe a connection at boat yard or shirt company started by a buddy. A sailmaker who he knows from St. George’s. I don’t think it matters. Hey I’ll send you a check for 50k worth of stuff. Send me an invoice. Send us half and give me the rest of the money back. Or send me an jnvoce for nothingand we split it.
he’s going to jail not for being a bad coach and dumb recruiter. For fraud and for personal enrichment.
Do I know any of this for a fact, no. But I do know a lot about financial crimes and money laundering from the prevention side of the house.
There are many more schools like that. I could name a dozen off the top of my head. But why shouldn’t there also be schools where athletics are important for those people who want that? I know lots of kids who are excited to be on a campus with great athletics and not all of them are athletes themselves. They just like the school spirit.
The link no longer exists, but this is CNBC 2017 which I believe relied upon the Crimson survey as so many other publications did. I know for certain there’s one student surveyed with a (non-blood-related) aunt in another state who attended the business school. That student didn’t mention that remote connection in her application, and I suspect most similarly situated applicants would not either. And yet for purposes of this survey, that student is a legacy admit. The Crimson likes a blaze of a headline like any other paper…