Guardian article: "How did ‘less than stellar’ high school student Jared Kushner get into Harvard? "

But a pledge isn’t usually the “it.” The ongoing record of substantial donations is. And as everyone knows, at a rather high level. If the father were spreading his wealth among colleges, I could see a number of them courting Dad for a good share. But I am still leery that a “subpar” kid would get in. (Or that this is as regular a practice as CC thinks.)

Someone want to tell what Jared’s hs stats were, that anon sources would claim such surprise and dismay? Was Golden privy to the app itself, the kid who “came through?” Most of the “insider” claims have only limited info and prick our emotions.

@doschicos See Hanna’s post on page 1. It’s still the price. No inflation. It also fits two recent cases I know personally $2M each to Penn and Yale a few years ago.

@iglooo You’re obscuring the facts of what you previously posted.

How am I obscuring the facts?

Hanna’s post doesn’t address your post for #1 and now you are using some anecdotal evidence. Fine. Maybe it’s true but $2.5 million in 1999 equates to $3.6 million today.

What really surprised me was that he applied for need based FA after the $2.5 million donation.

:wink:

Sorry not Hanna’s. Hegebege’s #2. $3.6M is still low. The after tax amount is about $2M. We could say the taxpayers subsidized about $1.6M. My point is how fraught this non-profit higher ed can become while we neglect puclic ed possibly escalating the inequality. I am not saying this because my kid is in state u. She is at a private u full pay but still benefitting from their large endowment.

Lol, Dreamer. Did he post about it here?

“Once he was admitted, he was held to the same grading and graduation standards as any other Harvard admit.”

Not quite, there is an old expression that still holds true, it used to be known as “gentleman’s C’s”, and it meant that legacy admits, unless they were total foul ups, would basically get passed along with a nod nod wink wink, and with the kids who the schools admit because of family connections not wanting to get them angry (and miss the $$$$), I doubt very much that has changed. I also will add that from what I have heard Trump himself was not exactly a genius but got into the U of P (his grades from what I have heard for years on the grapevine around NY was that his grades weren’t really good enough to get him into his original school, Fordham, but his dad gave a lot of money there, too).

Colin Powell made a statement about this, he said that the people who decried affirmative action at colleges, especially the top tier ones, saying it wasn’t fair to those who had ‘worked hard enough to get in to those schools’ but were excluded for someone who shouldn’t have been there, brush off something like Jared Kushner or Donald Trump or George W Bush getting in because of their family money and influence getting in, how come they don’t complain about these kind of admits getting in and keeping ‘deserving’ students out? Because unlike affirmative action students they basically bought their way in?

@lookingforward:
Don’t be dubious, studies of legacy admits and those getting in who are from families who gave the school a lot of money have routinely showed that something close to 20% of admits fall into one of these categories, where the kids if you looked at the numbers had significantly lower stats then the typical “blind” admit to the school did, and you are talking significant levels below the standard (even if the kids had stats that would get them in other high level schools, Harvard/Yale/Princeton are in their own league with how tough admissions are, so they stand out).

The schools all claim that they are backing away from legacy admits or from admitting kids of the uber well off with less than impressive stats, but every article I have read on the subject says it is going on, less the kind of George W Bush with all the Bush/Prescott ties (the old WASP elites), these days it is the scions of the tech revolution who are getting in on daddy or mommy’s wealth.

It’s not just 2.5 million dollars. It’s having the connection to a very wealthy family that will potentially donate much more over the years. And it’s also having an alum that has a very good chance of becoming a very powerful and influential person (as well as future donor). Is it fair? Not really, but then again, this is how those buildings get built and those endowments become so large. And Harvard isn’t the only one playing this game.

Musicprnt, it says “pledged.” That’s unusual. And we don’t have this kid’s stats or app. Of course I know legacies can get in and about development admits. But I also know about the sort of contact and how few of these kids there are.

Ime, the sort of family that would have the sort of pull that aggravates CC is higher than 2.5m and conversations to vet the student would have occurred over time.

If the goal of the IVYs is to educate our country and the world’s future leaders in government and industry, then clearly Donald Trump and George W. Bush were excellent admits for UPenn and Yale, respectively. In hindsight, clearly both men had tremendous potential, no matter what their GPA/SAT scores showed.

It’s just more than a bit skeevy to let people who are “less than stellar” buy their way in when you’re already rolling in money and have so many more truly qualified students than you can possibly admit. Add in tax exempt status and it’s even more skeevy.

But what a great opportunity for the middle income geniuses admitted solely based on merit to meet members of the upper crust. Harvard want a diversified student body, so this is diversity.

I feel bad for the ones who actually pay tuition there and it really taxes their family, while their roommate might be a development admit who jets off somewhere every long weekend and gets the same grade.

But isn’t he the success story the schools hope for with a developmental admit? Isn’t he proof that Harvard can take anyone and make a success story?

TCU took a football player and made him a Rhodes Scholar. Now that’s impressive.

“But isn’t he the success story the schools hope for with a developmental admit? Isn’t he proof that Harvard can take anyone and make a success story?”

Are you talking about Kushner? Do you really think Harvard contributed all that much to his success or is it the circumstances - money, connections, name, lessons learned from being raised in the family he was for 18 years - that allowed him to get to Harvard in the first place? I’d bet more on the latter. He was already making good money in RE during college.

Personally, I think @MamaBear16, @roethlisburger and @doschicos are on the right track. As has been pointed out on many threads, if HYP simply ranked students based on grades and scores and handed out admits until they ran out of beds, they wouldn’t be HYP - they’d be something resembling Caltech. Similarly, if they just sold most of their admits to the highest bidder, they’d become finishing schools and their influence and the value of their degrees would dissipate.

HYP admit people that they think are in the best interests of the institution to admit because of what they’ll achieve while there or later, across many areas of society and around the world. Some applicants are admitted because the university believes they’re going to be eminent academics, writers, scientists, journalists, politicians, entrepreneurs, important businesspeople, leaders of nonprofits, leaders in their community or country, musicians, artists, etc. Some will be athletes, some will help/motivate their classmates to achieve great things and others will support the institution in various ways, including monetarily. Many, probably a substantial majority, check multiple boxes. Most students at these schools are very bright with high stats while not card-carrying geniuses. Very, very few are morons - the overall standards for admission are too high for that - and most of the legacies (of whom one in three to one in five who apply are admitted) have stats at least as good as the rest of the class. In my experience, nearly all of the students at these schools - I have known hundreds, over decades - are really interesting for one or more reasons, and they’re getting better and better.

Without reading Jared Kushner’s file (which means that I, like everyone else not on the Harvard admissions committee at the time, know very little), I’ll guess he had good enough stats that Harvard could be confident that he would do fine academically there (admittedly, it’s much harder to get in than stay in). Whether or not some of his high school classmates had better stats is beside the point; Harvard likely thought he would go far in life (which would increase the reach and influence of Harvard while giving them another famous alumnus) and that he and his family would be highly supportive financially (although not at the level of a “development case” - because Jared didn’t need to be treated as one). On this basis, it doesn’t look like Harvard was wrong, as of now.

“A school with an endowment the size of Harvard’s does not need to do this-period.”

Are Stanford, Yale, Princeton, etc. going to stop, too? If not, Harvard will get crushed by its competition in the long run. There are plenty of legendary brands (and empires) that are forgotten or out of business today. Harvard is not going to go under, but you don’t remain a leader by letting your competition race ahead of you.