How Wealthy Families Manipulate Admissions at Elite Universities

Parents Forum
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How do you think colleges like Harvard should handle the unquestionably qualified children of donors who have donated huge amounts of money for years, maybe even before the kids were born?

My former boss was a big donor back to before his kids were even born. Both were totally solid academically, but the usual wealthy white kids from NYC. The older one was waitlisted and didn’t pursue the wait list. The younger one slightly less academically stellar, although still in the upper quarter of the range, but less interesting and did get in. The father swears that the younger son only got in because of him and it’s probably true. He is now a junior at that school and doing very well.

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Harvard, like many “elite” schools is a PRIVATE business.
Anyone who doesn’t like or value their way of doing business need not apply.
There are many many many other places to get a quality education.
Also, those full pay kids and donors subsidize other outstanding kids who otherwise could never dream of attending an elite school.
The restaurant analogy is a good one.
Just go somewhere else.

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No, the restaurant review would be: I dreamed for so long of eating there, I polished my table manners, got a new outfit, I couldnt even get through. I’m certain those who did bribed the maitre 'd. No way they called more than I did, they must have had a different phone number for privileged folks.

If they got in and waited at the bar and a better dressed person got seated first: it’s a bigger bribe, I know it. No way they called x months in advance. No way.

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I think that’s only in the last year or two, partly because they aren’t that happy about how many kids have been sucked into investment banking and are concentrated in a few majors.

Ruth Reichl wrote a very famous review of the two restaurants and how she was treated when she went in disguise vs how she was treated when they knew who she was. I saw no evidence that once you were let in that the rich kids were treated any differently - they were the happy bottom quarter of the class getting gentleman C’s. For classes with curves they were a great addition!

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Harvard’s brand is strong enough that they probably don’t need to do dev admits. But they are perfectly free to do so. Even Harvard can always use more money. Presumably they would want to keep the number of dev admits small and low key, since it could hurt their brand if they got too aggressive on this. Like say cough cough Brown and cough cough Duke). : )

In Jared’s case, the cash probably wasn’t the ONLY consideration in his admission. But, like chicken soup, the cash certainly didn’t hurt. Also probably didn’t hurt Jared’s younger brother who also went to Harvard. Two Harvard enrolled kids from one non-athlete, non-legacy, non-URM family is a statistically significant track record no matter how good the kids’ credentials actually were.

Don’t forget that Jared got his JD/MBA from NYU. Dad happens to be an NYU alum and a $3 million NYU donor…

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mathmom, your post #243 doesn’t seem to square with lookingforward’s idea that the development admits are perfectly qualified academically. Or perhaps they are, but they need to spend a lot of time managing their stock portfolios. Or one of their polo matches conflicts with midterms.

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lf, I am starting from DeepBlue86’s hypothetical about how the restaurant (Harvard) really works.

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@QuantMech I see myself more as Mr. Burns than Bart Simpson…

@zoosermom got in ahead of me on some of this, but anyway:

@LadyMeowMeow, you’re describing a situation that I would be inclined to bet $2.5m never happened - and you have no evidence to believe otherwise. It’s implausible on its face to suggest that Jared’s family went to Harvard and said “I will give you $2.5m if you admit Jared” and Harvard agreed. Harvard is far too smart to do something like that at all (and definitely not for $2.5m). I imagine they teach you on your first day of work at the development office to deflect/not engage in those kinds of conversations. So, there is no evidence to believe there was an explicit quid pro quo, and common sense would dictate there wasn’t.

That said, I think you’ve now taken what was a strained argument to start with and broadened your condemnation to include behavior that most people would consider entirely appropriate, even laudable. If, as I believe, there never was (or would be) an explicit quid pro quo, and you’re now conceding that “Jared’s application might well provide compelling proof that he has academic chops along with personal integrity, maturity, strength of character, and concern for others”, then Jared’s situation as framed by you is no different from that of any qualified applicant whose family has a history of contributions or the prospect of making some. In other words, the vast majority of legacy applicants, plus a whole lot of other people who happen to think Harvard might be a worthy cause for a donation. Yet you would suggest that because these students’ families have donated money, or indicated the prospect of doing so (notwithstanding the absence of an explicit quid pro quo), “by purchasing their entrance, [these students have] renounced their single best opportunity to demonstrate integrity, maturity, strength of character, and concern for others” and disqualified themselves, or proved Harvard’s hypocrisy in admitting them.

C’mon now. If an alumnus makes donations to Harvard that increase over time as the alumnus becomes wealthier, with the prospect of growing further, and then Junior applies and gets in, and then bigger donations are made, with no guarantee before or acknowledgement afterward of a quid pro quo, you have no basis to claim anything inappropriate has occurred, or that Junior has forfeited his right to apply to Harvard, or that the Harvard admissions office is run by hypocrites. You further have no basis to believe, on the facts as known (he went to Harvard and his family at some point gave $2.5m), that Jared’s situation was any different. And there is no line you can draw to differentiate Jared-type behavior from wealthy legacy-type behavior. And if you concede, after all that, that all these people are qualified, it seems to me you’re spending a lot of time and energy winding yourself up over…I don’t know what, but nothing important.

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This thread is proof that Harvard has been doing right: Keeps it the most talked about and wanted school. Whoever they admit is qualified against their metrics which are not what posters here suggest. Thinking DJT’s SIL is less qualified than whomever is laughable at best. If you want your kids to get in, pay attention to what some posters have said over and over again.

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I know that Admissions and Development talk to each other. Do they have to? Couldn’t the people in the two offices be kept at arms’ length? Perhaps the Admissions staffers could refrain from reading the annual reports of donations, and from attending donor events.

Of course there is not going to be an explicit quid pro quo. That doesn’t mean that “quids” are not on offer.

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I want to present the complete opposite perspective. Let me admit up front that it's far from a perfect analogy, but it's not 100% wrong either.

Take the restaurant analogy that DeepBlue86 made. Imagine there’s group of people who decide to start a private dining club. They use their own money to buy some property, construct a building, hire the chefs, buy the food, etc. Over time, they open up the club to the public, but they continue to contribute their own money to expanding the restaurant, hiring more chefs, upgrading the tables, inventing new types of cuisine, etc. After many years, their restaurant is now considered one of the finest in the world.

In their private lives, the group of founders and their descendants have collectively become really wealthy, but they continue to be very fond of the restaurant they founded. They’re also really generous people, and they want to give lots of people the opportunity to eat there. They subsidize each and every meal even for those who pay their bill in full. In fact, for 55% of the diners they pretty much pick up the tab and make the meals almost free. Almost all the restaurant’s revenues come from earnings on the founders’ money, not from the restaurant bills.

The only bad news is that the restaurant has become so popular that every night there are 16 people in line for every seat in the restaurant. Competition to eat there is fierce. The founders, who paid for and built the place, do get some preferential treatment, but almost 90% of the seats go to those who have no prior connection with the restaurant.

Meanwhile, a small mob of outsiders, whose knowledge of the restaurant business consists of ordering Happy Meals at McDonalds and having watched 5 episodes of Iron Chef on TV twenty years ago, is telling them they’re doing it all wrong. They demand the right to eat at the restaurant and have their meals paid for by the founders. If you were in the group of founders, how would this sound to you??

As I said, it’s far from a perfect analogy. The story is exaggerated and doesn’t even reflect my own opinions. Even though it’s a private university that was built using private donations, Harvard is a tax exempt institution and should be doing things like giving lots of financial aid to those who need it. Its alums are proud of its generous aid policy and are very happy to contribute money for scholarships.

But I do think there is some truth in the analogy, and that’s why I don’t think a small amount of preferential admits to very qualified legacies and development admits is a “moral evil”. Honestly, there are so many pushes and pulls on the admissions process - athletic recruits, underrepresented groups, students from low-income families, legacies, geographical constraints, development admits, academic admits, kids to work on the student paper, kids to play in the orchestra, etc. - that it’s a wonder that the people in the admissions office don’t go crazy from having everyone breathing down their necks.

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@DeepBlue86 We don’t need to waste time “proving” that quid pro quo exists in Jared’s case or any other. The point is that, going forward, Harvard should say, believe, and enforce the idea that actual or potential donations will not influence admissions. Once that policy is in place, lines will be easy to draw, and admissions officers will be trained not in careful obfuscation and speaking out of the side of their mouths but in ignoring calls from the development office. As a plus, everybody involved gets to demonstrate what I keep hearing is the essence of the Harvard undergraduate: integrity, maturity, strength of character, and concern for others.

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@LadyMeowMeow may I ask your opinion on whether they should do the same for other preferred applicants, such as:

  • Athletes
  • Singular talents (debaters, musicians, math prodigies with weaker other academics)
  • Legacies
  • Movie Stars
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@postmodern: Harvard is in the Ivy League, of course it needs athletes. Athletes, movie stars, musicians, math prodigies, singular talents – obviously Harvard should consider them. They all have some mixture of natural talent, development of the talent, and tangible results to show for it. Same goes for any legacy who meets those criteria and whose application hasn’t been tainted by being stapled to a golf-tournament-sized check.

Being born rich is not a talent, not something you’ve developed, and not anything you deserve any admissions credit for. In fact, being born rich has in most cases given you especially good opportunities to develop abilities so you should meet (high) standards relative to those opportunities – this is the stated point of holistic admissions. “Born rich” would qualify as a “talent” only if Harvard had no explicit admissions criteria, but (pace @DeepBlue86 ) they do.

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Lady, does it bother you that a foreign billionaire who gets a cancer diagnosis jumps to the head of the line at Mayo clinic or Sloan Kettering? The rest of us might wait three weeks for an appointment with a world-renowned oncologist- the billionaire charters a plane, lands, gets an appointment and starts chemo the next day.

it doesn’t bother me. The “donation” which eventually makes its way to these hospitals pays for the care of indigent people, pays for research at both the cellular and clinical trial level, takes care of hospital overhead which otherwise doesn’t get covered by insurance payments. I sleep well at night despite knowing that a billionaire from far away might jump the line ahead of my mom when it comes to treatment.

That’s what scarcity means. In the case of cancer care, there is likely a qualitative difference between the care available in the US vs. the home country. In the case of Harvard- it’s likely only perception. Did Jared get a degree with better content or rigor than he would have gotten at CMU, Hopkins, i.e. colleges where he likely wouldn’t have needed a finger on the scale? I would say no.

Blame society for the consumerist values which weight the brand over the substance. It’s not like the kid who DIDN’T get into Harvard because Jared did was denied a college education. That kid went to CMU or Vanderbilt or Penn or Duke and is doing just fine in life.

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Why?

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@LadyMeowMeow apparently we don’t have to waste time “proving” anything. All we need to do is be convinced we’re right and repeat it until people get tired of producing actual evidence to the contrary.

The notion that “going forward, Harvard should say, believe, and enforce the idea that actual or potential donations will not influence admissions” is your point, not mine, which you still haven’t demonstrated would do any tangible good to any specific person, but would (as proven exhaustively by the numbers I’ve been citing) create substantial, measurable hardship for all students at Harvard, particularly those receiving financial aid. You either deny this or think it’s outweighed by Harvard adhering to your notion of its mission (which is, as detailed previously, at odds with what Harvard states is its actual mission).

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@DeepBlue86 I think we’re nearing the end of this discussion, or at least my contributions to it, so I’ll just note that you haven’t proved anything whatsoever. Nobody knows exactly what the effect on alumni giving, or Harvard’s finances generally, or Harvard admissions, or the perception of Harvard in the world, or anything else, would be if a policy against developmental admissions were to be enacted. Certainly many on this board have spent a lot of time trying to prove that not only would the impact not be apocalyptic, it would hardly make a difference.

It would make an ethical difference, and Harvard – Veritas! – cites ethics as a key aspect of its identity.

You’ve ignored / discounted a lot of what I’ve said, and I’ve done the same to you, but it’s been mostly a cordial exchange, and I don’t want to jeopardize that. The record speaks for itself. If you’d like to have the last word, it’s all yours.

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“Athletes, movie stars, musicians, math prodigies, singular talents – obviously Harvard should consider them. Why?”

Harvard doesn’t NEED athletes. It chooses to give them the spots they do. They don’t HAVE to have a fencing or crew or field hockey or lacrosse team. If they have those teams, no one really cares if they are any good or not. So why do they choose to allocate a BOATLOAD of their precious seats to athletes?

Some athletes get a tiny tip and others get a bigger one. Almost all Harvard athletes graduate, so they are clearly qualified. But the allocation of seats to sports is YUGE as compared to dev admits or URMs or other tips being discussed.

Enrollment at Harvard is 6874 and Harvard sponsors 1270 varsity roster spots. That’s a LOT of seats going to kids who happened to be born big/strong/fast and who (on average) aren’t going to be stat-wise as smart as the non-athletes. [Before you tell me how smart the Harvard athletes are, please research and explain why the Academic Index system would have to exist if the athletes were as smart as everyone else. Harvard goes to great pains to define exactly how much less stat-wise smart its athletes are allowed to be as compared to the overall enrollment.]

In contrast, football factory Alabama has 750 roster spots for its 27k enrollment. In its own Ivy League way, Harvard could be considered an embarrassing, sports-obsessed, jock factory. To me, that makes less sense on the surface than selling seats for a couple million bucks. But Harvard knows itself best.

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Sorry for the irrelevant post but is there a way to unfollow a thread?