This thread is pretty played out, but I’ll burden it with a few more anecdotes of the sort that everyone always reminds me aren’t data, but which help explain my worldview.
First: Somewhere upthread someone asked for examples of deserving poor kids whose careers and lives were enriched by association with undeserving privileged kids at Harvard. I couldn’t think of a concrete example, and I still can’t, but yesterday’s newspaper suggested an intriguing possibility. Ed Lampert wasn’t exactly working class – his father was a lawyer in NYC – but his father died young and the family was clearly in straitened financial circumstances. Notwithstanding working throughout high school to help support his family, he was a good student and a good athlete, and he went to college at Yale in the early 80s, almost certainly on scholarship. His roommate there was Steven Mnuchin, the son of a Goldman Sachs senior partner. Sure enough, on graduation Lampert wound up as an intern at Goldman Sachs, which he left after a few years to found the private equity firm that made him a billionaire. (Steve Mnuchin, of course, also started at Goldman Sachs, but stayed a couple of decades before striking out on his own, and is now about to become Secretary of the Treasury.) It’s highly unlikely that his relationship with Mnuchin was necessary to Lampert’s success – among other things, he was a non-legacy member of Skull & Bones, which indicates he had a lot on the ball – but the coincidence is pretty striking.
I’m not suggesting, by the way, that Mnuchin’s father bought his way into Yale. He seems to have been a super-smart rich kid from the get-go
Second: I realized I had a relationship with a possible developmental admit that I hadn’t drawn on here. Unfortunately, it’s really hard to give any details without making it easy to figure out whom I am talking about. This was in grad school, not college. He did not go to any of his family’s colleges; he went to a nonselective hippie-ish LAC, although his style wasn’t the least bit counterculture. He was very modest and unassuming. I worked with him pretty closely for a year, and he was very hardworking and smart in a solid, methodical way. He wasn’t at the top of his class, but he was nowhere near the bottom. He had universal respect from a group that included some future very high flyers. You had to know him pretty well to know how privileged he was, and even though I knew that, it was only in thinking about this post that I realized that he was related to various buildings at that university. It’s no big surprise that he wound up as a big deal – running the family business, a huge civic and charitable presence in his community, a true mover and shaker. His personal qualities would have ensured a good level of success had he started with nothing. But if he had started with nothing, it’s unlikely he would ever have had the opportunity to run a huge, far-flung business empire (or that he would even have aspired to do that).
My point here: If you were a university president, you would absolutely want someone like that associated with your university. Everyone you admit – and lots of people you don’t admit – has the intelligence and personal qualities to be successful. But very few of the people you admit are ever going to have the opportunity to be in a position of great power and influence, and in most cases a certain amount of luck enters into that. With this person, it was a virtual certainty that he would be in a position to have a lot of impact on the world. If you believe in your university’s educational mission, don’t you want to educate that person? Don’t you want to cultivate his long-term support for what you do? Of course you do.
Third: Based on my limited exposure to people who might have the wherewithal to buy their children’s way into an elite university, I would say that few if any of them think their children need any kind of elite credential to succeed. Those people are very proud of themselves, and consider their names plenty credential enough. Lots share the values of @LadyMeowMeow and @QuantMech , believe their kids need to feel they have made it on their own, and wouldn’t dream of putting a finger in the scales. Lots wouldn’t want to put their kids in a situation where the kid would not feel successful. Most are really happy with their own educations, and if they have specific educational ambitions for their kids it’s to have the kids go to their college (often a state flagship or an LAC). Some have trouble believing their kids could be as smart or capable as they, and even go so far as blocking their kids from attending their elite alma maters. It’s a tiny percentage who are so obsessed with “trading up,” or who so desperately want their children to go to their alma mater and no other college, that they would try to buy a child in to an elite university.
So what limits this issue and makes it not such a big deal is not just that colleges don’t do it with many kids; it’s that colleges don’t get asked to do it with many kids.
). Talk with some of the faculty about their teaching and research. Investigate the facilities and their condition. Talk to the people at the development office about what they do and how they do it. Hear from the admissions office firsthand what they look for and how they make their decisions. Get a sense from the administrators what their priorities and needs are. Finally, study the finances.