The article reveals that perhaps 3/4 of the special admits for children linked to wealthy donors or potential donors would otherwise have not met academic selection criteria.
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And in other breaking news, the sky is blue.
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Who cares? I’ll trade a handful of mediocre students for a new building that will improve the experience of thousands of students.
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It does not. That was an example one specific class for one year at Notre Dame
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Yeah, some people seem to highly value the wealthiest colleges mostly for things that they are using their enormous wealth to buy . . . and then they complain about the practices they use to stay the wealthiest colleges.
I think if you want to entirely reject this system of super-wealthy private institutions and critique the effects they might have on society, then OK!
But if your complaint is basically that you really wish you could get in on the action because you think it will give you an edge in the global capitalist economy over the kids who don’t go to such wealthy private institutions, but you are afraid they won’t have enough room for you, then I think you have to accept those are really two sides to the same coin.
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Well one wouldn’t donate obscene sums if it didn’t give them gain.
Agree. Colleges accept kids for all kinds of reasons. There are some great athletes that would likely not have been admitted otherwise. The band needs a french horn player. I’d love to know the elite college acceptance rate for students from South Dakota.
Life isn’t perfectly fair and a mediocre applicant from a very wealthy family helps the college arguably as much as a great football player.
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The lawsuit that this article references is being discussed in this thread:
So far, ten schools have settled (with the first at $13.5M, the most recent at $55M) and there are still six holdouts. @NiceUnparticularMan has also been shedding some light today on some of the strategies that are often used in class action lawsuits in that thread.
The lawsuit is not because there are schools that give an admissions boost to donors’ kids. It’s that THESE schools got an exemption from the government to work together on their financial aid formulas and that 1) in exchange these schools were supposed to be need-blind in their admissions, i.e. agreeing not to give admissions preferment based on $, and 2) that the financial aid formulas were designed to keep net prices artificially higher than they might have otherwise been.
Schools that were not part of the exemption (like Harvard) could continue to give donors’ kids preferences with no legal issues. The issue is only with these 16 schools who agreed to be need-blind in exchange for an anti-trust exemption.
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Definitely not the best WSJ article ever written.
As austennut said, the lawsuit is about a group of elite schools sharing financial aid formulas and practices via an antitrust exemption (1994 Improving America’s Schools Act Section 568, the actual group that met and had a website was called the 568 Presidents Group.) Here’s the entire 568 section:
(Sec. 568) Exempts, temporarily, certain agreements of two or more institutions of higher education, at which all students are admitted on a need-blind basis, with respect to awards of need-based educational aid. Amends the Higher Education Amendments of 1992 with respect to institutions’ authority to award need-based aid.
Schools had to be need blind for all students to satisfy the terms of the antitrust exemption. We know that some of these schools were need aware for international students and/or waitlisted students and/or transfer students, and sometimes recruited athletes. These schools might have been technically need blind for donor kids, but you only get on the donor list by making large donations, which demonstrates a lack of financial need.
Noting that in this passage from the article that both things can be true…ND admitted students who were qualified/ready to succeed (even if some had relatively low stats) AND ND technically broke the need-blind-for-all-students requirement of section 568 (they just this year went need blind for international students.)
Spokespeople for Georgetown, Notre Dame and MIT said that the schools plan to fight the suit in court and that their students all earned their places. A Notre Dame spokesman said the school is confident “every student admitted to Notre Dame is fully qualified and ready to succeed.”
This all seems so obvious to me that some of these schools were not need blind for all students. I guess that’s why some schools have already settled.
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Yeah, the core of the defense seems to be that at least when it came to the main admissions route (so not waitlists and such) for domestic students (so not Internationals), they did not literally have the Financial Aid office sending individual need estimates to Admissions for use in making admissions decisions.
However, did they do all sorts of other things with their admissions policies and practices that they knew would help them meet their budget goals? It sure seems like there is a lot of evidence they did.
As a technical legal matter, the question is whether what they didn’t do was enough to qualify under 568. On the one hand, in discussing “need-blind basis,” it does say, “with respect to awards of need-based educational aid.” So maybe that qualification supports the defense. On the other hand, it also says “all students,” and if that includes International students, students admitted off waitlists, and so on–that could be a very serious problem.
Then completely independent of the legal issues, this is probably not the best press. I am personally pretty realist about all this (some would say cynical), so I don’t find these to be surprising revelations. But I am pretty sure these colleges do not love it when people really get to see behind the curtain.
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That gain can simply be prestige for the donor, it doesn’t have to include admissions preferences. There’s plenty of prestige in getting your name on a building at MIT and being invited to events to mingle with the great and good, without them having to admit your less than stellar offspring.
Indeed people donate large sums to open or near open access institutions too. We have friends whose family have donated an 8 figure sum to an alma mater (a state flagship), which didn’t even admit the one grandchild who applied. They do like going to donor events, getting invites to the university president’s box at football games, etc.
There shouldn’t be an assumption that donations will collapse if admissions preferences were banned.
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This isn’t exactly “news”. People who are familiar with admissions at elite schools realize that there is no such thing as a “meritocracy” - the schools give preferences (some unearned) to all kinds of students. At these places, education is big business and, as a result, they act accordingly. The fact that an organization like Harvard, with its billions, gets any tax considerations seems ridiculous. I feel the same way about mega churches, gargantuan hospital systems and other “non-profits” that look more like corporate entitities than my non-profit clients who are operating on a shoe string.
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As a nonprofit fundraiser, I agree with this. We have donors who have donated well into the millions for which they get…nothing. We put their name in our newsletter and annual report. But they receive nothing tangible in exchange for their donations. And yet people still donate. Some for the prestige and some because they actually want to use their money to support something they feel is good and important. I imagine there are a number of university donors who donate simply because they found their own education at the institute invaluable and continue to believe in the school’s mission. We have a board member who is extremely wealthy and graduated from an expensive, but mid-tier university. He has no kids, and if he did, I expect they wouldn’t need any admissions boost as it is not super selective. He has donated many millions of dollars to the university and has a scholarship named after him which gives a full ride to low-income students showing high promise. He gets nothing tangible in return - some prestige, some good feeling, some investing in something he finds worthy of investment.
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I think this is super important to remember, there are good people in the world who just want to support causes that they believe in.
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