Nicholas Kristoff, a another New York Times progressive pundit but one who occasionally makes sense, has an intermittently valid op-ed in today’s paper titled, “The Real College Admissions Scandal,” which is, he argues, “affirmative action for the rich and privileged.”
Kristoff immediately knee-caps his own credibility by writing, perhaps to please his Dark Woke Masters, “I wish the Supreme Court had ruled differently on affirmative action for race, but unfortunately it blocked that path for diversity.” It’s a stupid statement. The Constitution blocked that path, and so did the 1964 Civil Rights Act. What his statement literally means is that he applauds “good racial discrimination and prejudice”, but deplores it when it adversely affects groups he cares about.
He also comes close to setting off the hypocrisy alarm, but at least is transparent. While including “legacy admissions” in his list of “affirmative action for the rich and privileged,” Kristoff says, “I was a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers, and my wife, Sheryl WuDunn, is currently a member and previously served on the Princeton and Cornell boards; our three children also attended Harvard.” Hmmm. So, having benefited from the policies he condemns while doing nothing to reform them, the pundit now want to stop others from benefiting from them! Cool. He also is silent about how much money he has given to his alma mater over the years. Donors also get an edge for their kids when they apply to prestige colleges.
But I digress. Kristoff writes, “Elite universities are bastions of left-of-center ideas, yet advantage four groups that are already privileged: children of graduates, recruited athletes for sports like rowing and fencing, children of faculty members and children of large donors.”
The two arguments Kristof makes in support of this that need to be retired forever are…
1. “[C]hildren from the top 0.1 percent of households in income are 2.2 times as likely to be admitted as kids with the same scores from less wealthy households. In fact, this understates the injustice, for the less advantaged children achieve the same scores without $1,000-an-hour SAT coaches.”
Boy am I sick of hearing about SAT courses and coaches. This is easy: ban them. Or require any student who uses them to disclose that fact, with an automatic deduction from their final score. I didn’t take any prep courses or tutoring for my SATs; neither did my sister, or anyone I know. We didn’t do any preparation at all. Of course allowing special courses and tutors for the tests are unfair. Stop them.
2. “If you’re rich and your child sails, maybe he can be recruited by an Ivy League sailing team.” That’s easy too: end scholarships for such skills and teams. In fact, end all sports scholarships, period.
I started, restored or helped create three theater organizations when I was in college. I directed productions: my efforts enriched the college experiences of many students, probably many hundreds of students. I didn’t get a scholarship for theater, and I shouldn’t have. I helped create several publications at my high school and wrote the editorials for the paper for two years: I didn’t get a journalism scholarship: there wasn’t one….and shouldn’t be one.
Other aspects of Kristoff’s arguments are more debatable, but not those.
Ethics Alarms 
Mein Gott in Himmel! Was Kevin Bacon THAT young in “Animal House?” Yikes. Did his parents have to sign a waiver for him to work? He looks twelve.
What is this sudden fixation with squash and fencing and other obscure, elitist sports? When I was a freshman at my preppy college, I was told by the head of the PE department that learning how to play squash (something I’d never heard of before) was essential because you need to play squash if you wanted to get into a good, northeastern graduate school (which I hardly knew existed as well). Why stop at cutting scholarships for northeastern sports (field hockey? lacrosse?). Why not simply drop intercollegiate athletics in their entirety? Any college or university serious about education should adopt the University of Chicago model and get out of the sports business entirely and back into the education business.
I see both Kristof’s parents were university professors at Portland State University. Don’t children of professors have a leg up on others applying to elite universities and colleges? Why are they privileged? Isn’t that racist? How many black kids have both parents who are Ph.Ds?
Let’s do student financial aid next. The process is complicated to benefit wealthy families, in my opinion. This is what happens when you focus on debt, not income. When I went to college, I was eligible for 0 financial aid. I could receive no scholarships because of my race and sex, and I was denied even student loans because of income. My mother was furious because the son on a friend of hers received student loans, and we didn’t despite the other family making 5 times what my parents made. When confronted about this, the financial aid person explained that need is determined by debt, not income. A friend of mine couldn’t go to MIT because he qualified for no financial aid. His family made about $30,000/year, but his father was very good with his money. They owned their home and paid cash for cars. My friends father was told to mortgage his house and buy a bass boat with it and they could get his college paid for. The problem I have is that rich people can go into much more debt than rich people. I don’t make enough money to be $3 million in debt. No one will loan me that much money.
My solution: Financial aid should only be based on the average of the last 3 years income. How you spend your money is your business. Your kid shouldn’t get preferential financial aid because you purchased 2 vacation homes and 3 boats on loans.
I had no idea, Michael. That’s bizarre.
Mrs. OB, pre-OB, had to drop out of BU after her single semester of a scholarship arranged by her high school teachers ran out. Her father had refused to fill out the parents’ confidential financial statement required for her to apply for financial aid. He was Scottish and cheap and didn’t want anyone, I mean anyone, knowing what he was actually worth. He had zero debt, of course. This was in 1970, so I’m going to assume eligibility was determined back then by income. If it had been debt at that time, filling out the statement wouldn’t have helped Mrs. OB at all.
“That’s easy too: end scholarships for such skills and teams. In fact, end all sports scholarships, period.”
But don’t you know that minorities get into schools via sports scholarships? If you eliminate the scholarships, they will be disproportionately represented in admissions! Isn’t that racist? 😉
What do you mean, “yet?” Are we supposed to see some kind of contradiction between left-wing ideology and the reinforcement of privilege? I sure as hell don’t.
College admissions are a finite resource. Of course they’re more accessible to the wealthy and privileged–what the hell in this category isn’t?
Oh, we’re working from a socialist premise that if we equitably distribute college admissions then society is better off.
That premise is unproven. Maybe we’re better off educating those who already possess larger levers to improve society. Maybe we’re better off commodizing education to reduce cost and focus it to income generating programs instead of gender studies. Maybe we’re better off NOT saddling huge swaths of the population with student loans that they wouldn’t have even applied for if they weren’t isolated from the sunk cost fallacy and would be then motivated to complete the degree to recoup paying for the education.
Maybe we’re better off recognizing equity as a socialist value and not actually compatible with prosperity.
Oh, I think the premise has been disproven. See any communist country.
If you look at Europe in the Middle Ages, you will find that England was a pretty poor country. As time went on, England became more and more powerful despite having a rather small population and not a lot of inherent wealth. What made this tiny island a power that could dominate the world? Well, my thought is that England was able to harness their native talent to a larger extent than the other European countries. England’s social structure was less rigid than other countries. A joke was a man who said “I am Edward, Lord X (I don’t remember his title), my father was the Lord Mayor of London, and my grandfather was Lord know who.” Talented people could make money, buy some land and set themselves up as country gentry, and marry their children into impoverished noble families. In 2-3 generations, their children were as respectable as the great-grandchildren of a king.
This acceptance of a larger percentage of the population into the ‘movers and shakers’ group of the country meant that England had more talent/person than other countries. Now, this still wasn’t a large amount. Let’s say most European countries had 1% of the population that they accepted into the ‘movers nd shakers’ group and for England it was 2%. That is still a huge increase. I think this idea explains a lot about why the US became the dominant country in the world for a while. I mean, we were a poor and backward country at the end of the Civil War, but technologically and militarily, we could have taken over the world? How did we do it? I think it is because we harnessed a greater percentage of genius that existed in our population. It wasn’t 100%, but it certainly wasn’t 2%. Maybe it was never over 30%, but that was a huge increase over everyone else. How much better off is the world because we elevated agriculture and engineering to university-level studies?
I think part of our downfall is that we have repudiated this. We now rely on an ‘expert class’ that is the only one allowed to make decisions. By centralizing and concentrating power, we have squeezed out the native genius in the country. Capable people aren’t allowed to rise to positions of power any more. We don’t want good people in positions, we want the ‘right’ people in positions.
Years ago, one of the Kennedys applied to both UNC and Duke. The kid held a press conference and stated essentially “No offense to UNC, but I think Duke is a better school and that is where I am going”. Well, the UNC chancellor was asked about this statement and he said “No offense to Mr. Kennedy, but his opinion would have more weight if he had been accepted at UNC”. This led to questions because Duke’s entrance requirements are higher than UNC’s. Well, the requirements are, but the admissions don’t seem to be. How is this possible? Many elite colleges seem to have something called a ‘special admissions program’ (or some similar name), which basically says if you don’t meet our admissions standards, you can still get in if you agree to pay double the entire time you are here. So, it seems likely that Duke has such a program. I am sure there are a variety of rationalizations and reasons they give to justify such programs. You might remember the scandals of wealthy people bribing coaches to get their kids admitted so they wouldn’t have to pay for such an admission program.
If you want to know why the wealthy seem to be admitted preferentially to elite schools, such programs seem to be a big reason if you ask me.
Schools sell their souls to get big name kids to come there. The Obama girls would have been accepted into MIT or Cal Tech if they’d applied. Chelsea Clinton could have gone to the University of Chicago. When you’re from a big deal family, you just drop whatever school you want to go to a line, and you’re in.
The point is, if you are from any family with enough money, you can probably get in no matter your test scores or grades. Just pay enough.
What I have trouble dealing with is how incoherent some of the positions some of the people are taking are.
Legacy admissions are a great example. We all know why they’re happening: Legacy admissions are a great way of enticing future philanthropy out of donor parents. While I’m sure there are some racists in admissions, that’s financially driven, not racially driven. But we pretend it’s a racial issue because of disparate impact.
In fact, we’re supposed to pretend that legacy admissions are a resource of white supremacy, despite the fact that legacy admissions are almost perfectly proportionate, at least for white applicants (hovering very close to 70%). I don’t know about you, but if I were designing a system that was supposed to privilege my race over others, I might devise a system where my race isn’t almost perfectly proportionately treated.
But it doesn’t matter that both white admissions and legacy admissions are proportionate. Because black admissions aren’t, and “their” slice of the proportionality pie is taken up disproportionately by Asians. So what do we do? Well, we put our thumb on the scale and make it so that the average Asian applicant needs an average SAT score something like 400 points higher than the average black applicant to make it in.
And even with that, black people are still under represented.
Why is that? No no, you can’t ask THAT question, or you can, but only if the answer is: Racism!!! Of course. White supremacy that doesn’t benefit white people.
The reality is that all the arguments being made about financial class, prep, life experiences… They’re all relevant. I have no idea what would have happened to me if I’d come from a broken home. But the steps of Harvard are a really shitty place to try to address that. The applicant who cannot compete on their own merit was failed long before then.
Which is an amazingly bitter pill to swallow. But again… You can’t fix that on the steps of Harvard. If you think the freshman year pool is disproportionate, look at the grad classes. The black dropout rate varies by institution, but it’s incredibly high. I got to see a version of this when I took my first two years of my degree through community college, my intake class was 23 people, 6 of us were white. My graduating class was 9 people, 6 of us were white.
You don’t do anyone any good setting them up to fail.
So what can you do? Nothing the progressives want to talk about. It’s not proper to talk about the blight of single motherhood. It’s not ok to talk about the failure of teachers unions to actually provide an education. What we’re left with is shoveling ever more money per student into systems bloated by administration and ever more divorced from results, and shrilly screaming “racism” when someone points it out.
Terrific analysis, HT. Comment of the Day. The other reason for legacy admits is that schools want to create loyalty and historical connections, which also assist in getting high quality students to choose their elite school over another, eventually making a family donation a habit and tradition, and having a constituency that has an emotional tie to the institution. My father and sister attended Harvard, and my mother worked there for decades. We were thought of a “Harvard family,” though my folks were far more emotionally tied to the school than my sister and I.