Daniel Golden - The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges--and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates

An ivory-tower expose.

ATLANTIC MONTHLY

Provocative and stimulating A tough investigative reporter, Golden does not hesitate to name names. In his final chapter, Golden issues a series of sensible and hard-hitting recommendations.

JEROME KARABEL, Washington Post Book World

I didn't want to believe that rich families and celebrities buy places for their children in America's best colleges. But Daniel Golden's evidence is overwhelming. This book should be read by everyone who cares about pre serving higher education as a route for developing talent, not rewarding privilege.

DIANE RAVITCH, research professor of education at New York University and author of Left Back

An explosive new book.

NEW YORK POST

Golden has fun making trouble in the best journalistic sense. The Price of Admission is a powerful reminder that the public will increasingly require selective colleges to defend their preferences; that not all are prepared to make their complex case well; and that some of their practices, finally, seem indefensible today.

HARVARD MAGAZINE

The Price of Admission is a muckraking morality tale with many villains and few heroes [Golden] names names. Duke University comes off especially badly, followed by Brown, Harvard, and other Ivies.

NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

An important new book With clarity and moral force, Golden shows that our greatest universities have been sacrificing their highest ideals on behalf of base pursuits unworthy of their names.

EDUCATION SECTOR

Provocative [B]lows the door off traditional notions about affirmative action and explains how whites benefit from relaxed admissions standards.

SAN FRANCISCO DAILY JOURNAL

If you did not attend or do not teach at a prestigious university, do not play polo well enough to pass it on, and do not have a cool million lying around to buy a place in the freshman class, your child might not make it into the school he or she deserves to attend. Daniel Golden explains why in this passionately written and bitingly acute book.

ALAN WOLFE, professor of political science at Boston College and author of One Nation, After All

This report's abundance of juicy stories of outrageous favoritism makes for an absorbing read.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

Fascinating reading As a body of reporting, The Price of Admission is a tour de force. Behind-the-scenes admissions practices have probably never before been documented in such persuasive detail. Immensely readable and enlightening.

WEEKLY STANDARD

A chilling story of double standards and double crossings. Daniel Golden reminds us that when elite college admissions go to the highest bidders, we all pay the price.

LANI GUINIER, Bennett Boskey Professor at Harvard Law School and author of Lift Every Voice

Makes a trenchant and convincing case that admission to America's elite universities has too often turned into a system for reinforcing wealth and privilege, rather than opening new opportunities In the wake of this book, the university establishment has some explaining to do.

JAMES FALLOWS, national correspondent of The Atlantic Monthly and author of Blind into Baghdad

INTRODUCTION
The Tennessee Waltz

1 HOWTHE Z-LIST MAKES THE A-LIST
Harvard's Payback for Big Donors

2 RECRUITING THE RICH
Development Admits at Duke

3 THE FAME FACTOR
Celebrity Children at Brown

4 ENDURING LEGACIES
Notre Dame's Other Tradition

5 TITLE IX AND THE RISE OF THE UPPER-CLASS ATHLETE
Fencing, Crew, and Polo Scholarships

6 A BREAK FOR FACULTY BRATS
Free and Easy Entry for the Children of Professors

7 THE NEW JEWS
Asian Americans Need Not Apply

8 THE LEGACY ESTABLISHMENT
Taking On Congress and the Higher Education Lobby

9 THE CHALLENGE OF WEALTH-BLIND ADMISSIONS
How Caltech Raises Standardsand Donations

10 ENDING THE PREFERENCES OF PRIVILEGE
Suggestions for Reform

A Note on Academic Records

Since college admissions offices pay considerable attention to applicants SAT scores, this book does too. The purpose of revealing students test scores (as well as high school grades and class ranks) is not to embarrass individuals who fall below the norm of the colleges they attend but to document the extent of admissions preferences for alumni children and other favored groups.

SAT scores in this book are based on the old SAT, which awarded 200-800 points on math and verbal scales for a maximum 1600 score. The current SAT also includes a writing test, worth 200-800 points, for a top score of 2400. Whenever possible, SAT scores used in this book were confirmed by documents or sources besides the students themselves. The book takes no position in the long-running controversy over whether SAT scores are a useful way to evaluate college applicants and predict future achievement.

Private high schools, which many of the college applicants described in this book attended, do not formally rank students. However, many prep schools induct students with the best grade point averagesusually the top 20 percentinto an organization called the Cum Laude Society, which is roughly comparable to the National Honor Society. Hence, this book frequently uses Cum Laude status as a mark of whether college applicants ranked in the top fifth of their prep school class.

Introduction

THE TENNESSEE WALTZ

T he United States would never develop an aristocracy, Alexis de Tocqueville declared in his classic 1835 study, Democracy in America. The fledgling democracy, he wrote, lacked primogeniturethe European custom of parents leaving all their wealth to their firstborn son. Without that practice, family fortunes in America would be divided among multiple descendants and gradually dwindle to nothing.

But the great French historian underestimated the ingenuity of America's upper classes, which have all too often enhanced their wealth and poweracross generations. Elite families, it turned out, didn't need primogeniture. They developed an indirect method of preserving their status: college admissions.

Despite the popular notion that top colleges foster the American dream of upward mobility and equal opportunity, the truth is quite different. While only a handful of low-income students penetrate the campus gates, admissions policies channel the children of the privileged into premier colleges, paving their way into leadership positions in business and government.

Even without primogeniture, the firstborn sons of former Senate majority leader Bill Frist and former vice president Al Gore could count on a valuable inheritance: easy entry to America's foremost universities. Although their fathers are political foes, William Harrison Frist Jr. and Albert Gore III have a great deal in common. Both bear the full names of their famous fathers along with the pressure of public expectations and media scrutiny. Both have Tennessee roots but attended expensive Washington private high schools that cater to children of power. Both are stocky and played the same positioncenteron their prep school football teams.