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The Year to Bribe Your Way In
The recession is dramatically changing the college admissions game, as cash-strapped schools court students with ties to big donors. Why it's easier than ever to buy your way in.
If you think Wall Street is in dire straits, take a look at academia. Endowments, hit by market losses, are hemorrhaging money. Last year Harvard lost $8 billion, Yale expects a 25 percent loss in 2009—and we’ve all heard what Bernie Madoff did to Brandeis.
The mounting money woes are dramatically changing the dynamics of the admissions game. While there’s no doubt donations have long played a role in the admissions process, this year, it’s easier than ever to buy your way into college. Some of the nation’s most elite universities are confronting the fact that they can’t afford to turn away students with connections to rich donors—and bending the rules.
“We recently had a generous donor suggest we admit more students from Nevada, his home state. It was like, ‘All hands on deck! How do we get more kids from Nevada to apply, stat?’”
In this Daily Beast exposé, admissions officers, donors, and fundraisers reveal the role money is playing in the admissions game this spring. They talk about why $500,000 might not be enough, how to use a middle man, and the reason so many students seem to be from Nevada.
On greasing the admissions wheels
Not Enough Takers
“Nobody wants to say it, but there’s really an atmosphere right now of come one, come all. If you give enough, we take your kid. Unfortunately, we just don’t have any folks taking the bait.”—Development officer at Northeastern liberal-arts college
The Bottom 10 Percent
“Is anyone surprised anymore to hear donating money helps get your kid into a school? Of course the academic standards are lower. Of course the essays don’t have to be as good. Easily 10 percent of our class every year is development cases. Will [that portion] be higher this year? Everybody’s broke, so duh, absolutely.”— Admissions officer for top-tier Mid-Atlantic university
New Science Wing
“My father, a successful businessman, has always been a major donor at his Ivy League college. I know when I got in, some money exchanged hands—I didn’t have the grades. Well, plus the wing of science labs named for my family… But it wasn’t that easy with my nieces and nephews. Now, this year, he’s been virtually guaranteed admission for my 6-year-old for any check at all.”—Ivy League alumnus
The New Standards
“I’m embarrassed to say it, but I worry we’re letting kids in this year we wouldn’t have in the past. My best guess is that there’s a promise out there for a few million dollars in donations that will suddenly show up when the admissions letters go out. At least I hope so.”— A Boston college-admissions officer
Buoying a Whole State
“We recently had a generous donor suggest we admit more students from Nevada, his home state. It was like, ‘All hands on deck! How do we get more kids from Nevada to apply, stat?’”— An Ivy League admissions officer
How Rich People Smoke Pot
Paul Schrodt is a writer living in New York City. He has contributed to New York magazine, Radar, and Esquire.com.
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As vice chairman of Public Strategies and president of Maverick Media, Mark McKinnon has helped meet strategic challenges for candidates, corporations and causes, including George W. Bush, John McCain, Governor Ann Richards, Charlie Wilson, Lance Armstrong, and Bono. McKinnon is co-chair of Arts & Labs, a collaboration between technology and creative communities that have embraced today's rich Internet environment to deliver innovative and creative digital products to consumers.
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Kathleen Kingsbury covers education for The Daily Beast. She also contributes to Time magazine, where she has covered business, health and education since 2005.
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Kathleen Kingsbury covers education for The Daily Beast. She also contributes to Time magazine, where she has covered business, health and education since 2005.
The Decade's 15 Hottest Colleges
Kathleen Kingsbury covers education for The Daily Beast. She also contributes to Time magazine, where she has covered business, health and education since 2005.
susumar
This is nothing new, just more sickening than ever. My son is on financial aid at a good university. One of the students from his high school did not get into University of Pennsylvania three years ago so her father donated $500,000 and, voila, she got in. I guess he'll just have to up the ante if there are more siblings. It's nice to know that our so-called elite universities will soon be filled with many not particularly bright students.
hammer
"If you kid is a dud. He's a dud."
It is selectively applied to reject kids of wealthy and privileged. Let's look at the case of An Wang's son who applied to Harvard. Wang of Wang Laboratories donated in excess of $5 million for naming rights to a technology building and his son was still rejected. It was because his son selectively determined by the admissions board that he was really a dud and nothing could help him.
On the other hand Al Gore's son a C student at St. Paul's School with a DUI arrest in high school was accepted to Harvard. He was a dud and still a dud based on his arrest for drugs after college. In this case the "dud" rule was over looked for a sitting vice president.
Given there are 29,000 applications for Harvard's 1,700 opening in the freshman class. Any advantage one has can help the admissions board determine the uniqueness of the candidate. The merits of academics are a given so there have to be other criteria like sport, music/art, volunteerism, work, legacy or donations. Elite colleges aren't based purely on merit otherwise it would be highly populated with Asians, Jews, international students, and children of immigrants. Merit only makes up a part of the elite colleges and let's not deceive ourselves that the cream always rises to the top.
GMCaesar
There are so many great colleges out there. Why do people want their kid to go to an Ivy? Because of the connections they make with classmates. The legacy contingent are part of what makes the top-tier experience so desirable and, yes, so worthwhile.
citivas
I guess the only thing new here is the price to entry is going down so that the really rich can obtain admission this way and not just the super rich...
We all know this has been going on since these schools were founded. Heck, we have a handful of Presidents who got into college this way, including Bush and Kennedy, neither of which would have qualified for many state colleges without connections.
citivas
GMCaesar, plain and simple, getting such a degree is like printing money if you use it right. It shouldn't be, but there it is. I know many companies here in NYC that pretty much exclusively hire and promote into their best jobs from the ranks of these schools. So as a point of statistics, its simply a much more conservative investment in their future earnings power than a non-Ivy if you can pull it off.
menckenlite
Ivy League schools have a lot of bright students that often lack common sense and social skills. Many Ivy League grads are "duds." We see how they destroy government projects, corporations and squander money with no benefit to the taxpayer or the shareholder. Currently Obama, Barney Frank, Franklin Raines, and Larry Summers are among the Ivy bureaucrats. FDR had many Ivy Leaguers (and the founder of the Kennedy cult) who failed to stimulate the economy then. I do not recall hearing that the US government rejects taxes from non Ivy League graduates. lf If their money is good why are they not good enough for government work? Eisenhower and Reagan, two of the best recent Presidents did not attend Ivy League schools.
susquehannastudio
Legacy has always been spelled with 5 $$$$$
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n--Y--Cooper727jstevens65
uh obama did go to columbia (the ivy) and harvard law (yes, that harvard). apparently you did not.
hammer
Maybe education at an elite school pays off for some.
Following high school in Hawaii, Obama moved to Los Angeles in 1979 to attend Occidental College. After two years he transferred in 1981 to Columbia University (Ivy League) in New York City, where he majored in political science with a specialization in international relations and graduated with a B.A. in 1983. Obama entered Harvard Law School in late 1988. He was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review at the end of his first year, and president of the journal in his second year.
GMCaesar
btw, Ivy League grads don't make any more money on average than grads of other schools, because some of them go onto academic and nonprofit pursuits.
@menckenlite
As for naivete, well, that's a good point as long as you account for the fact that many of the culprits are products of the Ivy grad schools, and were undergrads outside the Ivys. And they have records of successes to go along with their failures, like anybody else.
Eisenhower went to West Point, in a league by itself. Reagan, well, hehheh, the source of so many of our current problems, let's not even go there.
PricklyPete
Cooper727: "where you went to college" usually means where you got your undergraduate degree, which was Columbia University in Obama's case (you obviously don't know that Columbia College is Columbia University's flagship undergraduate school).
reader1961
All this seems skewed by the idea that the GOAL is for our college grad sons or daughters to get the highest paying job possible in New York, or to become US President. Is it possible to define success by something other than these narrow terms? Read Howard Gardner's Extraordinary Minds for a summary of the conditions that have created culture's greatest individuals. An Ivy League education is not on the list.
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