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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Legacy has always been spelled with 5 $$$$$

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uh obama did go to columbia (the ivy) and harvard law (yes, that harvard). apparently you did not.

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.

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.

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).

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.

For ten years I worked in the development office of a major research university and I was often asked to intervene by alumni on their children's behalf. I was never able to persuade the admissions office to admit the child of a wealthy alum. Not once. I learned that the news about these admissions decisions get around because alumni talk to each other. After several years, I came around to accept and respect the integrity of the admissions office.

Here's what I learned in the long run: it's important that universities maintain their admissions standards because, again, alumni talk to each other. One of my large donors complained to his alumni peer group that my university had rejected his son. Later, I heard from his alumni friends that we had made the right decision. His friends told me they would have thought less of their alma mater had we accepted his child.

P.S. I think the use of the word "dud" is cruel and I suggest that this crowd stop using it. Every child deserves to find the right place to be nurtured and grow and develop his or her full potential. Sometimes that place is not dad's alma mater.

Perhaps with the current economy the strong B to B great student,great kid, who is a "full pay" student will have a better chance of getting into a great school. I am so tired of the games played in the admissions process. Great A students, who were full pay students, got nailed in last years admission process. It's not all about the Ivy's and New 25 Ivy's. Apply to a school that's right for the kid.

I am a graduate of top tier Ivy undergrad and professional schools. My parents were unemployed when I was a student, so I worked, got loans and scholarships.

The money for all of those came from wealthy alumni. Without them I would have had nothing.

The very, very small number of legacy admits based on money allows dozens of poor students to attend on scholarship. Without the wealthy, these schools are finished.

So stop the nasty attitude towards them and recognize their importance. And note -- the lowest qualified kids in those schools aren't the few donor admits, but the affirmative action kids whose total costs are paid by the rich kids' parents.

And also note, in general, the legacy admits (not money influenced) are extremely well qualified. Only the affirmative actrion admits are below par. And if they don't like the very small number of rich kid admits, they lose their place.

Enough of this jealousy already. These are private schools.

The emergency room at the University Medical Center in Princeton is already jammed every weekend with Princeton students who love to party (alcohol poisoning). What the Ivies need now during these difficult times are more "money" students to enjoy staring into space. The good news is that society can look forward to more Donald Rumsfelds (Princeton) and GWBs (Yale) to guide us through difficult times. Admissions is still a dirty little business wearing a lovely set of perfectly matched pearls and a floral scarf.

Since most of this recession was caused by bad decisions made by Ivy grads, will that dull the Ivy patina? I entrusted about ten percent of my dough to an Ivy run firm. It is down 50%. The other 90% is run by a graduate of a third rate, state school (lets say Flyover State U--me) it is up five percent. I will say, however, Yale has a much nicer club in NYC than Flyover Sate.

The people at Ivy schools may not be any smarter, in the aggregate, than any other group of college students. If what citivas says is true then apparently the ivies are doing a piss poor job of educating students.

Seriously, why the obsession with ivy league? And have you ever noticed that people who went to Harvard always manage to let you know they went there within about ten minutes of meeting you? What a bunch of needy, pathetic melvins.

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GMCaesar, I agree. I was not commenting on their average, simply their opportunity for higher paid work as a result of the source of their degree. Some of it definitely has to do with people being impressed with the Ivy's, rightly or wrongly, but a lot of it is it is just a very powerful network of alum who like their own kind. I see it all the time. You can look at a given company and end up identifying the "Harvard mafia," etc...

ramiuthudna, I think it really varies by the school. Public University's in most cases never accept people based on legacy status or donations. But Private Universities aren't shy about admitting it and they absolutely do it, every year. My guess is you ether worked for a public university or the people you were pushing for at a private one didn't have enough juice. The fact that they would have been going through you probably means they didn't anyway - the people who donate enough or have enough influence to get their kids in despite terrible grades and scores tend to have direct lines to the Deans and Trustees, etc.

Derida, I hear you. I live out in the Princeton area and have seen it. And just try getting any college kids interested in part-time work (nanny, tutor, etc.) around here - you have to import them from other colleges (or sometimes the music college) because there's no such thing as a Princeton student who has to work apparently...

Embers, first of all, the number of people who get in on a basis other than academic (i.e. money, family influence, celebrity - the Ivy's love to educate former child actors, etc.) is pretty small as a percentage. A strong majority are there because they had the grades, scores, etc. to earn it. Second, I completely agree that once there, these Ivy's, certainly at the undergrad level, are no better at educating or having motivated students than most other colleges. The advantages you have are a disproportionate rate of interesting faculty (though many of the best never teach the undergrad courses) and a large pool of high potential students to set the bar high. That said, as a rule these Ivy's tend to be easier on their students academically than many public universities. As an example, compare UC Berkeley (public) to its neighbor, Stanford U. (private, "Ivy West"). At Berkeley (or any UC) a student has only the first few weeks of a course to opt out and get no grade on his/her transcript. After that they are stuck and if they stop going they will get a permanent F on their transcript. If they get less than a passing grade (a C), they may re-take the course but their transcript will permanently show the initial non-passing grade and the new one. At Stanford, a student can quit a course with no consequence up until the final and if they fail the final they can re-take the class and have the new grade wipe the old one off the transcript entirely. So students can game the system - quit before the final if they know they aren't doing well, and tank the final on purpose if they get it and realize they won't ace it. (At least this was how it was some years ago, I haven't checked if they've changed it since.).

The thing is, this is all good prep for life, really. The best public U.'s have a lot of smart students who didn't have the money or connections for the best private U's. They need to learn early on that life is not fair, that they will have to work harder and get less breaks and still won't have the same opportunities on average as those from the best private U's. The best (and most lucky) overcome all these obstacles anyway.

Kingbarryofdc, first, you are oversimplifying the race issue. You make it seem all black-and-white as if everyone has the same educational opportunity prior to college which is absurdly at odds with reality. Of course these schools can't compare a kid who grew up in gangland neighborhoods going to failing public schools on exactly the same basis as those who went to nice private schools with limitless resources. That would be grossly unfair and a poor result for our society. Education is the root issue of most of our major social issues and you're not going to solve any of them by perpetuating a have and have-not system and denying extremely smart, capable minority students who have been denied a good education at the primary levels a chance to reach their potential in college. That said, the systems for promoting under privileged kids is often grossly over-managed and badly applied. When the principle gets warped into a pure quota system, for example, it is no longer about equalizing opportunity and more about some artificial system of trying to exactly match demographics with higher education, which doesn't work, and leads to reverse racism, such as against Asian-American's which are discriminated against in the UC system because they are "over-represented" as a percentage of qualified applicants. It also fails miserably when the ideals get warped into a system that hands degrees to people in affirmative action programs even when they didn't earn them. I saw this first-hand in my day. My girlfriend's roommate in college was there because of affirmative action, which was fine. But she didn't excel. In fact, she often didn't show up for class at all. We repeatedly saw cases where she was bringing back F's on test and assignment after assignment and in some cases even blew off finals. She never worried though because she would just make her quarterly appointment with her special counselor and end up with straight C's on her final transcript. By the time she graduated from a top twenty university, she was still barely educated - I recall looking at a world map with her during the wars in Yugoslavia and her say, "whoa, I didn't know Yugoslavia was so close to Europe!"

Embers,
You are SO right. If Harvard doesn't come up in the conversation, Harvard grads will bring it up. I've literally had them say, "what a beautiful day, reminds me of days like this in Harvard Yard," They are also champs at sending bios out before meetings. With these people its like Groundhog's Day and they are stuck in the day they got their class ring and can't wait to show it off.