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Daniel Golden

The Price of Admission (Updated Edition): How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges--and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates Paperback – September 25, 2007

by Daniel Golden (Author)

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “A fire-breathing, righteous attack on the culture of superprivilege.”—Michael Wolff, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Fire and Fury, in the New York Times Book Review

NOW WITH NEW REPORTING ON OPERATION VARSITY BLUES

In this explosive and prescient book, based on three years of investigative reporting, Pulitzer Prize winner Daniel Golden shatters the myth of an American meritocracy. Naming names, along with grades and test scores, Golden lays bare a corrupt system in which middle-class and working-class whites and Asian Americans are routinely passed over in favor of wealthy white students with lesser credentials—children of alumni, big donors, and celebrities. He reveals how a family donation got Jared Kushner into Harvard, and how colleges comply with Title IX by giving scholarships to rich women in “patrician sports” like horseback riding and crew.

With a riveting new chapter on Operation Varsity Blues, based on original reporting, The Price of Admission is a must-read—not only for parents and students with a personal stake in college admissions but also for those disturbed by the growing divide between ordinary and privileged Americans.

Praise for The Price of Admission

“A disturbing exposé of the influence that wealth and power still exert on admission to the nation’s most prestigious universities.”—The Washington Post

“Deserves to become a classic.”—The Economist

Print length

400 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Crown
Publication date

September 25, 2007
Dimensions

5.19 x 0.85 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

1400097975
ISBN-13

978-1400097975
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“A delicious account of gross inequities in high places. . . . [Golden] is the Ida Tarbell of college admissions. . . . A fire-breathing, righteous attack on the culture of super-priviledge.”—Michael Wolff, New York Times Book Review

“Deserves to become a classic. . . . Why do Mr Golden's findings matter so much? The most important reason is that America is witnessing a potentially explosive combination of trends. Social inequality is rising at a time when the escalators of social mobility are slowing.”—The Economist

“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 preserving higher education as a route for developing talent, not rewarding privilege.”—Diane Ravitch, research professor of education, New York University, and author of Left Back

“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, Boston College, and author of One Nation, After All

“Daniel Golden 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. He names names—and test scores, and family donation levels. In the wake of this book, the university establishment has some explaining to do.”—James Fallows, national correspondent, The Atlantic Monthly, and author of Blind into Baghdad

“Anyone who believes that affirmative action for minority students is the big threat to college admissions by merit should confront Golden’s evidence that most elite colleges show much larger preferences for the privileged and the connected. I hope the book helps move colleges toward more equitable practices.”—Gary Orfield, professor of education and social policy, Harvard Graduate School of Education

“Daniel Golden pulls back the curtain on the world of selective college admissions, where the already privileged are the truly preferred. With vigorous prose and artful anecdotes, Golden tells a chilling story of double standards and double crossings. He reminds us that when elite college admissions go to the highest bidders, we all pay the price.”—Lani Guinier, Bennett Boskey Professor, Harvard Law School, and author of Lift Every Voice

“If you or your child is applying to a selective college this year, here's a reading assignment: Pick up a copy of The Price of Admission , a new book by Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden. It'll either give you a useful view into how the elite admissions game works or just leave you disgusted about the whole enterprise. Actually, probably both. Mr. Golden's subject is the root unfairness in the way elite colleges choose who wins the coveted spots in their freshman classes. . . . Mr. Golden, himself a Harvard alum, details the ways colleges chase after the children of the rich and powerful, like paparazzi pursuing Paris Hilton.”—Joshua Benton, Dallas Morning News

“The Price of Admission is perfect for those curious about what goes on in college admissions offices because it shatters assumptions about acceptance to elite colleges. . . . The Price of Admission forces the reader to wonder how affirmative action can be deemed controversial when favoritism of the white and wealthy is overly prominent in elite colleges. . . . [F]or those interested in the injustices in higher education, this book is a must-read."—Kansas City Star

“If you're ‘shocked’ by this, you haven't been paying close attention.”—Boston Globe

“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

About the Author

Daniel Golden is a senior editor at ProPublica. He was previously a managing editor at Bloomberg News, the deputy Boston bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, and a reporter for The Boston Globe. The recipient of many journalistic honors, including the Pulitzer Prize and three George Polk Awards, he holds a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard College.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1 HOW THE "Z-LIST" MAKES THE A-LIST: Harvard's Payback for Big Donors On a mild evening in early spring, corporate executives, lawyers, oil barons, money managers, high-priced consultants, and heirs to Brahmin fortunes strolled unrecognized across Harvard Yard from their suites at the Charles Hotel or Harvard Inn. Hardly a black or Hispanic face could be seen as the gray-suited, gray-haired businessmen--some leaning on walkers, others spry and ruddy-faced, with athletic builds honed on Harvard crew or tennis teams--and women in silk scarves and slimming black pants made their way through an unmarked door into Annenberg Hall. There was no campus announcement of the gathering, and no press coverage allowed. Bouquets of forsythia and tulips decked out the usually spartan freshman dining hall. The visitors enjoyed cocktails, wine, and appetizers--beef tenderloin, crab cakes, asparagus spears--as well as the attentions of Lawrence Summers, then Harvard's president. Several guests chatted about the latest show by the Hasty Pudding Club, the student theatrical society that puts on a musical burlesque every spring featuring Harvard men in drag. Then the Harvard band, perched in a balcony overhead, struck up "Ten Thousand Men of Harvard," and the group sat down to a candlelit dinner. Wine refills put the crowd in an expansive mood, and they frequently interrupted Summers's after-dinner speech with applause. The sole exception was when he outlined his initiative to boost enrollment of students from families earning less than $40,000 a year by making their Harvard educations free. He appeared to wait for an ovation that never came. I interpreted the awkward silence to convey a message, perhaps even a threat: If you make room for more low-income students by rejecting our children, we'll stop giving our millions. The April 8 dinner kicked off the 2005 annual meeting of what is likely the wealthiest advisory group in higher education: Harvard's Committee on University Resources. Little known and rarely mentioned in the media, COUR is not actually a committee in the usual sense--it doesn't formally make or advise on university policy--but Summers or any other Harvard president needs its support. It consists of Harvard's biggest donors, who form the financial backbone of an endowment that totaled $25.5 billion as of fiscal 2005, making it the nation's largest, more than $10 billion ahead of second-place Yale's. Committee membership has tripled in the past fifteen years, propelled by the university's record-setting $2.6 billion fund-raising campaign, which lasted from 1994 to 1999 and relied heavily on multimillion-dollar gifts. "As a member of COUR, you will be asked to play a leading role in the proposed campaign," committee chairman Robert G. Stone Jr. told members in 1991 in the first issue of its newsletter. By 2004, COUR's 424 members, handpicked by university fund-raisers, included ten of Forbes magazine's four hundred richest Americans, led by Microsoft chief executive Steven Ballmer (2005 net worth: $14 billion), oil tycoon Robert Bass ($3 billion), and banker David Rockefeller ($2.5 billion). Most are alumni of Harvard's undergraduate college or its graduate programs, but not all; Bass, for instance, went to archrival Yale, followed by business school at Stanford. To qualify for membership, donors must generally have given at least $1 million to Harvard--or be expected to do so--although a few smaller donors were picked for their prowess in raising large sums from wealthy classmates and business associates on Harvard's behalf. The seventy-three members of the group's inner circle, the executive committee, have typically given or raised at least $5 million, and sometimes much more. A free dinner and a newsletter aren't the only signs of Harvard's gratitude to COUR members. The school summons top faculty to the committee's annual meeting to expound on such topics as nanotechnology and the science of aging. It names athletic facilities, research centers, faculty chairs, fellowships, and scholarships after donors. And, in the most valuable reward of all, Harvard gives a massive admissions edge to their children, who flourish in a selection process that lacks conflict-of-interest rules and systematically favors the wealthy and well-connected. Although Harvard bridles at any suggestion that its slots are for sale, I found numerous instances in which a child's acceptance closely preceded or followed a major gift from the parents, giving at least the appearance of a quid pro quo. Most notably, a politically connected New Jersey real estate mogul with no Harvard ties pledged $2.5 million to the university only months before his elder son--a student below Harvard's usual standards--was admitted. Harvard admits fewer than one in ten undergraduate applicants, turning down more than half of candidates with perfect SAT scores. Nine-tenths of its freshman ranked in the top 10 percent of their high school classes. Its graduate and professional schools boast similarly high standards: Harvard law school, for instance, accepts only 11 percent of applicants. Children of major donors enjoy far better odds. By examining Who's Who entries, alumni records, and other sources, I found that 218 of 424 COUR members, or more than half, have had at least one child at Harvard. Many donors send more than one child to Harvard, bringing the total number of COUR members' offspring who have enrolled there over the years to at least 336. Nearly three hundred of these children attended Harvard as undergraduates, with most of the rest attending the law and business schools, which provide an entree into the corridors of American power. Since, by my count, at least eighty COUR members either do not have children or their children have not reached college age, the number of COUR offspring who have gone to Harvard works out to 336 children of about 340 eligible members--an astonishing enrollment rate of one child per major donor. Given that the typical married couple in the United States has one or two children, that wealthy women tend to have fewer children than the average, and that many children of COUR members never apply to Harvard at all, a conservative conclusion would be that the university welcomes well over half of applicants from the families of its biggest donors. Through their easy access to Harvard, the children of COUR members don't just gain intellectual polish. They also acquire a prestigious career credential and high-powered friends and spouses, consolidating their families' place in the American aristocracy. "Last year we completed a double 'hat trick' when my youngest daughter, Morgan, married Harvard classmate John Stafford," investment banker Ralph Hellmold, a member of the Committee on University Resources, boasted to his Harvard classmates on their fortieth reunion in 2002. "Thus, each of my three daughters has not only graduated from the college, but married her own Harvard man." Executive committee member James O. Welch Jr., former vice chairman of RJR Nabisco Inc. and a Harvard alumnus who endowed a professorship in computer science, leads the way in the admissions sweepstakes, with six sons who graduated from Harvard. Welch declined comment. Similarly, Finn M. W. Caspersen's generosity has not gone unrewarded in admissions to Harvard Law, a school whose preference for children of well-heeled alumni was satirized in Legally Blonde. The heroine of the hit 2001 comedy, played by Reese Witherspoon, learns from a classmate that her dim-witted ex-boyfriend, Warner Huntington III, "got wait-listed when he applied. His father had to make a call." Caspersen, a Harvard Law alumnus who also sits on the COUR executive committee, formerly headed consumer lending giant Beneficial Corp., which specializes in making high-interest loans to consumers with poor credit. He and his wife have endowed several faculty chairs at the law school and donated to its library, where the rare-book room is named after them. Caspersen, who now runs a private investment firm, chairs a $400 million fund-raising campaign that the law school launched in 2003. Four Caspersen children--Finn junior (who also has a Harvard bachelor's degree), Erik, Samuel, and Andrew--have enrolled at Harvard Law. The Caspersens declined comment. Professor David R. Herwitz, who served for years on the law school's admissions committee, told me that Caspersen's sons were fine students and "totally admissible." He added, "Any school, particularly one with a long tradition, becomes something of a family. What kind of a crazy world would it be if people who had gone to the school and made contributions would be told: your kid is very close, but not close enough?" Undoubtedly some children of COUR members were superb candidates whom Harvard might have admitted even if they were unhooked. For others, the preferences of privilege outweighed test scores or grades below Harvard norms. These fortunate candidates with marginal credentials--like many minorities aided by affirmative action--are often saddled with self-doubt, wondering if they deserved their Harvard admission. Most COUR children at Harvard have been legacies--a group to which Harvard acknowledges giving at least a small admissions boost. Harvard accepts one third of alumni children, nearly four times its overall admission rate. Legacies constitute 13 percent of the student body. William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard, who has been a guest speaker at COUR meetings, told me that he personally reads all applications from alumni children. He said the average SAT score of legacies admitted to Harvard falls just a couple of points below the school's overall average, and that he uses legacy status as a tie-breaker between comparable candidates. Asked how he defends a policy so little rooted in merit, Fitzsimmons, a 1967 Harvard graduate, said the school's alumni "volunteer an immense amount of their free time in recruiting students, raising money for their financial aid, taking part in Harvard Club activities at the local level, and in general promoting the college." He added, "They often bring a special kind of loyalty and enthusiasm for life at the college that makes a real difference in the college climate . . . and makes Harvard a happier place." Therefore, he said, "when their sons and daughters apply, we review their applications with great care and will give a 'tip' in the admissions process to them." Loyalty and volunteerism aside, the biggest reason for Harvard's legacy preference is money. Alumni donations drive Harvard's endowment, and the ability and willingness of graduates to donate to the university influence the size of the preference given to their progeny. The better than one-in-two admission rate for COUR members' children in my survey indicates that children of big alumni donors enjoy more than the tie-breaker edge Fitzsimmons describes. This finding corroborates a 1991 study by David Karen, now a professor at Bryn Mawr College, which concluded that alumni children at Harvard lose most of their admissions advantage if they apply for financial aid. In other words, if alumni want their children to have an admissions edge at Harvard, they should become bankers, lawyers, or dentists--not social workers, teachers, or ministers. "My interpretation was that if you couldn't parlay a Harvard degree into an income sufficient to pay for your kid's education, Harvard was less likely to make the same mistake twice," Professor Karen told me. The boost for children of alumni on the University Resources committee can amount to far more than a couple of SAT points. Harvard alumnus and Boston venture capitalist Craig L. Burr, a member of the Committee on University Resources, gave his alma mater at least $1 million in the mid 1990s; his son, Matthew, applied in 1998. Matthew Burr ranked fourth in his class at the Groton School but had an SAT score of 1240. Three-fourths of Harvard students have SAT scores of 1380 or higher, and the average freshman score is about 1470. Matthew applied to one other college, Williams, which rejected him. "I just don't test well," Matthew told me. He wrote an application essay about a family safari to Kenya--a likely tip-off, if one were needed, of the Burrs' wealth to admissions readers. His Groton counselor, he said, made it clear to him that his family connection would "help out" with Harvard admissions. Craig Burr told me his donation to Harvard had "absolutely nothing to do" with his son's acceptance. "Matthew did not need any help because he had phenomenal grades," he said. "I was qualified in getting in to Harvard," Matthew said. "At the same time, I do think legacy helped me. I don't think legacy is a fair criterion for people to get into college. But for me, that was the way it was." Like Matthew Burr, Jessica Zofnass had excellent grades in prep school but an SAT score (1410) below the Harvard average. Jessica, who enrolled in 2004 (followed by her sister Rebecca in 2005), is the daughter and granddaughter of Harvard alumni; her father, COUR member Paul Zofnass, endowed a scholarship in environmental studies. "I don't think I got into Harvard for my SAT scores," Jessica told me. "Hopefully it wasn't just legacy. More of what I did at Choate [Wallingford, Connecticut, prep school Choate Rosemary Hall] was being well rounded, captain of a lot of sports teams, president of the French Club. "It's really exciting for me to be here. But it's a very unjust society if the people who already have the benefits and the advantages and already have a wonderful life get an additional leg up. I'm very torn. If I were born into a family that was less advantaged, I would feel very bitter about the legacy status." Paul Zofnass, a financial consultant to environmental firms, donated between $250,000 and $500,000 to Harvard in 2003-4, when Jessica was a senior at Choate, and says he is also "very committed" to raising donations from his Harvard classmates. Zofnass told me Jessica "clearly had the credentials for someone to get into Harvard. I've also known plenty of kids who were every bit as good as her and they didn't get in. Why? My involvement helped a little bit. Had I had nothing to do with Harvard, she probably would have gotten in, but I'm not sure." Another COUR member's son, a Harvard undergraduate, told me that he graduated in the middle of his prep school class with an SAT score in the 1300s--"not too good by Harvard standards," he acknowledged. His father, an alumnus, donated more than $1 million to the 1990s campaign, plus half a million in his son's freshman year. Still, the student said he felt no qualms over his admission. "Definitely legacy was a factor, but I don't feel like someone else should be here instead of me," he said. "I don't feel guilty. A lot of people I know at Harvard are very, very, very, very intelligent, but they just sit on their asses. With my work ethic and potential, test scores that may be a little less than some others shouldn't get in the way of possibilities for me and my life." He said his father donated to Harvard out of love for the institution, not to sway admissions. Most of these upper-class legacies went to prep schools, where they participated in aristocratic pastimes such as squash, crew, and sailing. Largely played by affluent whites, these sports offer a college admissions entree unavailable to most public school and inner-city students. Some of the COUR children were skilled enough--and had the right pedigree--to impress Harvard coaches who submit lists of potential recruits to the admissions office.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown; Reprint edition (September 25, 2007)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1400097975
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1400097975
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.19 x 0.85 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #477,102 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Daniel Golden

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I am a journalist and author, best known for my investigative reporting on higher education. Some college administrators have called me a muckraker or a gadfly, labels that I wear with pride. I won a Pulitzer Prize as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in 2004 for a series of articles on preferences for children and donors in college admissions. I expanded that series into a critically acclaimed national bestseller, The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges--and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates, It drew renewed attention in the Trump era because of its disclosure that Jared Kushner was admitted to Harvard after his father pledged $2.5 million to the university. A new edition with a chapter on the Varsity Blues scandal was published in 2019.

My second book was Spy Schools: How The CIA, FBI, and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America's Universities, which was published in 2017. One of my idols, the famed spy novelist John Le Carré, called it "timely and shocking."

My day job is as a senior editor and reporter at ProPublica, where I co-edited a 2019 Pulitzer-winning series about the MS-13 gang. Before joining ProPublica, I worked as managing editor for education and enterprise at Bloomberg News. I edited a series about tax inversions--companies moving headquarters overseas to avoid taxes-- that earned Bloomberg's first-ever Pulitzer Prize in 2015.

Prior to The Wall Street Journal, I spent 18 years as a staff reporter at the Boston Globe, including four years on its Spotlight team. I have won numerous honors aside from the Pulitzer, including three George Polk awards, three National Headliner awards, the Sigma Delta Chi award, the New York Press Club Gold Keyboard award, and two Education Writers Association Grand Prizes. I was a Pulitzer finalist in 2011 for a series of Bloomberg articles on for-profit colleges that recruit soldiers, veterans, the homeless, and low-income students, often to leave them with debt and no degree.

I grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, where my parents were professors at the University of Massachusetts. My wife Kathy and I have lived in Belmont, a Boston suburb, for 35 years. Outside of work, most of my time is devoted to family, watching Boston sports, and walking our golden retriever, Sydney.

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Roberto M. Barros

A clear verdict in search of non-circumstancial evidence to nail a conviction

Reviewed in the United States on June 7, 2021

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First, let me be clear that I agree with the book's overall conclusion: the admission's process is skewed towards whiter, richer, legacy students, which increases inequality by favoring a subset of society that's already well ahead economically than the rest. Second, this is an enjoyable read most of the times, with very interesting stories and quite a few surprising situations, even for someone who's been through this process. For example, legislation passed to level the number of males and females at varsity sports increased inequality as universities, to comply with the legislation, shifted admissions focus based on sports programs from male/poor dominated sports like basketball to rich whiter sports like horse riding. Not in my lifetime I'd have thought of that on my own. Third, it's a very good book for those wanting to understand how the admissions process for US universities work, the biases and the realities behind it, and so on.

The reason I gave it 3 stars is that the book is more of a collection of few stories that fail to make a waterproof case for it being a representation of the overall reality and that there are underlying questions that the author barely or does not touch at all, but are key to understanding why thighs are what they are. In the courtroom movies speak (to be clear, I'm not a lawyer), if this was the prosecution case, a good defense attorney could point to these all being circumstantial evidence and that it does not prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.

Starting is the fact the stories focus on some top (generally Ivy League) universities, namely Harvard, Brown, Duke, Notre Dame and Yale, plus a few mentions here and there of Princeton, Cornell, and others. But rarely does the author transpose these stories in how do they play nationwide. Is the fact that Brown's focus on celeb sons and daughters a Brown problem or a general problem? How much of the legacy issue that so affects Harvard and Notre Dame also happens at Tulane or Boston College? Aside from more countrywide statistics focused on the impact of white-rich sports like horse riding, golf, etc. on admissions, overall it's just this happened in Harvard, that happened in Duke and Notre Dame is full of legacies...

And thus come to my second point... the overall universe of the schools mentioned account for a minor part of the US graduates as far as I know, and therefore, could not solely explain increase in inequality due to admissions in a country as large and rich as US. I understand that Harvard has an enormous share on presidential candidates and other top executive jobs... but this is more of an exception than the rule. Again, the problems showcased by the stories could happen across the board nationwide, but without info, this cannot be concluded just from what is presented.

Then comes the issue of why does it happen? Which is... legacies, celebs, white rich sports all bring potential donor parents, and thus this means more money. But what happens to this money? It's just for status or perhaps this money is funneled towards better classroom, facilities, endowments, etc. that actually improve the education and therefore benefits other students, a lot of them who are not rich? Or does it happen because deans focus on short term financial goals and therefore sacrifice some poorer students just because they need to keep their jobs? I'm speculating here because this is a missed opportunity... if the donations provided by donors are actually put to good use in terms of better education for everybody, including poor students, then does the legacy system increases or decreases inequality?

And if they do not and in fact this is just plain greed, ego, etc... there is no real recommendations on how to end this or what impacts would happen if law was passed towards this goal. There are (again) a few stories on a couple of universities that survive well without this system, but are those universities one offs or could their situation be the new rule? There are very effective government organizations, but as a rule they are not, so one cannot make the case for the whole just with a few examples.

Finally, and a provocative thought here... the book shows that some groups with no minority status like Asian Americans are negatively affected by the combination of "admission benefits" for legacy / whiter / richer students on one side and affirmative action on the other. Probably this is also happening to white poor students, who also do not benefit from either situation. But this is not touched at all, like it's anathema to suggest that there are white people being screwed by the system. And it's always important to remember that it was exactly the white poor americans who elected and supported Donald Trump in the last years, a lot because the city democrats and intellectuals focused their progressive agenda on the poor they can see from their suburb homes.

Once again, I liked the book, learned a lot from it and tended to agree with it, and would recommend it easily to anybody interested in the subject. But my feeling it has missed a great opportunity to go beyond storytelling. I kept expecting in each chapter that glue that would connect that story with everything else and make the conclusion waterproof, and it rarely came. If I were a juror on this judgment, I'd believe in the prosecution but would not vote to convict as the evidence presented does not prove the case beyond reasonable doubt.

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BeingQuaBeing

Great journalism, flawed argumentation

Reviewed in the United States on January 24, 2010

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This book is written magnificently, and the journalism is first-rate. Golden has certainly done his homework, and he provides the reader with revealing quotes from interviews with prominent people. I had no idea the extent to which one could essentially purchase a slot at our nation's elite colleges. The sections about faculty children and the counterintuitive consequence of Title IX were particularly creative, as I had never associated such things with aristocratic privilege.

That said, the overall argument of the book doesn't appreciate the complex means by which merit is defined and prestige is acquired. In spite of a disclaimer at the beginning of the book claiming that he is agnostic about the value of the SAT, Golden constantly makes subtle points to the effect of "The child of {wealthy person} was admitted even though his SAT score was 150 points lower than the school's average." More often than not, these well-connected kids who got admissions breaks were not total dunces; they received excellent educations at premier prep schools where competition was fierce and a B GPA may have been difficult to earn. Golden often harps on class rank and SAT scores to determine whether a student was qualified. So while I agree with him that there is injustice in this whole process, I disagree with some of the reasoning used to make the point.

To a large extent, elite schools are elite precisely because they are in bed with the aristocracy. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton didn't rise to the top solely due to academic prowess. Far from it-- Chicago, Berkeley, and Michigan have long rivaled these schools in terms of sheer academic strength. If you read the following Penn dissertation, you'll see that the "upper ivies" maintained their status by catering to the elites of their respective towns, not by offering better academics: Prestige in the Ivy League: Meritocracy at Columbia, Harvard and Penn, 1870-1940' by Richard Albert Farnum.

As such, one might imagine that if Golden's wish were to come true, that which gives Harvard its Harvardness could vanish. It's almost as though he assumes that the education itself at these places is inherently valuable, which is almost certainly untrue. As a graduate of a rather unknown liberal arts college with superb academics, I can attest to the fact that elite-level academics are only one piece of the formula that determines future success. Elite schools are more valuable for the connections-- including the fact that one may share a dorm with the president's child.

Golden ends the book by citing all of the wonderful opportunities that he was given as an undergraduate of Harvard, lamenting the fact that so many qualified students will not be able to have that experience because of admissions preference for the rich. But I wonder whether these wonderful opportunities are contingent on being intimate with the elite; perhaps this quid pro quo system is the only way to get this level of institutional investment. After all, elite schools in other countries have nowhere near the social cachet and endowment value of the Ivies. Think of all the excellent research that is funded thanks to this investment.

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ADRIANO GOMES SANTA ANA

Excelente LEITURA

Reviewed in Brazil on April 24, 2021

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Leitura excelente.

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Cecilia Walker

Nothing You Didn't Know Already!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 4, 2021

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This book is pertinent owing to the latest college admissions scandal involving the celebrities paying the Singer guy dosh to get their kids into good schools.
1. It is accepted most schools favour alumnae and obviously if your surname is Hilton/Getty/Kennedy you will have clout. Interesting how some schools allow alumnae to sway admissions over potential students with no connections.
2. Donating big bucks to an institution also pays dividends at some colleges.
3. Admire Caltech for breaking the mould and oh...heres a new idea..let's admit student based on their academic merit and potential!!!!NOT their wealth/connections/network.
4. Excellent the author acknowledges Oxbridge entry which is based on academic merit only.

StarMan

Five Stars

Reviewed in Canada on May 22, 2018

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A+

Tony

The Truth is out about truly corrupted selection system!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 17, 2014

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If you naively thought USA was a meritocracy this will show how wrong you are.The vast majority of Ivy League places are 'fixed up' for the relatives of big donors, staff, politicians and children of rich business elite who in fact rule USA. A tiny token few are awarded to highly intelligent others to keep up the credibility that a University is a place of learning and supposedly the only criteria should be proven intelligence.In the USA however this is absolutely not the case.
This is shocking and reveals how bad things are. The lack of Hispanic and black people in Ivy leagues shows the situation when these groups make up the majority of US population. The odd 'non fixed up' exception allowed into an Ivy College has the College making as much PR out of it as possible, pretending everyone has a chance, trying to deflect the reality of their selection process. Harvard Uni has around 200 undergraduate places per yr left after all the fix up people have been let in, around 200 places for people applying from rest of world, that's less than 1 person per country! Meritocracy it certainly is NOT. Truly shocking state of affairs for any intelligent ambitious person.

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Paul Darlow

Excellent book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 31, 2022

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Excellent book, adds more information to the Varsity Blues scandal.

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The Price of Admission (Updated Edition): How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges--and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates Paperback – September 25, 2007

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