Tuesday, July 16, 2019

The Other College Admissions Scandal

By now the news that celebrities and the rich don't have to play by the same rules as everyone else should be pretty obvious. The most (and already dated) example of this came about regarding what the government called Operation Varsity Blues. The feds busted up a college admissions bribery ring that took down William Rick Singer, the mastermind, and his rich-parent clients like terrible Hallmark channel movie star Lori Loughlin and Desperate Housewife Felicity Huffman. They are accused of paying off various college officials and inflating their children's application credentials in order to secure admission to prestigious universities such as Harvard, Yale, The University of Southern California, and Stanford. It shouldn't come as a shock that rich kids tend to do OK regardless of where they attend college because, like, they're already rich. In a 2004 paper economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger found that where the wealthy children has little to no consequence on future earnings, or as they put it, "generally indistinguishable from zero".

Again none of this is all that shocking. Presidents have taken advantage of being rich and getting into good colleges. George W. Bush is a pretty obvious example (Yale undergrad, Harvard MBA). A less obvious one is Franklin D. Roosevelt who went to Harvard and then Columbia Law School where, according to historian William E. Leuchtenburg, "he attended for two years, never graduated, and displayed neither an aptitude nor a passion for the law."Presidents don't need to be smarty-smart scholars, that much is certainly obvious in 2019, but these two examples show that 1) it's politically neutral and 2) this stuff has been going on for a while now.

If Operation Varsity Blues and rich kids being unqualified for prestigious institutions isn't a shocking scandal, then what is? Well, that would be the continuing practice of legacy admissions or legacy preference. Another quick example, according to the freakin' Harvard Student newspaper (the Harvard Crimson) the class of 2022 is 36% legacy while the class of 2021 is a lowly 29% legacy. In other words of the 2,024 freshman admitted 728 of them had a parent or relative attend Harvard.

The Crimson student survey finds other really important stuff that is shocking in it's own right and is never discussed because it's easier to laugh at Olivia Jade's "sponcon" than to think about have minorities are disadvantaged in terms of legacy admissions and wealth at places like Harvard. The survey also found that "White students were more likely than were students belonging to any other demographic to report an annual income above $250,000. About 33.5 percent of white freshmen did so." And the real kicker "Income levels also appeared to correlate with legacy status. Over a third — 36.3 percent — of students with one or more parent who attended Harvard said they come from a family with a combined income of $500,000 or more." Hit pause here and go back to the Dale and Krueger paper.

There? Great! Find the "indistinguishable from zero" part on page 5. Look at the next two sentences. Here's what they say "Notable exceptions are for racial and ethnic minorities (black and Hispanic students) and for students whose parents have relatively little education; for these subgroups, our estimates remain large, even in models that adjust for unobserved student characteristics. One possible explanation for this pattern of results is that highly selective colleges provide access to networks for minority students and for students from disadvantaged family backgrounds that are otherwise not available to them." The important bits are in bold. Putting this simply in non-academic language: minorities gain more from colleges because they access what is not normally available to them. What isn't available to these disadvantaged students? Oh, that's right stuff wealthy legacy kids already have access to, Dale and Krueger call it "job-networking opportunities."

It is worth mentioning here that the idea of legacy admissions often gets lumped into the idea of meritocracy or is justified because of alumni donations. The problem is that even though it's "rare" to express the idea that legacy admissions is wrong there's still the occasional Harvard student who sees the problem. In one study a student named Jeremy told his interviewers that " It’s kids who went to fancy New England prep schools and who have parents who could buy these SAT prep courses and private tutoring and just had resources. Like 40% of students are legacies. That’s not a very meritocratic policy. So no, I don’t think Harvard is a meritocracy." The claim of alumni donations is doubly false because as one study found "These combined results suggest that higher alumni giving at top institutions that employ legacy preferences is not a result of the preference policy exerting influence on alumni giving behavior, but rather that the policy allows elite schools to over-select from their own wealthy alumni." Put simply, elite schools pick elite kids because they're parents were elite kids. The second part of this double fallacy is that alumni parents simply stop donating if they're child is rejected. Another study put it frankly "If the child is rejected, giving falls off dramatically". The two arguments of meritocracy and donations leave miss out on larger conversations regarding race and diversity on campus.

This is all to say that the real scandal here isn't that rich parents get their rich children into elite colleges. The wealthy in the Varsity Blues sting may or may not have been alumni at these schools but they were able to circumvent that situation by simply be affluent. What's shocking, in other words, is that elite colleges select a group of both wealthy and connected students regardless of their merit and interest in furthering their own knowledge and in the process reject students who do not have the wealth or familial connections that would allow them to gain admittance to something that is, clearly, a large positive for their socioeconomic situation despite having similar or superior credentials as their well connected peers.

Putting it simply the real shocking news isn't wealthy parents gaming the system to get their children accepted into elite colleges. No, the real shocking news is who those elite colleges are keeping out.

**All views in this post are the author's own and do NOT represent the views of Mercer County Community College**

No comments:

Post a Comment