The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates (review)

The first thing that strikes the reader about Daniel Golden's The Price of Admission is the populist stance taken by, of all people, the Wall Street Journal's Boston bureau chief. Golden's central premise is that the admissions process at selective colleges and universities has been corrupted by preferences for children of wealthy families. Golden's populist argument against admissions preference for legacies and the wealthy underscores a major contradiction for wealthy American conservatives. Conservativism's professed belief in self-reliance and meritocracy over aristocracy runs counter to the practice of doing whatever is necessary to preserve a family's money, honor, and name. Golden even goes so far as to compare the relationship between the British nobility and the House of Lords to that of wealthy American families and selective private higher education.

Of the book's 10 chapters, six take on a specific element of preferential admissions. Golden's targets are: big-donor legacy students at Harvard; big-donor non-legacy students at Duke; children-of-celebrity admits at Brown; the strong legacy culture at Notre Dame; athletic admits at a variety of schools; and breaks for children of faculty, most of whom receive substantial tuition discounts as a job benefit.

Other chapters include an explanation of how this litany of pernicious practices discriminates mostly against Asian students (he calls Asians "the new Jews," in reference to the documented discrimination against Jewish students practiced by the Ivies during the first few decades of the 20th century); a chapter recounting attempts by Congress to scale back legacy admits; and examples of "pure" meritocratic admissions processes. In one chapter, Golden proposes some fixes for the system. The modus operandi is to introduce deserving but denied applicants and contrast these cases with examples of students who benefited from whichever preference is the subject of the chapter. Much of the book draws on a series of articles Golden has written for the Wall Street Journal, augmented with more research and reporting.

Whatever the practice, Golden claims that the usual result is to favor the rich and connected but undeserving over those students whose academic preparation leaves them more deserving of admission to the top schools in the country. For legacy admits, especially legacies from wealthy families or the "development admits" who are not children of alums, it is obvious how wealth is favored. For athletics Golden finesses the point to center on the so-called "country club" sports such as crew and equestrian teams. Golden writes that these sports, as well as sports such as golf and squash, are played mostly by rich kids. Thus, reserving spaces in freshman classes for "country-club" athletes with lesser academic credentials favors children of means over more deserving middle- and working-class students. Golden claims that Title IX, well-meaning though it is as an gender equity measure, has had the unintended consequence of exacerbating the class equity dilemma, moving colleges to establish more women's crew squads and equestrian teams as a means of achieving gender equity in college athletics.

Golden's argument leads to some intriguing questions. Why doesn't a private institution, even one operating as a tax-exempt non-profit, have the right to use the admissions process to reward loyal alumni or as a development tool? Absent explicit discrimination covered by the Fourteenth Amendment, why should the U.S. government impose itself by means of legislation and/or regulation upon the college admissions process? Why should we be concerned with the plight of students who did not get into their first choice of Harvard or Yale but still ended up at places like Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon, and other excellent schools, places that still punch the students' ticket for a bright future, even if the undergraduate degree...