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It’s a textbook case of entitlement, closely intertwined with a logic that undermines affirmative action. For while children from wealthy families float to college on rafts of invisible advantages that we pretend are talents, minority kids are constantly told that they don’t really deserve to be there. 

the students who come in through the “front door” at elite colleges, by simply applying and being accepted, have also often bought their way in.

Rich parents spend millions on their children to make them “better” than others

Almost every student on campus is the subject of harsh appraisals based on how others assume they got in. The New York Times recently published an article about five freshmen friends at Harvard; one of them, the daughter of two Harvard alumni, was unsettled when a classmate “contrasted people who were ‘super qualified to be here’ with legacies.” Assumptions about affirmative action have led other observers to perceive Harvard’s many black and Hispanic students as beneficiaries of lowered admissions standards, rather than students who are themselves “super qualified to be here.”

In fact, the only students who aren’t vulnerable to assumptions of underqualification are Asian. The heartless assumption about Asian Americans at highly selective colleges is that they are, if anything, overqualified—academic beasts of burden, whose strange willingness to work endlessly makes them a vast group of curve-busters, who disappear into the hard sciences and are never heard from again until you need a knee replacement or a shunt in your brain.

he lawsuit has thrust many facts into the public view that Harvard would have liked to keep secret. An internal investigation conducted in 2013 concluded that the admissions process was biased against Asians, yet the admissions office never did anything to remedy the fact. Previously confidential notes made by admissions officers reveal that many Asian students were torpedoed because of low scores in the squishy category of personal qualities; these notes suggested that many Asians just aren’t the right kind of people for Harvard—not enough self-expression, norm-breaking, insouciance. “Would she relax and have any fun?” was written on the application of one high-achieving female student, which seems both racist and sexist

The issue at hand was—and still is—the city’s nine elite public high schools. Like most public high schools in the city, these schools can choose who attends. But the elite schools are their own animal: Whereas other schools look at a range of criteria to determine students’ eligibility, eight of these nine elite institutions admit applicants based exclusively on how the students score on a rigorous, two-and-a-half-hour-long standardized test.

The test-only admissions policy is touted by supporters as a tactic that promotes fairness and offers the best way to identify the city’s most gifted students. But the complaint, which is still pending, tells a different story—one of modern-day segregation, in which poor kids of color are getting left behind.

Public schools in cities across the country—schools intended to break down the walls typical of expensive, elite private institutions by opening up access to stimulating, quality education for kids of all means—are closed in their admissions. In other words, kids aren’t just automatically enrolled because they live in the neighborhood—they have to apply to get in

Charges are also being brought against 13 college coaches, including Yale’s head women’s soccer coach, who allegedly accepted a $400,000 bribe to admit a student as one of his recruits even though the student had never played competitive soccer.

“Every year, alumni contribute to their alma matters with the expectation of special treatment for their children,”

“This more genteel form of bribery is considered perfectly legal. Not only that, the donors get a tax break to boot, undercutting the fundamental legal principle that a charitable donation should not enrich the donor.”

Admissions professionals have long acknowledged that recruited athletes get special handling. A federal trial — in a separate civil lawsuit over affirmative action — revealed last fall that Harvard gives a significant admissions edge to recruited athletes. More than 80 percent of its applicants with top athletic ratings in a recent six-year period were admitted, an analysis showed. The university’s overall admission rate in that time was about 7 percent.

In exchange for the alleged bribes, prosecutors say, Ernst named at least 12 applicants as recruits, including some who did not play tennis competitively, easing their path into Georgetown.

the “most insidious model” is when coaches are given “slots” to recommend filling with little oversight or internal checks. “They get a certain number,” he said, “and sometimes it’s just up to the coach to decide how to play these cards.”

More than half of the admissions officers at public research universities, and more than a third at four-year colleges said that they had been working harder in the past year to recruit students who need no financial aid and can pay full price, according to the survey of 462 admissions directors and enrollment managers conducted in August

we’re seeing a fundamental change in the admissions process,

“Where many of the older admissions professionals came in through the institution and saw it as an ethically centered counseling role, there’s now a different dynamic that places a lot more emphasis on marketing.”

This x-axis is proportionately scaled, so the drop off in the admissions rate doesn’t come until about the 65th percentile of family income. But what it shows is still real: It’s much harder to get into an elite college if you’re in the top 30th percentile of income—unless you’re at the very top of the income scale. At which point you’re basically golden.

Children from middle- and upper-middle-class families — including those at public high schools in high-income neighborhoods — applied in large numbers. But they were, on an individual basis, less likely to be admitted than the richest or, to a lesser extent, poorest students with the same test scores. In that sense, the data confirms the feeling among many merely affluent parents that getting their children into elite colleges is increasingly difficult.

“We had these very skewed distributions of a whole lot of Pell kids and a whole lot of no-need kids, and the middle went missing,” said an Ivy League dean of admissions, who has seen the new data and spoke anonymously in order to talk openly about the process. “You’re not going to win a P.R. battle by saying you have X number of families making over $200,000 that qualify for financial aid.”

The paper inspired him to write his influential 1996 book, “The Remedy,” which developed his theory that affirmative action had set back race relations by becoming a source of racial antagonism.

“If you want working-class white people to vote their race, there’s probably no better way to do it than to give explicitly racial preferences in deciding who gets ahead in life,” he said. “If you want working-class whites to vote their class, you would try to remind them that they have a lot in common with working-class Black and Hispanic people.”

Today, as in the mid-1990s, polls show that a majority of people oppose race-conscious college admissions, even as they support racial diversity. Public opinion may not always be right, Mr. Kahlenberg said, but surely it should be considered when developing public policy.

For many opponents, the heart of the case against is made by Chief Justice John Roberts’s pithy comment “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” The dictum seems to be trivially true

In context, it’s clear that Chief Justice Roberts means “The way to stop discrimination against any given race is to stop discriminating against all races.”

over the past 50 years, the idea that race should not matter in judgments of merit has become widely accepted among Americans. Affirmative action, however, denies this: When the purpose is sufficiently worthy, it’s right to prefer minority over majority applicants (and even to prefer some minorities over other minorities, such as Asian-Americans).

The recruitment of athletes in such sports may be an even bigger factor in the admissions process at colleges in the N.C.A.A.’s lowest tier, Division III, where athletic scholarships are forbidden.

Division III is also the largest tier, with nearly 450 institutions, including many of the country’s most selective small liberal arts colleges, where acceptance rates can be as low as 15 percent. These colleges might field as many as 30 teams from enrollments as small as 2,000, with varsity athletes, many of them afforded an advantage in admissions, making up 30 percent to 45 percent of the student body.

The cost of fielding a successful sports team in the ultracompetitive college athletic landscape often leads to other troubling conflicts of interest.

President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to reassert America's commitment to refugees, after the Trump White House has slashed the resettlement program, part of his anti-immigration drive.

In 2016, President Barack Obama aimed to admit 110,000 refugees. President Trump lowered the cap of refugee admissions every year of his presidency. For fiscal year 2021, he set the cap at 15,000, the lowest on record.

The agencies' budgets are based on the number of refugees admitted. Low admission levels reduced government funding, which decimated programs supporting newly arrived refugees. After the State Department told them to pare their operations, many agencies had to shutter or reduce offices and lay off workers.

It’s not that I oppose affirmative action per se; boosting opportunities for members of a historically disadvantaged group as a means of reparation and social justice seems to me easily morally justifiable.

nothing so defensible has been playing out in the admissions offices of the most selective American universities.

The voluminous record in the cases brought against Harvard and U.N.C. suggest that in order to maintain a vaguely defined notion of “diversity,” the schools’ admissions officials bumped up the chances primarily of Black and Hispanic applicants by undermining opportunities of another historically disadvantaged racial group — Asian Americans.

As I thought more about this and the challenges that might be encountered by those trying to break into college admissions later in their career, I developed the following recommendations for those seeking to enter the field.

Jeff Miller, the NFL’s senior vice president for health and safety, was speaking at a roundtable discussion on concussions convened by the House Committee on Energy & Commerce. When asked by Rep. Janice Schakowsky (D-Ill.) if a connection between football and CTE had been established, Miller replied, “The answer to that question is certainly yes.”

Miller’s admission followed comments by Dr. Anne McKee, a professor of neurology and pathology at Boston University who focuses on neurodegenerative diseases. “I unequivocally think there’s a link between playing football and CTE,” she told the panel Monday

“We’ve seen it in 90 out of 94 NFL players whose brains we’ve examined, we’ve found it in 45 out of 55 college players and 26 out of 65 high school players,” McKee continued. “No, I don’t think this represents how common this disease is in the living population, but the fact that over five years I’ve been able to accumulate this number of cases in football players, it cannot be rare. In fact, I think we are going to be surprised at how common it is.”

The suit cites statistical evidence to claim that Harvard holds Asian applicants to a “far higher standard than other students” and that Harvard uses “racial classifications to engage in the same brand of invidious discrimination against Asian Americans that it formerly used to limit the number of Jewish students in its student body.”

To get into the top schools, Asians need SAT scores that are about 140 points higher than those of their white peers. In 2008, over half of all applicants to Harvard with exceptionally high SAT scores were Asian, yet they made up only 17 percent of the entering class (now 20 percent). Asians are the fastest-growing racial group in America, but their proportion of Harvard undergraduates has been flat for two decades.

discrimination against an entire race of students is simply unmistakable. Fixing it could be accomplished not at the expense of racial diversity, but in curtailing affirmative action for athletes and legacy admissions.

Affirmative action at universities in doubt as U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments

It was clear that the court's conservatives, including Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., believe that using affirmative action in admission decisions is unneeded and unconstitutional.

In the past, when the high court has upheld affirmative action, it did so with the understanding that it was a "temporary" measure, the chief justice said. "When do you think your program will be done?" he asked.

Why was Felicity Huffman’s husband, an equally famous actor, not also charged with trying to bribe and fraud his kids’ way into college?

“Oh, I bet I know why,” sighed one friend, currently mired in her own kids’ school applications. “It’s because the moms have to do everything, including organize the crime.”

Macy, for what it’s worth, actually appeared to be a very involved parent. In the recorded phone calls, it was SPOUSE who brought up that his kid needed high enough scores for Georgetown. It was SPOUSE who declared the kid would perform better if the family could finagle an extended two-day SAT testing period, usually reserved for students with learning disabilities.

Why would a president say such things? And in public? My view, for what it’s worth, is that Trump’s pathological narcissism overrides reality on a minute-by-minute basis, and that because of this, the very idea of the rule of law, which makes no distinction between the really stable geniuses and everybody else, is impossible for Trump to understand

Looking at his long and abysmal business career, the rule of law was always, always an object of scorn, something only suckers cared about and lawyers were paid to circumvent. For Trump, the law is something to break, avoid or pay off. And as president, he clearly believes he is above it.

narcissism is no defense. Delusional mania and paranoia are no defenses eithe

The consequences were swift. Over the next two days, Ms. Groves was removed from the university’s cheer team. She then withdrew from the school under pressure from admissions officials, who told her they had received hundreds of emails and phone calls from outraged alumni, students and the public.

Ms. Groves was among many incoming freshmen across the country whose admissions offers were revoked by at least a dozen universities after videos emerged on social media of them using racist language.

In one sense, the public shaming of Ms. Groves underscores the power of social media to hold people of all ages accountable, with consequences at times including harassment and both online and real-world “cancellation.”

the important question for Harvard was never whether Gay should step down. It was why she was brought on in the first place, after one of the shortest presidential searches in Harvard’s recent history.

How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers — she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia?

The answer, I think, is this: Where there used to be a pinnacle, there’s now a crater. It was created when the social-justice model of higher education, currently centered on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — and heavily invested in the administrative side of the university — blew up the excellence model, centered on the ideal of intellectual merit and chiefly concerned with knowledge, discovery and the free and vigorous contest of ideas.