How to weasel your kid into an elite college without paying bribes - The Washington Post - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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Parents deploy their wealth to make their children look interesting and have the right “talents.” It works: Children from the top 1 percent are 77 times more likely to attend elite colleges than children from the bottom 20 percent.
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For the super-rich, the legal scam of buying your child a spot at an elite school through, say, giving a building is a secret so open it’s hardly a secret at all
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I spoke to someone who’d worked in development at a boarding school that had long served as a feeder to the Ivy League. At the time he told me that to get into an Ivy school, you need to give about $5 million.
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They may not even be able to talk about this: It’s become standard to require admissions officers to sign nondisclosure agreements.
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Kushner has objected that he graduated from Harvard with honors, but since about 90 percent of his class did, too, that hardly proves he was more deserving of admission than people whose families didn’t have $2.5 million to give.
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while Harvard accepted about 11 percent of applicants in the late 1990s, when Kushner was admitted (the admission rate is lower now), more than half of the members of the Harvard Committee on University Resources — made up of some of the school’s biggest donors — had children then at the university, and many had sent more than one there.
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Based on my research, I’d bet that there are orders of magnitude more students at elite colleges who took the “philanthropy” route to admission rather than the bribery one.
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the true tragedy is that almost all rich families buy their kids into elite colleges by purchasing advantages they pass off as talents, whether by way of sailing lessons or elaborate vacations planned with an eye on admissions essays. We view these vastly overrepresented children of the rich as having earned their spots. And that’s the great American delusion we call “meritocracy.”
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My parents gave me a lot I’m enormously grateful for: violin lessons that cost thousands of dollars a year, trips to museums and sites in foreign countries. My boarding-school classmates enjoyed much more: prestigious unpaid internships, interview coaching and tutors who helped with the work of every class.
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This is the real scandal. The 1 percent — more than 1 million American households — have more and more money, and they’re using huge sums so their children can get a leg up on the rest
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Those students escape questions about whether they deserve to be there, unlike people who benefit from programs like affirmative action, which could help moderate those advantages. Instead of thinking about this as a problem inherent in the system, we call it the virtue of meritocracy. And we look to the poor and middle classes and ask, “Why aren’t you more talented?”