Affirmative action is under fire, but are we focusing on the wrong issue?
If you’re born rich in America, it’s very hard to end up poor, and if you’re born poor in America, it’s very hard to end up rich.
ADVANTAGES FOR THE WEALTHY
EVAN MANDERY: Preferences [for athletes, legacies, donors, and children of faculty] are massive. So your baseline rate, if you’re a random smart applicant to Harvard and Yale right now — their admissions rates are sub 4%. I think the recruited athlete has a greater than two-thirds chance of getting in. The children of faculty members and donors get in at about a 50% rate. And I think legacy rate is in the high 30% [range]. So it’s an order of magnitude … If the overall Harvard admissions rate is 3.5% — and that includes the 50% admissions rate for all of these buckets — then for the random person, it’s significantly less than 3.5%. And in the book, I talk about a student of mine, and he applied regular admission to Princeton — super smart guy, by the way, could have easily done the work at Princeton — and I was like, Realistically, what was his chance of getting in? And it’s one-tenth of 1%.
According to Mandery, another way wealthy students get preferential treatment is through early admissions.
MANDERY: Early admissions is noxious. Who can afford to make a binding commitment to a college without seeing their financial-aid package? Well, it’s not poor students. And yet, at many of these colleges, the early admits constitute two-thirds of their class … So it’s taking up more and more space, and it just creates less opportunity for people, and they don’t understand the system because they only play the game once and nobody explains the rules.
Yet another advantage is by hiring a college counselor.
MANDERY: There’s one story in the New York Post that reported on one of these organizations charging a million dollars to somebody for their services, but they routinely charge hundreds of thousands of dollars. They say, We make no apologies about it … So do we have any confidence that when a student is writing their personal statement that that isn’t a highly polished, professionalized, daresay, written-by-someone-else product?
WHAT COLLEGES DON’T VALUE
MANDERY: I have a [student] right now … He’s worked at IHOP since he was 15 and caddied some. And he’s about to apply to law school. I have kind of a standard advising menu that I go through with people. Well, can you take a course for the LSAT? I’m like, How much money do you have? … How much money did he have? A hundred thousand dollars. He saved a hundred thousand dollars from working his jobs and investing it wisely … Tell me that that guy doesn’t have the equipment to succeed in life.
Now, he didn’t intern for Senator Schumer, that’s true … He definitely doesn’t play squash. His dad definitely didn’t go to Harvard. His dad definitely did not give a million dollars to help build a library. He didn’t do a science-fair project. What he did was be a straight A student while working full-time. But that’s not valued by Harvard.
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
MANDERY: Race-based affirmative action in the United States will end, and it will be Harvard’s fault because of Harvard’s indignant commitment to maintaining affirmative action for affluent whites. Harvard could have resolved this lawsuit [brought by Students for Fair Admissions] by ending or curtailing preferences for athletes and legacies and donors and children of alumni that would’ve created opportunity for middle-class and socioeconomically disadvantaged students. It wouldn’t have been a perfect remedy, but it would’ve been a significant remedy. It would’ve also created additional opportunity for Asian and Asian American applicants.
Harvard convened two committees to consider whether or not they could increase diversity by reconsidering legacy preferences. And they summarily concluded that they could not. That ending legacy would jeopardize compelling institutional interests. Now, there is no evidence to support — and evidence to the contrary — that legacy preference has anything to do with the generosity of donors. See, for example, MIT … has never practiced legacy preference and has an endowment of $25 billion. So if [Harvard] believes that diversity is an important institutional goal, which it says that it is, well then it should end these practices that are antithetical to diversity.
DEMANDING CHANGE
MANDERY: These institutions will only change if the students, faculty, and alumni demand change. And I’m sorry, but it can’t be the poor Black students standing alone — because there are only 12 of them per Princeton class … This universe does not change until people who are the beneficiaries of privilege and opportunity admit … that those institutional pathways are bad. And no one benefits more from the myth that getting into Harvard proves that you’re super smart or superior than Harvard students. And it’s just not true. And so we’re going have to say something nuanced like, Sure, we’ve worked hard to achieve what we’ve achieved, but that has to be considered in the context of opportunity that we’ve had and lack of opportunity that other people have, and we want a democracy that’s gonna survive another, you know, few hundred years and not a nation where a hundred people control as much wealth as the bottom 60%. And part of that is going to be creating different types of access. So I know this is unfathomable, but if either the Harvard Corporation or the management committee of Goldman Sachs or McKinsey included some people who actually grew up working at IHOP, their view of whom they should hire and opportunity in America would be vastly different.
