Elite academic institutions don’t simply provide the finest academic preparation across a breadth of fields. They are also the places important future relationships are formed; where powerful connections are established or renewed. Good schools provide passage to the best jobs and opportunities.
As it turns out, being smart, capable, hard working, or even having high test scores have very little to do with the college
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These facts are detailed in a new book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Daniel Goldin: “The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates.”
The numbers are unequivocal. According to the Century Foundation, at the top 146 colleges, only 3 percent of students come from the bottom socioeconomic quarter. Meanwhile, 74 percent of students come from the top socioeconomic quarter. Socioeconomic status is based on levels of education, jobs and income.
To put it another way: three-quarters of the students at the best colleges are rich. This also means that the middle half, the so-called middle class, accounts for only 23 percent of all spaces in elite colleges.
Students from ruling-class families enjoy innumerable advantages, from the quality and expense of their college preparatory education to their daily material comfort and safety. But superior preparation is not the principal manner by which the wealthy are admitted to elite colleges. Children of the wealthy benefit enormously from two things created exclusively for them: legacy status and development cases.
‘Legacies’ and wealthy preferred
“Legacy status” is the practice of favoring applicants who are the sons, daughters, or even grandchildren of alumni. The rate of admission for these applicants is often nearly double those without “legacy status.” This keeps colleges populated with students hailing from ruling-class families. The vast majority of alumni of elite colleges are, of course, rich.
Even more extreme are the privileges conferred upon so-called “development cases.” These applicants are children of celebrities, wealthy executives and influential politicians. Frequently, they have poor academic records, yet still demand admission to the most elite colleges. Strictly because of their wealth and power, they are afforded unequaled privilege. Many are admitted with SAT scores 300 or 400 points below those of some rejected applicants.
Daniel Goldin elaborated on this point in a recent Time Magazine interview: “If the parent pledges enough money or is a big enough celebrity or powerful enough alumnus, the break can amount to 300 SAT points out of 1600, which is as much or more than a typical affirmative-action preference would be. About a third of the kids at the typical elite university would probably not be there if not for those preferences.”
The privileges granted ruling class applicants far eclipse any special considerations that benefit the working class, including existing affirmative action programs. They point to a larger reality: a small wealthy minority benefits from an extraordinary set of privileges in every aspect of life.
Elite education is a potent advantage for the ruling class. It functions as a central instrument of continued class domination.
