March 14, 2019--Admissions-Gate

There may be nothing so pervasively hypocritical than the way elite colleges admit students.

We are reminded of that just now. Two days ago the federal court in Boston indicted 50 people from admissions officers to coaches to college-advisor hucksters and to nearly three dozen wealthy parents who cheated in various ways to secure places for their children in the freshman classes of some of the nation's most selective undergraduate schools. 

For many decades these and other comparable colleges have found inventive ways to shape the profile of those they sought to enroll and, more than equally, to deflect and reject others whom they did not want to welcome to their campuses.

I used to participated by knowing about scams of these kinds many years ago when I was an administrator at a unit of the City University of New York and then later, at other institutions. In no instances, in spite of what I knew, did I speak out about the corruption I witnessed.

And, earlier, I experienced the tawdry rules of the admissions game when I applied to and was accepted to a number of Ivy League colleges, and, after that, two medical schools.

Anyone following how college admissions works knows about how so-called "legacies," children of alums, are given preferential treatment, as are gifted athletes, geographically-diverse students (it is easier to be admitted to the Ivy League if you're from North Dakota), and members of certain demographic groups who are admitted via affirmative action programs.

We also know that there are soft quotas systems at work. If admission was determined by the cold calculus of just numbers--high school averages, SAT test scores, and grades on AP courses--many elite campuses, including all in California, would have students bodies where Asian students would constitute more than half the campus population. For this reason, Asian-American students, to those in the admissions business, are often referred to as "the new Jews."

Speaking of Jews, until the 1960s all highly selective colleges had and enforced Jewish quotas. As with today's Asians there was concern that places such as Harvard and Yale and my Columbia, if they admitted students only by the numbers, would become "Jew colleges." And so they all set low limits on how many would be admitted. At Harvard, for example, just five (5) Jews per year were admitted. This was also true for the other Ivy League colleges. 

Even somewhat less selective institutions had severe limits on the number of "Hebrews" that they would admit. At NYU, for example, about 10 percent of the entering class, following quota guidelines, were Jewish. 

This was true as well for professional schools. I was a pre-med and when it came time to apply to medical school my WASPY advisor subtly steered me away from applying to P&S (Physicians & Surgeons, Columbia's medical school). Though I did not in truth have the grades to be admitted there, being pushy (admittedly a stereotype) I pressed him to tell me why he was guiding me in a different direction. Hemming and hawing, he finally revealed that there was a quota and I should be realistic and apply to places such as the Jew-friendly University of Chicago.

When I told my Uncle Jac about my plans he encouraged me to apply to Chicago and generously offered to pay my tuition, revealing in the process that he was a major donor and that would help lubricate the process as it does today in many colleges--a $2.5 million dollar naming gift can go a long way when it comes to Jews being acceptable. Just ask Jared Kushner how he got into Harvard. Like his father-in-law he had mediocre prep school grades and wasn't much of a basketball player. His Daddy, like the parents of those just indicted, wrote checks.

(I, by the way, though accepted to two medical schools, not including Chicago to which I did not apply, decided not to attend, preferring to work on graduate degrees in English and comparative literature.)

So what we are seeing is nothing new.

Finally, what do I have to confess? 

Among a number of things retrospectively I do not feel good about discussing, at "Big City University," where I was a dean, one of the programs for which I was responsible was for traditional-age undergraduates. That program was directed by an enterprising administrator who reported to me. 

Among other things, I noticed that slowly the program was filling up with varsity athletes, especially baseball players. When I asked "Jim" about this he told me the coach's daughter worked for him and that he was just trying to be collegial. If I had probed he might have told me the true story--that this program for which I was ultimately responsible was a back door into the university for student-athletes who didn't have the grades or SAT scores to be admitted to the "regular" college. He also told me that our program was a financial beneficiary of enrolling athletes. The university's policy was, on paper, to credit us the equivalent of full tuition for each athlete we admitted. This amounted to a number of million dollars a year.

So, there you have it. Ivy towers aside, the admissions game has traditionally been tainted and though there are periodic exposes of the sort we are currently hearing about things quickly revert to "normal."