Essay 981

From The New York Post…

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CLA$$ SELECTION AT IVY HALLS

INJUSTICE LEAGUE REVEALED

By WILLIAM GEORGIADES

The country’s most elite colleges turn away deserving students to admit the less talented offspring of alumni and of wealthy and powerful parents, according to an explosive new book.

“One of the last taboos among America’s aristocracy is talking — or writing — about pulling strings in college admissions,” writes Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden in “The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges — And Who Gets Left Outside the Gates.”

In what Golden calls “affirmative action for rich white people,” colleges like Brown, Princeton and Harvard ignore poor SAT scores and other factors in favor of alumni connections, celebrity parents and generous donors.

An advance copy of the book, being published by Crown and due in bookstores Sept. 5, cites the following examples:

- Christopher Ovitz, son of Michael Ovitz, “had a mediocre academic record and a middle-school suspension for swinging a baseball bat at a female classmate.” Brown University admitted him as “a special student.” He didn’t last a year.

- The now-disgraced New Jersey real-estate developer Charlie Kushner pledged $2.5 million to Harvard in 1998. A year later, his son Jared, who recently bought The New York Observer, was admitted to Harvard despite having test scores “well below Ivy League standards.” Then “Kushner gave $3 million to endow an undergraduate deanship at NYU in July 2001; his daughter, Dara, enrolled that fall.” In 2003, Jared went on to NYU Law.

- Model Lauren Bush, niece of President Bush, applied to Princeton in February 2002, a month after its application deadline had passed. She was granted a “special dispensation” despite “SAT scores considerably below the typical Princeton student.”

- David Zucconi, a Brown administrator, “helped guide Jane Fonda’s daughter, Vanessa Vadim, through the admission process.” Later, the actress “gave $750,000 anonymously for minority scholarships.”

Golden details how “university presidents generally have a right-hand man, from Joel Fleishman at Duke to the late David Zucconi at Brown, whose role is to gratify key donors and alumni, including facilitating the admission of their children.”

How unfair is it?

The sons of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and former Vice President Al Gore, “both middling students who preferred partying to homework,” according to Golden, were admitted to Princeton and Harvard, respectively, “where their fathers had gone before them.”

Elite offspring who do get in say there’s a reason for the uneven selection system.

Frances Cashin, who followed her dad, Richard, an investment manager and big-time donor, into Harvard, told the author that “any college has to be careful about the students it lets in from a social perspective … It’s important to Harvard to have people who know what it means to work hard, make good friends, and go out at night. A lot more alumni children are well-rounded kids, probably because they come from more stable families.”

But so many spaces at elite universities are reserved for well-connected students, lamented a Notre Dame official quoted by the author, that “the poor schmuck who has to get in on his own has to walk on water.”