Pulitzer Prize-winner Daniel Golden’s analysis of Harvard admissions reveals both embarrassment and riches: The children of big-donor alums are systematically given preference over legacy offspring of lesser means.
Along with making large contributions, it also pays to be friendly with admissions staff. Every year, Michael Holland runs the Boston Marathon with Fitzsimmons, his old friend from college days. "We have a long time to talk about everything," said Holland, a COUR member and major donor. But neither man has ever regarded the friendship as a reason for the dean to remove himself from evaluating Holland's children. On the contrary, Holland says, Fitzsimmons personally interviewed "one or two" of his sons. Three of Holland's six sons enrolled at Harvard.
While Harvard Law School has a conflict-of-interest policy, Harvard College does not. According to Professor Elizabeth Warren, who chairs the law school's five-member admissions committee, members who know a student or a student's family cannot vote on that candidate. Such recusals take place "a handful of times" each year, she said.
But Fitzsimmons, who served as director of the Harvard College Fund before becoming admissions dean, told me he knows so many Harvard alumni that it would be impractical for him to withdraw from considering their children's applications. "We say to anybody, whether it's a Harvard person or not, if they feel they can add something to a student's application, send it in," he said. "We're in the information business."
"Lawyers may be more sensitive to conflict questions than most disciplines," Warren said. "We worry a lot about unarticulated and unintentional biases built into a system." Still, like Harvard College, the law school takes care of its benefactors: four sons of Harvard Law School alum Finn Caspersen, one of its biggest donors and chair of its current fundraising campaign, went to Harvard Law.
Harvard undergraduate admissions could reduce favoritism by eliminating weak applicants early in the process. Instead, "Everybody in the world is still in play until the last committee meeting at the end of March, when the letters go out," Fitzsimmons said. Since outstanding applicants would survive the winnowing anyway, this fluidity elevates connections over merit. "Who do you think is being brought back?" asks Lloyd Peterson, a former Yale admissions officer. "It's not a kid named Gonzales. The kid's going to be named Rockefeller or Vanderbilt." He estimated that, if the first cut were final, the number of children of COUR members admitted would drop in half.
While some heavyweight Harvard supporters are coy about what they get from the institution in return for their donations, Al Gordon isn't one of them. Half a century ago, Gordon, the son of Albert H. Gordon, a Wall Street financier who was already on his way to becoming one of the university's biggest donors, applied to Harvard despite a dismal record at St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H. Young Al had not only failed geometry, but he had been caught cheating on a chemistry final exam, breaking the honor code. "I was a lousy student," Gordon confided over breakfast in November 2004. "There's no one who ever had as much tutoring as I did through all my school years."
Nevertheless, Gordon said, Harvard's appreciation for this father's generosity prevailed, and he was admitted in 1955. He found it tough going academically; "I had to sweat every exam," he recalls. But he went on to have a wildly successful career as an investment banker at Kidder, Peabody & Co., the firm his father had rescued from collapse during the Great Depression. And he has, in turn, paid back Harvard for its generosity, by adding $5.3 million to the $30 million his father gave over the years.
"They were damn decent to me," the younger Gordon says. "So they get rewarded big time. This is why Harvard is loved by so many people. Guys that do very well, that get through Harvard very easily, they could care less."
For Gordon, Harvard is a family thing - his daughter, three siblings, and four nephews and nieces all enrolled - and so is COUR membership. He used to belong, and three family members remain on the committee, including his father and a sister on the executive committee. Maybe that much involvement gives him the freedom to state what others pretend to deny: "The committee is nothing more than a meat market," he said. "They parade you around and if you don't give enough, your kid doesn't get in."
Daniel Golden, deputy chief of the Wall Street Journal's Boston bureau, is the author of The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges - and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates, published this month by Crown Publishing Group. He won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in beat reporting for a series of articles about college admissions preferences for children of alumni and donors. Golden is a graduate of Harvard College, class of 1978.
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