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.
illustrations by Barry Blitt
On a mild spring evening last year, about 200 corporate executives, money managers, high-priced consultants, and heirs to family fortunes made their way across Harvard Yard and into Annenberg Hall. Bouquets of forsythia and tulips decorated the freshman dining hall. As the visitors chatted about the latest Hasty Pudding Club show, they enjoyed cocktails, wine, and appetizers - beef tenderloin, crab cakes, asparagus spears - as well as the attentions of Lawrence Summers, then Harvard's president. A student band, perched in a balcony overhead, struck up "Ten Thousand Men of Harvard," and the group sat down to a candlelit dinner. Wine refills put them in an expansive mood; they cheered psychology professor Steven Pinker's abstruse lecture on what irregular verbs tell us about the brain, and they greeted Summers with a standing ovation.
This was the 2005 annual meeting of what is likely the wealthiest advisory group in higher education: Harvard's Committee on University Resources. The COUR is not a committee in the usual sense. It doesn't formally make or consult on university policy, but Harvard's president needs its support nonetheless. Comprised of Harvard's biggest donors - mostly but not exclusively alumni - the COUR forms the backbone of a fundraising machine that raised almost $600 million for the university last year.
To qualify for membership, donors must generally have given at least $1 million to Harvard - or be expected to do so - although a few smaller donors are picked for their prowess in raising large sums on Harvard's behalf from classmates and business associates. The 73 members of the group's inner circle, the executive committee, have typically given or raised at least $5 million, and sometimes much more.The dinner isn't the only sign of Harvard's gratitude to COUR members. The university names athletic facilities, research centers, faculty chairs, fellowships, and scholarships after donors. And in what is arguably the most valuable reward of all, Harvard gives a clear admissions edge to their children.
Like most private American universities, Harvard offers admissions preference to all alumni children, justifying the privilege for "legacies" on the grounds of preserving tradition and rewarding loyal graduates. Harvard admissions dean William Fitzsimmons, Harvard College class of 1967, said legacies deserve a "tip" because alumni "volunteer an immense amount of their free time in recruiting students, raising money for financial aid, taking part in Harvard Club activities at the local level, and in general promoting the college."
That explanation glosses over the grubbier reality: Harvard actually has different levels of legacy preference, systematically and in some ways elaborately distorting its standards on behalf of a certain group. While children of middle-class alumni enjoy a modest edge, which may be heightened somewhat if the parents volunteer to interview applicants or organize reunions, the offspring of major donors receive in effect double preference - both as legacies and "development cases," whose admission is considered vital to fundraising. They fly first-class through Harvard admissions, often enjoying personal interviews with Fitzsimmons and slots on the exclusive "Z" list, which ushers in, via a one-year deferment, well-connected but often academically borderline applicants.
Increasingly, Harvard admissions values money over tradition. While the overall percentage of legacies in entering classes has remained constant at around 13% - roughly 210 out of the 1650 freshmen each year - there are reasons to believe that a growing number of those slots are being reserved for the children of alumni who are big donors or well connected. Two simple pieces of data document the trend: the number of COUR members (whose children enjoy 50% admissions rates) has tripled over the last 15 years. And the number of Z-list admissions has doubled just since 2001; as many as 40 of the students in last year's freshman class were Z-list placements. The Crimson reported in 2002 that an estimated 72% of Z-listers attending Harvard were legacies; if that pattern held this year, then roughly one in seven legacy enrollees arriving on campus last fall had entered via the Z-list.
Alumni of less-than-extravagant means have begun to note the double standard. While COUR executive committee member James O. Welch Jr., a former Nabisco executive who endowed a computer science professorship and the position of men's soccer coach, sent six sons to Harvard, Lynne Breslin had no such luck. Although her late husband, Geoffrey Brown, was also a Harvard graduate, their two sons - both, she says, class presidents in high school with strong academic records - were rejected. They enrolled at Princeton and Wesleyan instead.
"There are certain families where every kid gets in," said Breslin, an architect. "They're also class marshal and giving a fortune. Then there are the rest of us."
Disillusioned with the admissions process, some alumni question the implications for the values of their alma mater. When the child of two Harvard alumni, both professionals, was denied admission recently despite ranking in the top 10 percent at a premier public high school in the New York City area and scoring "just below" 1600 on the SAT, the student's mother acknowledged feeling "some sour grapes." The child was admitted to another Ivy League university, and has excelled there, but the rejection rankled. "The most interesting people I knew when I was in college were not people who had a lot of money," the mother said. "They have continued to be the most interesting people I know. I wonder whether Harvard," by favoring the wealthy, "isn't closing itself off from some of the more interesting applicants."
Corroborating my findings, a 1991 study by David Karen, now a professor at Bryn Mawr, concluded that alumni children at Harvard lose most of their admissions advantage if they apply for financial aid. "My interpretation," Karen told me, "was that, if you couldn't parlay a Harvard degree into an income sufficient to pay for your kid's education, Harvard was less likely to make the same mistake twice."
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