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Shumita Basu, Narrating: This is "In Conversation," from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, the problem with elite colleges.
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Basu, Narrating: The top universities in America carry a lot of weight, symbolism, all over the world. They mean something. Oh, you went to Princeton? You must be smart. You must be hard working. You must be deserving.
Evan Mandery: You must be dot, dot, dot. Well, you mustn't be anything other than wealthy.
Evan Mandery has been writing for years about admissions practices at elite schools.
Mandery: There are pathways, and I don't think people realize how common these pathways are, that are basically available only to the wealthy, a disproportionate share of whom are white.
Basu, Narrating: Evan is a Harvard graduate himself. He's also a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, which is part of CUNY, the City University of New York, where more than half of the students come from families making less than 30,000 dollars a year. He's also the author of the book "Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us."
There is so much conversation right now about affirmative action and whether it's fair or not fair. But Evan says we're talking about the wrong thing. The real problem with the admissions process isn't how much it favors disadvantaged students, it's how much preference they give to kids with lots of advantages, from wealthy families.
Mandery: I don't know what perfect justice looks like. I think reasonable minds can differ on affirmative action, but I know that doing affirmative action for rich whites is unjust. So let's stop doing that.
Basu, Narrating: I asked Evan to start by laying out a few of the different ways that college admissions favor wealthy applicants over others. There's one group that gets a big bump, known as ALDCs. That's athletes, legacies, who have a close family member who graduated from that school, donors' families and children of faculty.
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Mandery: These preferences are massive. So your baseline rate, if you're a random smart applicant, right, to Harvard and Yale right now, their admissions rates are sub-4% now, okay? I think the recruited athlete has a greater than two-thirds chance of getting in. The children of faculty members and donors get in at about a 50% rate. And I think legacy rate is in the high 30%. So it's an order of magnitude multiplier. And when you think about it, I don't want to overwhelm anybody with math, but if the overall Harvard admissions rate is 3.5%, and that includes the 50% admission rate for all of these buckets, then for the random person, it's significantly less than 3.5%. And in the book I talk about a student of mine, and I was like… Okay, he applied regular admission to Princeton, super smart guy by the way, could have easily done the work at Princeton. And I was like, realistically, what was his chance of getting in? And it's, you know, it's one-tenth of 1%.
Basu, Narrating: Another way wealthy students get preferential treatment: early admissions.
Mandery: Early admissions is noxious. Who can apply early? Who can afford to make a binding commitment to a college without seeing their financial aid package? Well, it's not poor students. And yet, and this is one of the things, and I didn't know this, at many of these colleges, the early admits constitute two-thirds of their class.
Basu: And you have a greater chance of getting in if you apply early, right? It changes the calculus.
Mandery: Definitely. So it's taken up more and more space and it just creates less opportunity for people. And they don't understand the system because they only play the game once and nobody explains the rules.
Basu, Narrating: A third advantage, Evan says, is all the prep that goes into the major standardized tests, the SATs and the ACTs.
Mandery: So tutoring is just the tip of the iceberg. People can sit for the ACT as many times as they want, sit for the SAT three times. I've never had a student, and I mean I ask lots of students, right? I mean, I explicitly interviewed from the book, but I kind of conversationally have been interviewing them for years. They don't sit for the SAT more than twice 'cause that's the maximum number of fee waivers you can get.
Basu: Yeah, you have to pay for it, right?
Mandery: Right.
Basu: Yeah.
Mandery: Certification for extra time. I think in Newton North High School, something like a third of the students are certified for extra time on an exam. It costs money to go and get that certification. By the way, you know, the SAT is a very poor predictor of college performance. It's very closely correlated to wealth, but grossly imperfectly correlated to college performance. High school GPA is a much better predictor.
Basu, Narrating: And then there's those who can afford to hire a college counselor.
Mandery: There's one story [LAUGHS] in the "New York Post" that reported one of these organizations charging a million dollars to somebody for their services, but they routinely charge hundreds of thousands of dollars. They say, "We make no apologies about it," right? And, you know, you're asking me the litany of advantages that are available to people. I mean, okay, so do we have any confidence that when a student is writing their personal statement, that that isn't a highly polished, professionalized, dare say, written-by-someone-else product?
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Basu, Narrating: Elite colleges tend to value extracurriculars that correlate with wealth, things like an unpaid internship with a senator or volunteer work or club sports. Evan says that's a real missed opportunity to assign value to other activities, ones that don't require money and that demonstrate true grit.
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Mandery: They don't value working at Taco Bell. I have a guy right now, I'll give a shout out to him, his name is Jorge Velez and he's about to apply to law school. So Jorge told me one day he wants to apply to law school, and I have kind of a standard advising menu that I go through with people. "Well, can you take a course for the LSAT?" I'm like, "How much money do you have?" He's like, "Uh…" Let me set this up by saying he works he's worked at IHOP since he was 15 and he caddied some. So I was like, "Oh, well, you know, you gotta… These are costly. I could try to find you help. How much money do you have?" He goes, "A hundred thousand dollars." He saved a hundred thousand dollars from working his jobs and investing it wisely.
Basu: Wow.
Basu: And being a student at the same time. [LAUGHS]
Mandery: Correct. Okay, tell me that that guy doesn't have the equipment to succeed in life. Now, he didn't intern for Senator Schumer, that's true, but I don't know in what universe, and there's tons of research that proves this now, right? That Jorge's ability to manage to work a job and simultaneously be in school, and by the way, he helps out, as you know, all of these students, there's so many health problems, they're always supporting family members. I mean, I'll bet you any amount of money that he resoundingly succeeds. But, you know, he definitely doesn't play squash, his dad definitely didn't go to Harvard, his dad definitely did not give a million dollars to help build a library, you know, he didn't do a science fair project. What he did was be a straight-A student while working full-time. But that's not valued by Harvard.
Basu, Narrating: Now, part of the reason Evan is arguing we should all care about who Harvard and other elite schools are letting in, is because there are consequences after they graduate. All those signals, all those values from the admissions process, get instilled in students and follow them out the door as they go on to become leaders, CEOs, lawmakers.
Mandery: They steer these students into investment banking and management consulting and tech jobs. So I actually think it would be significantly mitigating if Harvard led in a bunch of snooty rich white kids and steered them into do-gooder careers. That would actually make a difference to me. I was like, "Wow, they're changing values." It's not at all what happens. To the contrary, there's a sociologist at University of California San Diego named Amy Binder, whose work I love, and she shows, I think basically definitively, that students really don't have any idea what they're gonna do when they come to college. Same for rich kids and poor kids. But they leave Harvard, more than 60% of them go into those pathways. The percent that go into public services is approximately three.
Basu: 3%?
Mandery: Yeah. The lion share of which is people who are going to Teach for America, which is a two year commitment. By contrast, and depending how expansively you define public service, about two thirds of CUNY students go into public service. And, you know, if you live in New York, you know this, that if you stop and talk to a cop or your kid goes to elementary school, there's a pretty high chance that that cop or teacher went to CUNY.
Basu: Yeah, sure.
Mandery: Right? So we're a college of the poor that's educating our public servants, and they're colleges of the rich that are educating our investment bankers and management consultants. And what I find maximally objectionable is that they pretend that the rich kids are more deserving of their status than the poor kids. And, boy, I can't drill this home enough: meritocracy is a double-edged sword. If you say that rich people deserve their status, then you say that poor people deserve their status too. Nobody likes to admit that, right? And it's nonsense. Essentially every metric that these colleges are prioritizing are proxies for wealth.
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Basu, Narrating: So, I wanted to have this conversation with Evan right now because of a case that's being heard by the Supreme Court: Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
In this case, a group of students argues that race-based affirmative action is hurting Asian students in the admissions process at Harvard. They say that spots that should go to qualified Asian American students are instead going to other, less qualified students of color. Harvard says it does not discriminate against Asian American applicants and that race-conscious admissions policies are lawful.
Given the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, it's expected that it'll side with Students for Fair Admissions, basically getting rid of affirmative action altogether. Evan says that seems pretty inevitable. But it didn't have to go this way. Again, he says, if you really want to talk about who's not qualified to be at these schools, you should be getting mad about how schools protect spots for wealthy, less-qualified, mostly white students.
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Mandery: Race-based affirmative action in the United States will end and it will be Harvard's fault because of Harvard's indignant commitment to maintaining affirmative action for affluent whites. Harvard could have resolved this lawsuit by ending or curtailing preferences for athletes and legacies and donors and children of alumni that would've created opportunity for middle class and socioeconomically disadvantaged students. It wouldn't have been a perfect remedy, but it would've been a significant remedy. It would've also created additional opportunity for Asian and Asian American applicants.
Basu, Narrating: It feels important to stop for a moment and talk about legacy admissions. Just to give you a sense, according to a survey of this year's freshmen class at Harvard, 15.5% of students define themselves as legacy students. At Yale and Princeton, those numbers are roughly the same.
This practice of giving extra weight to anyone whose relatives went to that school can be traced back to explicitly discriminatory policies that gained steam after World War I. It was a way to limit the number of immigrants and Jews at elite schools.
In the past few years, there have been more serious calls to get rid of legacy preferences. Legislation banning it has been considered at the federal level, and in some states. Some schools have gone ahead and banned it themselves, like Johns Hopkins University and Amherst College. Colleges that continue to defend it say it's only a small part of the selection process, and that it's good for alumni-relations and donors.
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Mandery: Harvard convened two committees to consider whether or not they could increase diversity by reconsidering legacy preferences. They summarily concluded that they could not, that ending legacy would jeopardize compelling institutional interests. Now, there is no evidence to support, and evidence to the contrary, that legacy preference has anything to do with the generosity of donors. See, for example, MIT, which has never practiced legacy preference and has an endowment of, I think, 25 billion dollars. So, if it believes that diversity is an important institutional goal, which it says that it is, well then it should end these practices that are antithetical to diversity.
Basu: Mm.
Basu: So if the Supreme Court does decide to take down affirmative action, which many people have said is all but guarantee to happen, what kind of effect do you think this will have?
Mandery: So, the answer is nobody knows for sure. And I presume that the answer will look different in different places. One would hope that this would signal a sea-change to class-based affirmative action. One myth is that Black representation is proportionate at these colleges. It's not. Harvard and Yale and Stanford get to about 15% Black representation. Every other elite college hovers around 8%. One professor has said it's so consistent, it almost seems like it's collusive, right? So the idea that affirmative action has boosted these numbers to where these colleges look like society racially is just false. So class-based affirmative action would pick up a lot of race diversity too. They haven't gone down that pathway. Very important for people to understand that with respect to representation of certain types of minoritized groups at these colleges, part of the way Harvard and Yale get there is they pick up lots of affluent people of color. And I describe in the book how the most common pathway is foreign student of color who's getting admitted, which boosts these numbers.
Basu: So what you're saying is there might actually be a push to improve affirmative action by making it class-based.
Mandery: I don't want anybody to detect even a hint of optimism in anything I'm saying. I just feel that that's just too… No. Maybe, but I also think there's just as possible that there's retrenchment, right? Because class-based affirmative action is expensive so what… If we're kind of picking apart this puzzle, what I've told you is that a disproportionate chair of the Black students at Harvard are from wealthy families. So now if we're saying to them, "Hey, let in a lot of socioeconomically disadvantaged people," and we presume you're gonna pick up lots of race diversity in so doing, but they're gonna be like, "But those people, they want financial aid, so that's gonna be expensive for us." So I'm not as convinced… I'm certainly not certain that this turns out happily.
Basu: Yeah. Yeah. If you were able to reimagine college admissions, I'm talking about a ground up rethinking of the process, how would you do it?
Mandery: I'll say that having a single pathway of access doesn't make any sense, right? So I would diversify modes of access. For example, successful transfer students do very well. What could be better predictor of success in college than getting a 4.0 at a community college? Right? So, you know, how many transfer students does Harvard and Princeton admit? Virtually none. Does Harvard let anybody in from Bunker Hill Community College or Princeton from Bergen Community College or whatever? Almost not at all. I would focus much more on high school GPA. Imagine a universe in which Harvard and Yale conducted lotteries among high school valedictorians. Do you think that that would not be an academically well-prepared, gifted class? Of course it would be. Would there be many mathematicians and scientists represented among them? Sure. Would it be representative of America? Definitively, because it would be coming from, drawing from all of the communities. Now, would it be proportionately representative of wealthy people? No.
Basu, Narrating: Another idea that Evan says schools should consider: expand class sizes. Just let more people in. He says these elite schools with their multi-billion-dollar endowments have no financial excuse not to do this.
Mandery: So if Harvard wants to maintain its commitment to Groton and Exeter and Andover, and still let in six or seven students from those places every year, okay, let's not give them a hard time about that. Let's say to them, create a new school that's dedicated to socioeconomically disadvantaged students. A new school that's created to expanding opportunity. So NYU has NYU Abu Dhabi, how about Harvard Detroit? They could do it. But none of these colleges have significantly expanded capacity in 50 years.
Basu: This is obviously a political minefield. I mean, there are certain groups of people who reject the idea that admissions policies favor white wealthy people more than people of color. There are others who take issue with any attacks on higher education and the institutions. So how do you get people of differing views, differing political views, to agree on the same goal? If not the same way of getting there, but at least the same goal.
Mandery: This is such a complicated issue for people because I'm asking white people to surrender a little bit of their status. That doesn't mean that they have to stop advocating for their children, but they have to stop advocating for institutional mechanisms that disadvantage poor students of color. I can only say confidently that you're all gonna be fine, you know, if your kid goes to Cornell instead of Yale, or God forbid Vassar instead of Cornell, their life is still gonna be fine. And I interviewed a lot of people for the book, many people at elite institutions and many sociologists. And I would end and say, "Well, how do you feel about your own school?" And they would always say, defend, kind of make exceptionalism arguments that "We're doing the best we can, we're different than the others." I'd show them some data. It's a very, very hard thing for people to admit that they've been part of a system that's inequitable, dare say racist. Certainly classist. The American taxpayers are also sending these institutions collectively, conservatively, based on the leading estimate, 20 billion dollars a year in tax advantages based on preferential treatment of the endowment contributions and earnings on the endowment are both tax exempted, and I don't see anything that America has gotten in return other than deep class stratification. Look, this is the simple truth: if you're born rich in America, it's very hard to end up poor, and if you're born poor in America, it's very hard to end up rich. You can all send me your emails with your particular counter examples. I'm not saying that it's deterministic, I'm just saying a statistical matter. It's very hard. And we just… We have to do better than we're doing.
Basu: Evan, I want to ask if we can end on this note: you wrote an op-ed in the "Harvard Crimson" about a speech that JFK gave at Amherst College in 1963, where he told the students one of the greatest things that you can do is acknowledge that you've been given a running start in life. One of the most important things you can do is question power and put your talents and your compassion back into society. I'm kind of paraphrasing here, but I thought that was a really incredible moment to acknowledge in history and an incredible message for him to be giving to new graduates at that time. Why did you choose to write about that speech right now? And to actually say it to Harvard students today?
Mandery: These institutions will only change if the students, faculty and alumni demand change. And I'm sorry, but it can't be the poor Black students standing alone and saying… Because there are, you know, only twelve of them per Princeton class. So there's just not gonna be a critical mass of them. And that doesn't mean that if you come out and say, "Hey, Harvard and Yale and Princeton, you have to be creating more equitable pathways," that you're gonna be on the street, that you're not gonna be able to get a good job. None of these things are true. But this universe does not change until people who are the beneficiaries of privilege and opportunity admit. And that doesn't mean that they're undeserving people or un-meritorious people. It doesn't mean that people whose parents went to the college are undeserving of their place and, you know, that they're bad because they're legacies. It's none of those things. It just means that those institutional pathways are bad. And no one benefits more from the myth that getting into Harvard proves that you're super smart or superior than Harvard students. And it's just not true. And so we're gonna have to say something nuanced like, sure, we've worked hard to achieve what we've achieved, but that has to be considered in the context of opportunity that we've had and lack of opportunity that other people have. And, you know, we want a democracy that's gonna survive another, you know, few hundred years, and not a nation where a hundred people control as much wealth as the bottom 60%. And part of that is going to be creating different types of access. So if, you know, I know this is unfathomable, but if either the Harvard Corporation or the management committee of Goldman Sachs or McKinsey included some people who actually grew up working at IHOP, well, their view of whom they should hire an opportunity in America would be vastly different.
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Basu, Narrating: You can read an excerpt of Evan Mander's book out now, called "Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us," in "Mother Jones." We'll include a link to that on our show notes page.
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