What an 'elite' college does — and doesn't — get you in life
More than two dozen wealthy parents — among them high-powered CEOs and the actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin — went to expensive and illegal lengths to secure attendance at elite colleges for their own children.
“It’s really about the golden ticket of getting in,” said Antoinette Flores, an associate director for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. “And wealthy students are significantly more likely to do that.” But elite colleges’ reputations for offering the golden ticket has meant that parents and policymakers have always questioned elite schools’ admissions process. For years, pundits have suggested that top colleges simply use a lottery to form their classes.
Indeed, many top colleges pride themselves on what they describe as a holistic approach to admissions that takes a variety of factors — in addition to grades and test scores — into account. It’s difficult to tell if colleges exercise favoritism. “There’s so little transparency from the schools about how that works,” Ivey said. “This standard operating procedure was just ripe to be abused.”
College requirements change from year to year Applicants, however, have no power over who they are competing against, and that changes year to year. “The crafting of a class is a business,” Dodds said. That may explain why the parents embroiled in the college admissions scandal wanted to be certain that their children would get in.
The ability to play a sport appears to carry a lot of weight at least at some colleges. Harvard rates applications on four categories — academic excellence, extracurricular activities, personal qualities and athletics — according to court documents in the affirmative action lawsuit. Schools increase the number of applications they receive in part to push the share of students they admit down, allowing them to appear more selective — a factor in college rankings. Instead, the schools that fare the best on rankings and other metrics often have their pick of the best and wealthiest students who would likely be successful no matter where they went.
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