The Price of Admission 

The Price of Admission
By Daniel Golden
Crown, 2006
323 pages, $25.95 hardcover

Reviewed by Bruce J. Jones
Assistant Director of Admission
Whitman College (WA)
Read more about the reviewer

Have you ever bent a paperclip to pick the lock of your sister’s diary? It’s not that you learn anything dramatically new—she is, after all, your sister—but the salacious details keep you turning the pages.

Dan Golden, the Pulitzer Prize winning, Boston-based Wall Street Journal writer, has pried open the diary of selective college admission. In his thoroughly researched The Price of Admission, Golden discusses “the preferences of privilege” that reduce the number of admission openings at elite colleges. He names the names of the silver spoon winners and the losers—the “unconnected” or “unhooked.”

Candid Commentary
Golden quotes a number of our secondary and ivy tower colleagues. One of the more riveting facets of the book is the candor of the cast, such as Notre Dame’s assistant provost for admissions, Daniel Saracino, who admits that so many admission slots are reserved that “the poor schmuck who has to get in on his own has to walk on water.”

The author, the son of immigrants and graduate of a public school, laments the meritocracy that landed him at Harvard in 1974, has given way to targeted groups of legacies, development cases, celebrity offspring, athletes, faculty children, and minorities. (And in the case of minorities, Chapter Seven: The New Jews, focuses on discrimination directed at high-performing Asian students, from MIT to UCLA.)

Good Gossip
Although sober in tone, Golden has enough dirt to descend the journalistic food chain to gossip columnist. Bill Frist’s and Al Gore’s sons, the former a Jr. (Princeton), the latter a III (Harvard), got into college on something less—or is it more?—than their merit. Both were legacy admits whose fathers served on their college governing boards. The book is rife with such examples. The Price of Admission may irritate the ‘haves’ and prompt—attaboy, Dan!—from the ‘have-nots.’

Golden reckons that at least one-fifth of elite college admits are legacies, development cases and the children of celebrities and politicians. Overwhelmingly, these students share wealth, posh private schools and white skin. The class system is nourished at elite colleges.

A significant number of slots (Golden claims 10 to 25 percent) are reserved for athletes with their comparatively anemic test scores. And Title IX, which legislated gender-based sweat equity, introduced women’s crew, sailing, golf, lacrosse, horseback riding, skiing, and water polo—“an admission giveaway to rich [white] women.”

The third group, the one most popularly believed to be the recipient of preferential treatment (at 10 to 15 percent), is minorities.

Death to Diversity
Without exception elite colleges articulate a desire for the many manifestations of diversity—racial, geographic, religious, economic. Golden argues that current admission practices gut professed policy. He calls for an end to legacy preference, for a firewall between fundraising and admissions, for judging Asian students on merit, and for abolishing affirmative action for athletes.

These suggestions will fall on deaf ears. Rarely did Golden’s sources question or apologize for their admission processes: Legacy admits sustain the character of the college. They give more money. They make it possible to offer advantages to the less advantaged. Development and celebrity cases do the same. Politicians direct public money for scientific research. Notre Dame would not be Notre Dame without football.

In other words, this is how the game is played.

Squirm and Complain
Golden made me squirm from time to time: My youngest is a legacy admit—did he get in on merit? While sipping wine with a trustee from an elite college (whose family name appears on an attractive building) I rhetorically asked if he could get my daughter into his college. He looked at me with a neutral expression and simply said, “Yes.”

The author continually uses SAT scores to distinguish applicants. Scores are somewhat less important than popularly thought. Holistic reading of applications diminishes their impact (and at a growing handful of elites, test-optional policies have erased scores as part of the admission puzzle).

There is a black/white tone to the book that doesn’t ring true when one is sitting in the grey world of March committee meetings. But the broad strokes are deft and thought-provoking. And as they say in Dan Golden’s Boston, the gossipy nature of The Price of Admission makes it a wicked good read.

About the Reviewer
After a lengthy career as a high school counselor in California and Massachusetts schools, I switched to the other side of the desk and now work for Whitman College (WA), serving as the New England regional assistant director of admission.