The Price Of Admissions

Daniel Golden

INSIDE HIGHER ED - That American higher education is not a pure meritocracy is, of course, hardly news. But Golden's book has a level of detail about the degree to which he says some colleges favor the privileged that will embarrass many an admissions officer. Golden names names of students - and includes details about their academic records before college and once there that raise questions about the admissions decisions being made. For good measure, he attacks Title IX (saying that the women's teams colleges create favor wealthy, white applicants), preferences for faculty children (ditto, although substitute middle class for wealthy), and accuses colleges of making Asian applicants the "new Jews" and holding them to much higher standards than other students. . .

In an interview, Golden said that he became interested in the issue of preferences for the wealthy while he was covering the judicial battles over affirmative action at the University of Michigan. "Everyone was writing about the boosts [in the admissions process] for minority applicants," he said, but he started to realize that there were also explicit boosts for the extremely wealthy and alumni children. He was struck, Golden said, by how little attention such preferences received. . .

Judging from those who have favorably blurbed his book, Golden is reaching both sides in the affirmative action debate. Support comes from strong supporters of affirmative action like Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Lani Guinier, with the latter saying that the book shows that "the already privileged are the truly preferred." But the book also wins an endorsement from Diane Ravitch, a critic of affirmative action, who writes that while she "didn't want to believe" the book's thesis, she found the evidence to be "overwhelming."

http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/05/admit

ORDER
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=1400097967/progressiverevieA/