Repositioning Admissions’ “Side Door”
“There is a front door which means you get in on your own. The back door is through institutional advancement... And I’ve created this side door in.”
In 2019, more than 50 adults were charged with felony conspiracy to commit fraud for their participation in the largest college admissions scandal in history. Millions of dollars flowed out of the pockets of wealthy parents—including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin—into the hands of athletic coaches and exam administrators. Photoshopped water polo photos and clandestine SAT schemes dominated headlines for weeks after the story broke, despite Rick Singer’s much-discussed “side door” being responsible for the admission of fewer than 1000 students. Perhaps Singer has devalued diplomas from the University of Southern California, but his scheme boosted only a miniscule fraction of the nearly 5 million incoming college freshmen in the United States. Much more widespread and insidious is the usage of what Singer referred to as the “back door.” Recruited athletes, legacy students, students from families who donated or are likely to donate to endowments, and the children of faculty members—all overwhelmingly white and affluent groups—are disproportionately admitted to ostensibly meritocratic institutions, including Wesleyan. Of course, the idea that any institution could boast a truly open “front door” in a society where class and “merit” are inseparable is tenuous. Still, the continued preferential admission of athletes, legacies, “dean’s interests,” and the children of faculty (referred to collectively as ALDCs) represents an affront to even the pretension of meritocracy, and should be phased out as much as possible.
It will come as a surprise to no one who has witnessed the prevalence of Shakespeare and Company tote bags on campus that Wesleyan students are radically wealthier than the rest of the country. The New York Times reports that the median Wesleyan student’s household income is $192,400, more than 2.5 times the national median and in the 90th percentile of household incomes nationwide (Chetty et al.) This skew partially results from selection patterns on the part of applicants—it takes a certain level of disposable income to spend three times as much for Wesleyan compared to UConn—and some stems from the aforementioned “meritocratic” front door. However, how much comes from the back door—preferential admissions for ALDC students—is unclear. When asked, Wesleyan’s Vice President and Dean of Admission and Financial Aid, Amin Gonzalez, replied that “It is almost impossible to quantify the “boost” that [I was] inquiring about because so few students present identical credentials achieved in identical contexts.” In his book The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College, Jacques Steinberg disagreed. After following the inner workings of the admissions process for the Wesleyan class of 1999, he reported that legacy students, whose status was denoted by colored stickers, were approximately twice as likely to be admitted to Wes than those without connections (Santow). Perhaps policies have changed; Wesleyan’s 2020-2021 Common Data Set reports that legacy is “considered” (as opposed to rigor of secondary school record, “very important”, and academic GPA, “important” [Office of Institutional Research]) but without any quantitative data available, there is no way to confirm. The school also does not provide data on the trajectories of legacies, though Dean Gonzalez assured us that “the admission committee does not admit students who we are not confident have the academic preparation to successfully manage Wesleyan.”
Despite the lack of transparency from current employees, however, a 2017 Slate article detailing a recent explosion in football funding has proven illuminative. The author, Ben Strauss, was able to get an anonymous former administrator to provide detailed statistics on the boosts given to the “A”s in ALDC:
NESCAC rules allow schools to grant admission to a certain number of athletes who fall below typical academic qualifying standards. Wesleyan, like its conference rivals, gets between 60 and 70 of these “tips” annually, or just less than 10 percent of each incoming class... SAT scores for this group of students tended to be in the 1,100 range on the 1,600 scale compared to around 1,400 for other students... [The] gap in academic credentials between white men who got into Wesleyan as “tipped” athletes and white men who were admitted to the school as non-athletes was the widest of any demographic group. (Strauss)
The practice of recruitment for college sports, especially expensive and exclusive sports, have been widely and derogatorily referred to as “Affirmative Action for Rich White Students” (Desai). However, they do serve a real purpose beyond making “graduates who worked in the same offices as Williams and Amherst grads… [less] tired of losing” (Strauss). “[President] Roth... is fully aware that a better football team [and strong athletics in general are] good for the university’s bottom line.” And the money that Wesleyan takes in from superfan alumni is going to good causes, as least as much as any other donations and tuition would (despite the value lost in the athletics funding -> donations -> increased athletics funding treadmill). Yet if maximizing revenue is the goal, spending scarce seats on athletes, legacy students, or donors is an inefficient way to go about it (if preferential treatment for the children of academics is necessary to maintain a competitive faculty, that seems much more justifiable). Instead, the university should consider a more radical reimagining of the relationship between admissions and fundraising: directly auctioning off a small portion (say 10%) of seats.
The idea of selling seats at selective colleges is not novel; after Varsity Blues, Robert Samuelson made a convincing case for admissions auctions in the Washington Post. He believes, as I do, that the current bureaucracy surrounding college admissions and the various ways that parents are able to buy “merit” (service trips to the Global South, expensive athletic equipment and coaching, private admissions counselors) represent a misdirection of resources that could otherwise be used to make schools more accessible for the bright but underprivileged. He’s also likely correct that the transparency of a public auction would increase overall revenues: rather than cap out at 80k plus whatever donations arise from the goodwill of alumni hearts, some seats would be valued at their fair market prices (clearly higher than tuition given the large fraction of students who would have paid if they were not denied admission). Would this devalue the prestige of a Wesleyan degree? Probably, at least to a certain extent—but the university’s discriminatory preference for the 15% of legacies (myself included!) and ~10% of athletes already guarantees that at least some of the student body has not been selected solely on their scholastic aptitude. Recipients of auctioned off seats would be required to demonstrate that they, in the words of Dean Gonzalez, “have the academic preparation to successfully manage Wesleyan”—say, achieve an SAT score of four digits—and this change would be accompanied by the total elimination of preferential treatment in other areas. Ideally, a reorganization of the rest of the admissions process to strip away factors like extracurriculars and other class-linked variables, in order to eliminate other biases and bring the school towards something closer to “meritocracy,” would also accompany this change.
Ultimately, the largest difference between the teenagers who "consulted" with Rick Singer and ALDCs is that Singer's route was illegal, while the route for ALDCs is simply "unconventional," at least scholastically. However, if Wesleyan—which does apply a selective screen to most of its applicants—wants to be perceived as both an instrument of social change and a meritocratic institution, it cannot scoff at one and then shake hands with the others. If the school has no problem with "selling" seats that would have otherwise gone to deserving students to the athletically and financially talented, it should at least perform those transactions out in the open.
Sources:
Chetty, Raj, et al. “Economic Diversity and Student Outcomes at Wesleyan.” The Upshot, The New York Times, 18 Jan. 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/wesleyan-university.
Desai, Saahil. “College Sports Are Affirmative Action for Rich White Students.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 2 Nov. 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/10/college-sports-benefits-white-students/573688/.
Editorial Board. “End Legacy College Admissions.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 7 Sept. 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/07/opinion/sunday/end-legacy-college-admissions.html.
Matthews, Dylan. “A Modest Proposal to Fix Elite College Admissions after the Scandal.” Vox, Vox Media, 1 Apr. 2019, https://www.vox.com/2019/4/1/18277492/college-admissions-scandal-harvard-poor-students.
Office of Institutional Research. “Wesleyan Common Data Set.” Wesleyan.edu, Wesleyan University, 20 Jan. 2020, https://www.wesleyan.edu/ir/common-data-sets.html.
Samuelson, Robert J. “Opinion | Here's How to Fix the College Admissions System. Warning: You Might Hate This.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 19 Mar. 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/heres-how-to-fix-the-college-admissions-system-warning-you-might-hate-this/2019/03/19/78eb40c4-4a66-11e9-9663-00ac73f49662_story.html.
Santow, Dan. “An Inside Look at College Admissions.” Chicagotribune.com, 15 Sept. 2002, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2002-09-15-0209130397-story.html.
Strauss, Ben. “Is Wesleyan University Compromising Its Academic Reputation to Make Money from Football?” Slate Magazine, Slate, 21 Dec. 2017, https://slate.com/culture/2017/12/wesleyan-university-football-is-good-business.html.
For the note received from Dean Gonzalez, see https://pastebin.com/L8AEzsPc. The inquiry was originally made on behalf of the Wesleyan Democrats, but this article was written independently.