Last week I provided the Introduction to my new book on the profound wealth bias in the system of elite college admissions — and what we can do about it. The book is entitled “Let’s Blow Up the Elite College Admissions Black Box: it’s Roiling Young Lives, Rigged for the Rich, and Wrong for America” — the book is up on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle editions, revised to include the effects the Covid pandemic on admission practices.
The Introduction summarized “what’s really going on” — a constant theme of this Substack column — in terms of inequities foisted upon applicants in their families by elite admission departments. As a reminder, here is a short summary:
Once hailed as the pathway to social and economic advancement in America, the college admissions process has become the bulwark of entrenched privilege, crafted by a powerful coterie of a few super-selective elite colleges to advance their own economic interests above all else.
Shrouded in commercial-grade secrecy, their admissions “black box” churns out entering classes with family financial profiles that closely track our country’s increasing income disparity, now at a 50-year high. Dozens of highly ranked colleges now enroll more students from the top 1% of families than the bottom 60%.
This outcome is no accident. Elite colleges’ business models are laser-focused on attracting a majority of students from the wealthy and well-connected, using sophisticated marketing, data mining and networking that target rich zip codes and school districts; provide hidden preferences for legacies, donors’ relatives and privileged athletes; and manipulate annual college selectivity rankings. They have also greatly expanded “early decision” admissions that lock in the rich while effectively excluding applicants who need significant financial aid. The efforts trumpeted by these same schools to attract disadvantaged students actually pale in comparison to their pursuit of the wealthy and well-connected.
The dominance of the elite black box admissions model contributes directly to unacceptable social, economic, and moral costs: unprecedented teen anxiety, depression, and suicide rates; bribery and corruption in donor-related admissions and standardized testing; and gridlock in social and economic mobility. It has also put an acute nancial squeeze on colleges that lack local taxpayer support or vastendowments to match the most elite colleges’ marketing machines.
These adverse effects have been magni ed by the awkward shift of college classes and admissions tests online forced by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has exposed a critical lack of broadband access among low income and minority families.
Rather than offering yet another narrative on how to play the admissions game, my book proposes to change the game through a new “Transparency, Equity and Fairness in College Admissions Act.” TEFCA would replace the black box, using federal financial leverage and Congressional precedents reforming other rigged markets to mandate a radically new admissions model. It would require annual disclosure of baseline admission criteria, special preferences, and outcomes by socioeconomic group; decouple admissions from donations; ban coercive early decisions; and subsidize research into more equitable methods to assess student potential.
TEFCA would also fund universal broadband to expand college access and fortify the nances of tuition-dependent private and public colleges already doing a better job
of advancing upward mobility in America than more celebrated elite schools.
Next week I will lay out in detail, excerpted from Chapter 8 of my book, describing describing exactly how TEFCA would work to reverse the bias and imbalance in the elite college admissions market.