Why Elite Colleges Do Affirmative Action for the Rich

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Elite colleges also show a preference for applicants from private high schools. Specifically, they tend to give such applicants higher ratings on non-academic criteria.This is partly a function of the fact that prep schools invest more resources into abetting each of their students’ quests for admission, providing them with flowery recommendations from teachers and guidance counselors.

A vanishingly small fraction of American college students will attend an elite university. So from one angle, the stakes of such schools’ admissions policies for social justice may seem low. Whatever criteria they use, the absolute number of children from marginalized backgrounds who will receive an education at an Ivy League school is going to be tiny. You aren’t going to substantially reduce race or class inequality by altering Harvard’s admissions policy.

In any case, if we accept that this bias cannot be changed and that the mission of Ivy League schools should be to diversify the elite, then the question of what their admission policies should look like gets a bit thorny. None of this is to say that the Ivy League’s current admissions policies are actually optimized for elite diversification. They aren’t. Under an optimal system, the admissions preference for working-class kids would be drastically higher. Giving students from the top one percent a bigger leg up than those in the bottom 10 percent cannot possibly advance equity.

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