March is high season for college admissions offices. The applications are in and deans are juggling: athletes, quiz show champs, active volunteers, math whizzes, minorities, kids with disabilities, kids who’ve composed symphonies, kids with perfect SAT scores—sometimes all of these things at once—all vying to get into a top school. Apparently, many factors go into crafting a perfectly balanced incoming class.
At UVA, those decisions get made in the admissions office in Peabody Hall. Academe’s vestibule is appointed with creaky wooden floors, oriental rugs, spic-and-span white walls and crown mouldings. A waiting room with a long desk and several busy staff members stretches off the main hallway.
When William G. Bowen, former Princeton president and a higher-education researcher, asserted in 2004 that three categories of students were getting preference in the admissions office—athletes, minorities and legacies, that is, students with family connections to a school—he also pointed out that another group of students was getting passed over. That would be low-income applicants. Bowen urged universities to consider putting a “thumb,” or maybe “a thumb and a half” on the admissions scales, to tip them towards kids who had overcome economic obstacles.
Elite universities heard the call and have since set out to give poorer students more of an edge.
UVA Admissions Dean John A. Blackburn says ambitious fundraising will only help UVA do more for poorer students.
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UVA admissions Dean John A. Blackburn describes UVA’s efforts. His office is part workspace, part sitting room—there are books and papers, dark wood furniture and bits of UVA paraphernalia. A squash racquet with an orange Virginia “V” leans in a corner. Seated around a low coffee table, Blackburn talks about a new policy called “need-conscious” admissions.
“We describe ourselves as being need-blind, where we don’t consider the ability to pay as a factor in admission,” he says. “But this new approach, that we’re actively recruiting students from low-income backgrounds…it’s an affirmative decision to give special consideration to students from low-income backgrounds who have taken top courses and thrived at their school.”
Under “need-conscious” admissions, low-income status is, for the first time, “a plus,” Blackburn says.
But college admissions deans across the country also weigh wealth at the other end of the spectrum.
In The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates, Wall Street Journal education reporter Daniel Golden maligns the elite university system. He alleges unfair admissions practices admit children of the wealthy and leave little room for low-income candidates.
Golden skewers Duke University for propping up its endowment by bending admissions criteria to admit the academically subpar children of the upper-class. “Duke has enrolled thousands of privileged but under-qualified applicants…in the expectation of parental payback,” Golden writes. “This strategy has helped elevate Duke’s endowment…to 16th in 2005 ($3.8 billion).”
The strategy is not restricted to Duke, Golden claims. “Almost every university takes development admits, and the practice is increasingly prevalent, fueled by larger economic forces,” writes Golden. “Development admits” are students admitted because their parents—and one day, they themselves—will likely make contributions to a school.
Blackburn says that UVA, too, accepts such students. “We’re talking about a tiny number of people. …And [taking development admits is] true of every university. Of course fundraising is important, and for a small number of people, it may have an impact on admissions.”
The number of people admitted because of fundraising ties is about 15-20 students out of 3,100 who enroll per year, Blackburn estimates.
UVA, like other elite schools, also gives considerable preference to “legacies,” or the children of alumni.
The motivation for such admissions policies has always been fundraising. But, lately UVA may find more motivation to rake in the dollars. The Campaign for the University was officially kicked off in September 2006, and UVA has pledged to raise $3 billion by 2011. (With a current endowment of $3.6 billion, or $177,000 per student, UVA is already one of the nation’s wealthiest public schools.)
UVA has long paced itself against private universities like Stanford, Duke and Cornell and even the “Big Three” of the Ivy League: Harvard, Yale and Princeton. The capital campaign “holds the promise of propelling the university into the front ranks of all institutions of higher learning, public or private,” campaign chairman Gordon F. Rainey, Jr. said at the Board of Visitors campaign kickoff last fall.
UVA isn’t the only place where high-dollar campaigns intersect with ambitious financial aid programs for poor students.
“Financial aid, it is expensive to do,” Blackburn says, “so leading universities are getting into it.” UVA’s administration says the Campaign for the University can only help the plight of low-income applicants.
“Every institution has a pot of money and they have to decide how to use it,” Blackburn says. “I think the institutions have to recognize the importance of attracting low-income students. So I don’t see a conflict there. It seems to me it’s only going to get better.”
But a number of researchers have pointed out that though colleges profess equality, they must perform a balancing act.
“Colleges are part church and part car dealer,” writes Peter Sacks, citing Gordon C. Winston, Williams College economics professor and founder of the Williams Project on the Economics of Higher Education. “They often talk the talk of Martin Luther King, Jr., but as self-interested institutions focused on their own survival, they more often walk the walk of an investment banker.”
Sacks, a higher education author who reviewed Golden’s book for the Chronicle of Higher Education, writes, “Elite colleges will serve the public good only as long as it does not interfere with their financial survival.”
Such is the conflict that plays out each year in admissions. Acceptance letters for UVA’s new first year class will be mailed April 1.
