A Response to Daniel Golden

According to the New Yorker magazine, two Princeton economists have found that taller people are smarter and wealthier than shorter people. Not surprisingly, these economists have been accused of a new form of prejudice against shorter people, one that I have decided to term “shortism.”

The curious thing is that even tall people feel that they are victimized by “shortism.” In fact, the New Yorker article reports that a 6’ 11” man asked the authors of the study whether “a seven-footer would be exponentially smarter and therefore wealthier than a six-footer or even a five-footer?”

As this example indicates, new categories of victimization have overwhelming increased in American society. Attesting to this development, Daniel Golden’s new book, The Price of Admission addresses the victimization that occurs in college admissions. Golden’s thesis is that admissions officers at elite schools like Brown give unfair preference to the children of rich or famous non-alumni parents. For Golden, the appalling result of this policy is an “affirmative action” for the elite that “sells” admission in exchange for capital funds and favorable publicity.

Golden characterizes this practice as so prevalent that one to five percent of the students admitted at elite universities are the children of rich or famous parents, what admissions cognoscenti call development admits. Indeed, when this pool of development admits is added to those admitted as legacies, athletes, or faculty children, Golden claims that as much as one-third of a given class receives some sort of preferential admission.

The result, according to Golden, is that elite colleges are meritocracies in name but not in practice. Even though the children of rich or famous parents are one of the smallest pools of preferential admits, Golden singles them out as the least deserving. Thus while legacies and faculty children are members of the university community and athletes make important contributions to the school, admitting the children of the rich and famous is somehow “grossly un-American” according to Golden.

Admittedly, Golden’s argument has a kind of tawdry appeal to the American obsession with the rich and the famous. However, it is a logical contradiction for Golden to focus on the children of the rich or famous: if elite universities are to comprise a true meritocracy as Golden suggests, then all preferential admission policies should be eliminated. If only the best and the brightest are to be admitted, it should not matter whether an applicant is a legacy, a minority, or a left-handed oboe player. If development admits are to be replaced, so too should all other categories of preferential admissions.

Such a true meritocracy would benefit those middle class students who do not fall within the current pools of preferentially admitted students. Thus if 1 out of 14 students are currently admitted to Brown, it stands to reason that the competition for admission will be far greater for middle class applicants not included in any preferential admission category. This competitive disadvantage becomes even more pronounced if we expand Golden’s analysis to factor in how preferential admission for minority students reduces the number of available admissions slots. Hence, eliminating all preferential admission policies would inarguably make admissions more equitable for many deserving middle class applicants.