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Sunday, October 01, 2006
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Insert Coin Here Weirdly disembodied opinion piece by the president of the University of Pennsylvania in the Washington Post today. It's a contorted effort to defend her university's continued use of 'early admissions' even as other universities, recognizing how unfair and demoralizing early admissions is, are dropping it. Penn's president dismisses early admissions as a trivial internecine debate among universities; it's a policy, she claims, which makes little difference in real numbers of students admitted. But this is clearly incorrect. Plenty of rich students with insider information about the admissions game apply via early admissions and get in to places like Penn, destroying the chances of impressive but less informed and poorer lower and middle class students. These students simply can't afford to play the early admissions game, since they typically have to wait until all admissions offers are in to see about what sort of financial aid they've been offered, and therefore can't lock in to early admissions deals the way rich students, fully able to pay for themselves wherever they go to school, can. The flagrant unfairness of early admissions is the reason so many schools similar to Penn are, one after another, getting rid of it. Not only that. Early admissions is one of many symbolically potent, discouraging elements of the prestige-university admissions game -- a profoundly money-advantaged procedure in general, whose most scandalous elements are described in the much-talked about recent book, The Price of Admission. Pious blahblah about democracy ("American democracy," Penn's president intones, "can flourish and our economy remain competitive on a global stage only if we offer the highest-quality education to the most talented children from all socioeconomic backgrounds.") in the context of a rigged upper-class admissions game is the sort of hypocrisy guaranteed to make all of us - including very smart students without the kind of counseling, cosseting, and money rich students get - cynical. Indeed this opinion piece can be read as a coded announcement to rich parents that - with Harvard, Princeton, and other prestige schools dropping early admissions - Penn is the place to put their money. |