Friday, September 8, 2006

Walter Benn Michaels and "The Price of Admission"

I'm reading "The Price of Admission," the new book by the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden, based in part on his Pulitzer-winning articles from 2003 documenting all the advantages elite colleges give the children of wealthy alumni at admissions time. (The children of just plain rich people -- non-alumni -- get the red-carpet treatment, too.)

It's an amazing, infuriating read. Elite-college admissions officers love to say that what they do is like assembling a symphony orchestra -- all those kids with perfect SAT's have to get rejected so that people with other brilliant facets can be admitted. You wouldn't want an orchestra full of only trombonists ... blah, blah, blah. Golden says the analogy would work -- if orchestras, rather than the "blind" auditions that they currently use, hired musicians based on their connections to wealthy donors. Then wouldn't the BSO sound great!

What does this have to do with Walter Benn Michaels, subject of my Ideas piece this week? Well, he says that we shouldn't care about unfairness to individuals in the admissions process until the unfairness between groups is resolved -- until the poor and working class have a shot at a good K-12 education.

But Golden's book drives home how upper-middle-income kids can, indeed, get completed shafted. Over and over, a hard-working, brilliant, upper-middle-class kid -- often Asian -- is denied admission to Elite U., while Sally Scion waltzes in ... as the ink dries on her father's million-dollar donation.

I say "Elite U." but Golden names names (often Harvard's). We'll be hearing more about this book.

Posted by Christopher Shea at 03:49 PM

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