Journeys in Learning Beyond the Classroom

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. - One morning in late February, Mike Schoenfeld will gather about two dozen manila folders from his desk and carry them to a hearing room inside the admissions office of Middlebury College. 

 

As the admissions committee listens, Mr. Schoenfeld, the dean of enrollment planning, will present what the college refers to as its "special interest" cases: those of applicants whose parents - by virtue of being loyal Middlebury alumni, fabulously wealthy or both - have captured the attention of the Middlebury administration.

 

Though the committee members will be told to vote their conscience, their decisions are often a forgone conclusion, as a decision to admit may well help the college's president, John M. McCardell Jr., say thank you for a contribution (more than $1 million is not unheard of) or help him collect a marker for a future gift.

 

"I'm sure every admissions office in the country is paying attention to families' ability to make a major donation," said Dean Schoenfeld, who graduated from Middlebury in 1973 and is bombarded these days by applications from the children of his fraternity brothers. "That's likely to be even more important in the down economy."

 

While Middlebury, like other highly selective colleges, has engaged in some version of this ritual for more than two centuries, the favoritism that admissions offices show to legacies, as the children of alumni are called, and those with deep pockets is coming under fire as never before.

 

Now that critics of affirmative action have persuaded the Supreme Court to consider whether black and Hispanic applicants are taking the rightful spots of more-qualified whites, some supporters of race-conscious admissions are mounting a counteroffensive. They complain that it is the preferential treatment afforded some applicants because of their parents' wealth or college affiliation that is unfair.

 

At Middlebury and other highly selective colleges, the chance that the children of alumni will be admitted is often double that of applicants without such connections, though frequently not as great as the admission rate of underrepresented minorities and even some athletes.

 

The lament of the excluded, long expressed by unsuccessful applicants to Harvard and Yale, has crept into the early presidential campaign. In a speech not long ago at the University of Maryland, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, apparently seeking to enhance egalitarian credentials in his pursuit of the Democratic nomination, criticized the preferences given children of alumni.

 

"Affirmative action remedies past discrimination," Senator Edwards, a graduate of North Carolina State whose parents did not attend college, said in an interview. "Legacy admissions give more to kids who already have more."

 

Unlike affirmative action, the preferences for children of alumni have rarely been tested in the courts. But since the overwhelming number of beneficiaries of such policies are white, some scholars say that legal challenges are inevitable.

 

"Even if it's a private institution, a college is a nonprofit organization subject to civil rights law," said Michael Lind, a former lecturer at Harvard Law School who is now a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a centrist public policy institute. "Legacies are a relic of white supremacy and Northeastern establishment dominance."

 

In response to legal challenges to affirmative action, the public university systems of Georgia and California have dropped preferences in recent years for legacies and other so-called V.I.P. applicants. But no highly selective private college has followed suit, in large part because the economic benefit of admitting such applicants is so great.

 

Yet the flood of applications to highly selective colleges - Middlebury received 5,300 applications for the current freshman class and offered admission to 1,430 applicants - has stiffened competition faced by legacies, who until the 1960's were virtually assured admission. In recognition of that competition, many legacies these days do not even try to apply to their parents' colleges.

 

While legacies made up 12 percent of the freshman class entering Middlebury in the fall of 1965, they are just 5 percent of the current freshman class. It can be difficult to mount an argument that those admitted to this class were not otherwise qualified, at least by the yardstick of the SAT: the 30 legacies in the current freshman class posted an average SAT score (1389) that is 33 points higher than that of the class as a whole.

 

"We won't bring anyone here who can't succeed," said Mr. McCardell, the president. "I don't care if that person is an impact athlete, a member of a minority group or worth a gazillion dollars."

 

Middlebury, like other colleges, does occasionally disappoint its big donors. A few years ago, an alumnus who was negotiating a six-figure donation to Middlebury decided to hold off until the admissions committee had ruled on his child's application. When the committee said no, citing low test scores and grades, the prospective donor walked away, Dean Schoenfeld said.

 

"Our philanthropy follows our children," Dean Schoenfeld quoted the benefactor as saying, "and our children aren't going to Middlebury."

 

Nonetheless, the admission rate of legacies, even those whose parents rarely donate to the college, far exceeds that of applicants as a whole. At Middlebury, the admission rate of legacies in the class of 2006 was 45 percent, compared with 27 percent for the entire class. At Harvard, legacies who applied for the current freshman class were admitted at nearly four times the rate of students over all (39 percent, versus 11 percent). At Stanford, where nearly 10 percent of students in the freshman class are legacies, their admission rate (about 25 percent ) was double that of the class as a whole (12.7 percent).

 

But theirs were hardly the only applications that got a "boost," in admissions parlance, on this campus and others. The admission rates for black and Hispanic applicants to Middlebury were each nearly 60 percent. And at the University of Michigan's Ann Arbor campus, whose undergraduate admissions program is one target of a pair of challenges before the Supreme Court, the 4 points (on a 150-point admission scale) awarded to children of alumni are dwarfed by the 20 points awarded to black, Hispanic and Native American applicants.

 

Siblings, too, of current and past students often receive favored treatment. But at many selective colleges, athletes receive the greatest boost of all, while accounting for some of the lowest-rated transcripts.

 

To those who argue that the children of the connected receive an unfair advantage, Mr. McCardell, who has been president of Middlebury since 1992, argues that the admissions process entails "imperfect human beings' exercising their imperfect judgment in rationing a scarce commodity."

 

He also invokes a financial reality: the $36,000 that full-paying students spend annually would likely soar to nearly $60,000 without the generosity of the college's alumni, who helped raise more than $200 million in its last capital campaign.

 

"If a handful of slots go to deserving applicants whose families can at least have the potential to improve in dramatic ways the quality of the education at Middlebury College," he said, "we would not be fair to our successors or predecessors if we were to overlook that reality."

 

But that argument frequently makes it no easier for legacies to convince a classmate that their admissions were merited.

 

Katie Franklin, who is to graduate from Middlebury in 2006, is one of seven in her extended family accepted to Middlebury. The succession includes her grandmother (class of 1943), her father (class of '71), her mother ('72), her brother ('02), a cousin ('04) and her younger sister (just admitted to the class of 2007).

 

Initially, Ms. Franklin said, she "tried to hide" from her classmates that her father, the vice president of an investment firm, was also the chairman of the Middlebury board. But having entered Middlebury with an SAT score (1440) that ranked her above most of her class, and now posting a B-plus average, she no longer feels any qualms.

 

"Being here as a student, I know that no one knows who's on the board," she said. "Once they do, it's up to them to decide whether I was qualified enough to get in."