What the market will bear

Video: History of Ivy League sports.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

A suit by two basketball players, one a former Brown University player and one still playing there, alleges unfair, oligopolistic collaboration in sports programs by the Ivy League. The plaintiffs assert that the eight-college association’s policy of not offering athletic scholarships amounts to a price-fixing agreement that denies athletes proper financial aid and other payment for their services. The duo seems to have wanted to be treated as employees.

This case is absurd. These athletes have not been compelled to attend an Ivy League school. If they didn’t like these institutions’ long-established policies, they could have gone to many other places, some also called “elite,’’ in search of big bucks.

When the Ivy League as a formal organization was founded, in 1954, the ban on athletic scholarships was meant to be seen as fending off the corrupting commercialization of the sacred groves of academia and promoting the ideal, however naïve, of the “scholar-athlete

Hit this link.

Complaints about price-fixing in the league go way back, spawned in part by the curious similarity of Ivy institutions’ tuitions. Consider this.

And more recently. 

These schools charge what the market will bear, which is a lot when it comes to “The Ancient Eight.’’ Such is the American obsession with social status, they’ll continue to draw many more applicants than can be admitted, including top-notch athletes in search, above all of an education.

John Maguire: More affirmative action, not less, needed in elite college admissions

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

This essay is a sequel to “The Human Dimensions of Enrollment Management,” published in The New England Journal of Higher Education on June 30, 2020. In that article, my unusual focus (as a trained theoretical physicist) was on integrity, not science, as the single most important factor in enrollment- management success. Early in my supervision of enrollment management (from a faculty position in the physics department at Boston College), I encountered serious challenges to that fundamental principle of integrity:

• In my first year (1972) on the job as dean of admissions at BC, one day was disrupted by a loudmouth self-proclaimed wealthy Texan in an ostentatiously large cowboy hat. He barged into my office, opened a checkbook and guaranteed me, and/or anyone I designated, “any amount necessary” to secure his son’s admission to Boston College. I evicted him summarily from our office and denied his son the right to apply.

• An influential alum (“Triple Eagle”) and BC administrator’s daughter appealed her rejection on the margin from the highly selective BC School of Nursing. The director of admissions offered the young woman a “Summer Challenge” of passing three courses (with B-‘s or better). Tragically, she received two A-‘s and a C+ and was never enrolled in the School of Nursing. That candidate was my daughter.

• In the late ’70s , the chairman of the Boston College Board of Trustees insisted to the president that his daughter be provisionally admitted to BC, despite her questionable credentials. The president requested that I “make this one exception to avoid a major political risk.” I reluctantly agreed—and the chairman’s daughter flunked out after one semester. Both the chairman and the president agreed thereafter to make the Admissions Office the final arbiter in all cases, even at the risk of losing millions of contributed dollars for new buildings and endowment.

• For at least five years into my tenure as leader of BC Admissions, I tolerated (even countenanced) the admission of virtually all wealthy Phillips Andover Academy seniors, even those in the bottom tenth of their class—while rejecting all but a handful of applicants, many in the top tenth of their classes, in low-income places such as Chelsea, Mass.

In an attempt to advance the principle of “affirmative action,” we completely reversed our strategy, rejecting many wealthy Andover applicants in favor of needy Chelsea applicants, with great results: More top ­­Andover students began applying and gritty Chelsea students succeeded well beyond what their SATs might have predi­cted. Careful science-based research at BC documented the weak relationship between our ideal redefinition of “quality” (courageous, never-give-up grit, achievement against odds, work ethic—not wealth, social status) and test scores.

I take obvious pride in these displays of integrity by our enrollment team, which have served Boston College—and later other Maguire Associates client institutions—very well over these past 40-plus years.

These examples stand in stark contrast to the much-publicized multiple scandals of “Varsity Blues,” in which status-seeking celebrities are too often willing to write hundreds of thousands of dollars in checks, risk prison and disgrace, and dishonor their most sacred duty to (in the words of Crosby, Stills, and Nash) “teach your children well” about integrity and honesty.

At the highest levels of American leadership, there are now documented examples of secret payments to stand-in SAT test-takers to gain undeserved university admissions and to assist with writing assignments to cover up laziness and corruption—and nonstop braggadocio about fraudulent academic achievements. And too often the names of wealthy criminals remain on buildings and academic departments!

More recently, to underscore the offenses of the entitled well-to-do people whom I confronted earlier in my career—and who continue to seek unfair advantage in Varsity Blues pursuits—expensive legal actions on behalf of disproportionately “entitled well-to-do’s” are accusing Harvard and now Yale of law-violating affirmative action in attempting to do what Boston College accomplished quietly with the Chelsea/Phillips Andover case study. (I sometimes wonder how BC might have fared if a court action had been taken on behalf of Andover rejects losing seats to applicants from Chelsea.)

The great irony in evaluating the honorable ethical defenses (specifically, of white and Asian-American admission percentages, already among the highest in New England) that both Harvard and Yale have put forth is that (in my opinion) a stronger case can be made that too little “affirmative action” is being sought among highly endowed ultra-wealthy Ivies and NESCAC (New England Small College Athletic Conference) institutions. (The Ivy League schools are Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania.)

The following graph (prepared by me using firsthand data) presented at our 2017 Maguire Associates Tokyo Keynote (“The History and Future of Enrollment Management”) to a national group of Japanese universities is most revealing:

Under 20 percent, and in some cases under 10 percent, of family incomes at elite colleges and universities, are below the national median. And even more telling, of the 80 percent to 90 percent above the national median income, many are triple and more above that median. These institutions, with well under 5 percent of the total national college and university enrollment, control over two thirds of all endowment funds! (Note: Billion Dollar Club refers to the Ivies; the Selective Liberal Arts Colleges are generally NESCAC schools.)

Let me reintroduce the single most relevant and controversial commentary I have produced on this singularly important subject. The 2008 editorial, published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled “‘Have Not’ Colleges Need New Ways to Compete With Rich Ones” needs to be revisited in light of the Harvard/Yale challenges from those accusing them of “too much” affirmative action. We wrote over 10 years ago:

“What we now have is a kind of caste system in American higher education: Brahmin institutions (among which the Ivies are among those at the top) —by virtue of their implicit endowment-supported, non-need-based discount—are able to have their pick of the best candidates in every category of students, including minority students. Hidden from view, expanding year by year, that implicit discount is constantly widening the gap between the haves and have-nots.”

“Roughly 50 institutions now control more than half of college and university endowment money while educating fewer than 2 percent of the nation’s students—a 2 percent that is disproportionately drawn from wealthy families.”

“To put it bluntly, the massive endowments of elite universities confer on them an unassailable competitive advantage in the form of a hidden discount that forces the less well-endowed institutions to deploy merit aid in a scramble for a diminished pool of the best and most-diverse students.”

“The wealthiest institutions would argue, of course, that because they are blessed with the luxury of more aid dollars they are already doing their share. And, in fairness, some of them are reexamining their policies to try to attract more low-income students.”

“Let’s face it, serving the have-not students has become, by default, the disproportionate responsibility of the have-not private institutions and the public four-year and community colleges.”

“We need to be open to new ideas, however unworkable they may, at first glance, appear.”

My point in describing the work we conducted at a now-elite university (Boston College) and in the quoted commentary above is that a stronger case can be made that America’s most elite institutions could and should be doing more—not less—in supporting affirmative action. In the Chronicle article, we advocated “offering donors bigger tax breaks for gifts to private institutions with smaller endowments.” Perhaps the ultimate “pipe dream” (our words in 2008!) that we proposed in the Chronicle piece was our “call for universities with huge endowments to share the wealth by partnering with less well-endowed institutions to extend the benefits of a high-quality education to a broader array of students.”

While I served as a trustee at two separate low-endowment institutions, their outstanding leaders actually did approach (regrettably, unsuccessfully thus far) institutions with multibillion-dollar endowments in pursuit of innovative partnerships that could become win/wins.

I proudly congratulate my own alma mater, Boston College, for investing tens of millions of dollars in creating the Pine Manor Institute for Student Success to dramatically enhance BC’s already above-average diversity—while creating the most possible positive outcome for its financially challenged neighbor, Pine Manor College. More such partnership initiatives should be pursued by the most elite institutions. It may be past time to revisit those “pipe dream” partnerships.

A wonderful example: Brown University has gifted $10 million to the public school system in its home city of Providence. This is perhaps a challenge to, say, Harvard and Yale to invest (even more?) in boosting education in their home cities of Cambridge and New Haven. Let us all continue to brainstorm on other innovative strategies for increasing educational equality.

John Maguire is founder and chairman of Concord, Mass.-based Maguire Associates, a higher-education consulting firm.

'Beyond the call of duty'

Walter Camp as Yale's football captain in 1878

“There’s no substitute for hard work and effort beyond the call of duty.’’

— Walter Camp (1859-1925), often called “The Father of American football.’’ His first fame came as a player and later as the coach of Yale’s football team. He was in on the beginnings of what became the Ivy League (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell and Columbia).

There will be no Ivy League football this fall because of COVID-19.

Affirmative action for the affluent!

Tower Room in the Baker Memorial Library at Dartmouth College.

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

“Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations on the rear window of their automobiles.’’

-- The late Paul Fussell

The federal government is suing Harvard as part of the Trump administration’s drive against affirmative action in college admissions (and elsewhere). Its angle is to assert that Asian-Americans, many of whom have very strong high-school records, should be admitted in higher percentages. What is left unspoken is that the Trump plan is also meant to help white applicants, who, at least in part because they tend to come from more privileged backgrounds than African-Americans and Hispanics, also tend to have better high-school records.

I think that the Feds should bug out of the college-admissions controversy. All elite colleges, including all eight Ivy League schools, use a wide variety of criteria to try to make sure that their undergraduate student bodies have at least a vague resemblance to the population of the nation that these schools have served very well. Indeed, the schools are jewels of American culture, having helped to produce much cultural, technological and financial wealth. Consider the scientific breakthroughs in the institutions’ labs.

Anyway, despite the schools’ efforts at affirmative action, students from affluent backgrounds (overwhelmingly white) dominate these schools because of the economic, educational and social advantages (including better public and private schools) they’ve grown up with. Students must be careful to pick the right parents! If the administration wins, the colleges will be even more skewed to the rich. Such skewing is what helped Jared Kushner get into Harvard despite a mediocre high-school record. Daddy wrote a check to America’s oldest college for $2.5 million. And Donald Trump’s transfer to the University of Pennsylvania from Fordham was lubricated by his father’s wealth.

As this Bloomberg story reported:

“A Harvard dean was thrilled. The undergraduate college had just admitted the offspring of some wealthy donors, and now the money was expected to pour into the university.

"’I am simply thrilled about all the folks you were able to admit,’ David Ellwood, then the dean of {Harvard’s} John F. Kennedy School of Government, wrote to {Harvard College} Dean William Fitzsimmons on June 11, 2014. ‘All big wins. [Name redacted] has already committed to building and building. [Name redacted] and [name redacted] committed major money for fellowships -- before the decisions (from you) and are all likely to be prominent in the future. Most importantly, I think these will be superb additions to the class."

There will always be affirmative action for the rich, even at Harvard, with a $39 billion endowment.

Oh, well: Not all the big donors’ gifts go to putting up grandiose buildings with their names plastered on them and endowed professors’ chairs, also with donors’ names plastered on them. Some goes to fellowships and scholarships.

To read more, please hit this link.

At Dartmouth College, post-election traumatized students

Plutocrats and their kids in the Ivy League

See how the super-rich help their kids get into and prosper at Ivy League schools. This piece might be the best example  yet of how America is no longer the land of opportunity it was long touted to be but a self-perpetuating plutocracy, where overwhelmingly the most important thing you can do for success in life is to pick rich, powerful and, preferably, pushy parents. Harvard and Brown universities are  paradises for this sort of thing.

Another is Dartmouth College. Read this.

Diana Anahi Torres: Elite schools a better financial deal

As high-school seniors start to churn out their college applications, elite campuses are trying to catch the attention of high-achieving and gifted low-income students around the country.

It may be hard to believe, but schools like Harvard University and Amherst College are opening their doors to more highly qualified high school students who grew up facing economic hardship yet can thrive in their campuses. Given the record sizes of the endowments supporting the most selective schools, these full rides won’t bust their budgets.

At $1.8 billion, for example, Amherst’s endowment amounts to about $1 million per student.

This means Harvard can turn out to be more affordable than your own state school. But the path from a poor neighborhood to an elite college, as Richard Pérez-Peña recently wrote in The New York Times, is almost impossible to travel without the support of teachers or mentors who know how to guide students through the process.

I’ve been there and I couldn’t agree more.

Consider many of my friends in Albuquerque, New Mexico, N.M.  Around two out of three of the students I grew up with dropped out of high school and at most 10 percent got a college degree. The rates are even lower when you account for race, class, immigration status and gender.

It took Alan Marks, a seasoned educator and Stanford University graduate who has dedicated his career to helping students in my community attend college and mentoring them, to introduce me to my potential.

Marks encouraged me to take demanding college classes while I was still in high school and to participate in extra-curricular activities I felt passionate about. He recommended summer courses, invited me on trips to visit campuses, helped me study for standardized tests, and told me that I should consider applying to the top schools in the nation.

By senior year I had a 4.4 GPA, five college-level courses under my belt, and an idea of the schools I wanted to apply to. But even with his guidance, I found the application process daunting.

The first time I looked at the tuition pages for the top-ranked schools, I balked. It cost upward of $55,000 a year to attend them, a price tag my mom, a domestic worker, and dad, an auto body worker, could never afford to pay.

“Their financial aid packages are generous,” my mentor assured me. You won’t have to worry.”

His encouragement and unyielding support led me to four years at Amherst College, for which I paid less than $10,000. The total was less than what I would have paid to attend one of New Mexico’s public universities for one year.

And the $10,000 paid for much more than four years of college classes.

Amherst’s comprehensive financial-aid package paid for my tuition, fees, room and board, two round-trip flights a year, health insurance, personal expenses, and research opportunities. All I had to worry about was a minimal student contribution. I paid for that with a mix of outside scholarships, summer jobs, and negligible student loans.

Amherst, however, is one of very few schools willing to do what it takes to boost its economic diversity. Thanks, in part, to the commitment of its former president Anthony W. Marx to attract students from all walks of life, at least 20 percent of its students come from working class and poor households.

But it’s not enough for these top colleges to offer generous financial aid packages to low-income students with great grades.

More educators and mentors who work with economically challenged yet high-achieving students need to encourage and help those kids consider applying to and attending those schools. And qualified, low-income students need to know that earning a degree from a top-notch school could turn out to be within their reach.

So, as I ask high school seniors who can relate to my story, what are you waiting for? Apply to your dream Ivy League universities. (The official Ivy League consists of Yale, Harvard, Brown, Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton.)

There’s nothing to lose except a great opportunity.

Diana Anahi Torres is the New Mexico Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, in Washington.

This piece comes via OtherWords.org.