Wealthy families have huge advantages when it comes to playing the college admissions game, and it’s not just more AP classes and $400/hour SAT/ACT tutors. That’s the conclusion of Paul Tough in his most recent book, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us, which Ira Glass describes as, “Gorgeously reported. Vividly written. Utterly lucid.”
Tough reveals that cash-strapped universities actively seek out prospective students whose parents can pay full tuition. Thus, despite the ongoing discussion about preferential treatment for minorities and underprivileged families, schools’ thirst for cash flow results in far more lenient criteria for the children of affluent parents.
In other words, it’s better to be a dumb, rich kid than a smart, poor kid, even though less well-off students at good schools have very similar outcomes to their more affluent classmates. Said one admissions counselor of the struggle to meet her school’s tuition (i.e., revenue) goals, “It’s not a matter of turning down kids we’d like to admit. It’s a matter of admitting students we’d like to turn down.” OUCH.
Paul Tough is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine; his writing has also appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, GQ, and Esquire, and on the op-ed page of the New York Times. He is a speaker on topics including education, parenting, equity, and student success. Among Paul’s previous books is How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, which was translated into 27 languages and spent more than a year on the New York Times hardcover and paperback best-seller lists.
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