(Source: Brown University)

Most people assume that students from rich families promising donations get an unfair advantage in admissions contests. It's one of higher education's dirty little secrets.

Now it's no longer much of a secret thanks to a new book titled The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges - and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates.

The author, Daniel Golden, based the book on a series of articles he wrote for the Wall Street Journal. A couple of those articles focus on the fates of wealthy and not-so-wealthy students at Groton and Duke. Along the way, we learn that you can, to some extent, buy your way into the Ivy League and other elites.

The release of the book was covered by InsideHigherEd. Here's a bit:

That American higher education is not a pure meritocracy is, of course, hardly news. But Golden's book has a level of detail about the degree to which he says some colleges favor the privileged that will embarrass many an admissions officer. Golden names names of students - and includes details about their academic records before college and once there that raise questions about the admissions decisions being made. For good measure, he attacks Title IX (saying that the women's teams colleges create favor wealthy, white applicants), preferences for faculty children (ditto, although substitute middle class for wealthy), and accuses colleges of making Asian applicants the "new jews" and holding them to much higher standards than other students.

Even before its official release, The Price of Admission is causing considerable fear among the admissions officers of elite colleges. If you want to see an admissions dean really happy, tell her that you can't find her institution in the index. The preferences highlighted in this book are the admissions preferences that college officials don't like to talk about (except perhaps at reunion weekend). Presidents and deans in many cases welcome the opportunity to talk about why they want racial or socioeconomic or geographic diversity in their classes, why it is important that a class include enough string players for the orchestra and enough running backs for the football team. Who hasn't heard an admissions story about recruiting a tuba player from Wyoming - as the perfect symbol of the art and science of constructing a class.

But preferences for the rich and famous, or generous alumni donors? That's not something people like to talk about. Several deans accused Golden of taking the admissions process out of context (they said the numbers of rich who benefit are small), or being naive (when a billionaire is admitted to the ER, is treatment the same as that for an average Joe?), and of neglecting history (the preferences Golden described were far worse a few generations back). Some argued that it would be racist to eliminate preferences for the children of wealthy alumni now, when for the first time there are starting to be significant numbers of wealthy alumni who aren't white.

Others disputed some details about their institutions, but most acknowledged that the book is likely to increase scrutiny of their practices - whatever they think of the fairness of the book and its message.

A chapter about Duke University, for example, says that a few years back the institution spread the word among private high schools that it wanted "development admits," those whose families had the potential to become big donors, and that strong academic credentials weren't a requirement.

Read the full article here.