How Harrison Frist got to Princeton

[question everything]

(From TIME magazine, apologies if already posted)

Growing numbers of kids may be discovering that they no longer need Harvard, but according to Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden, the Ivies still feel a need for certain kinds of kids. Golden won a Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for his articles on the admissions advantage élite schools give to the children of alumni (known as legacies) and to the sons and daughters of big donors and celebrities. His book on that practice, The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges--and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates, will be published in September. He spoke with TIME's Nathan Thornburgh about the myth of college meritocracy.

(snip)

WHO HAS BEEN USING THIS IVY-LEAGUE BACK DOOR?

Lots of people. Take the example of Harrison Frist, the oldest son of Bill Frist. His father is a Princeton alumnus and a very powerful politician. The family has given $25 million for Princeton's Frist Campus Center. Harrison wasn't in the Cum Laude Society, which is the top 20% of students at his prep school, St. Albans, but my research indicated that Princeton considered Harrison a very high priority for admission.

HOW DID HE DO WHEN HE GOT TO PRINCETON?

He joined an eating club that is kind of notorious for rambunctiousness and was eventually arrested for drunk driving. He graduated this year but without academic honors. Now Harrison's youngest brother was just admitted to Princeton. He's entering in the fall. And he wasn't in the Cum Laude Society at St. Albans either.

AND YET BILL FRIST OPPOSES AFFIRMATIVE ACTION.

I think it suggests that he's glad to take advantage of one type of affirmative action for his own family while opposing it for people of a different race or of lesser means.


(snip)

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1226164,00.html

[Viva_La_Revolution]

1. K & R

one slot filled by these "alumni kids" is one less slot available for someone who actually earned it.

[wicket]

8. Amen to that

It's infuriating :grr:

[Selatius]

2. Do they have anything like this in France or Germany?

This form of nepotism or favoritism, I mean.

[intaglio]

3. Of course, it's present in the UK as well, n/t

[izzie]

4. As far as history goes it has always been like this in Europe.

That was one of the points of the 'founders' but it has still been with us since we got here also. Even the Pilgrims had a class system and the Puritans thought to marry in to the Pilgrims families was a good deal. I think it may be human nature to buy our family into the in groups that gets ahead. Once talent makes it to the top it also joins the group. We just are a little better about pushing talent in this country than Europe. It is only reasonable to see more talent go to the top as you open the gene pool to all that can do it. Societies have not always done this. Interesting that India and China are moving to wards this for schools. A fact I once learned in Germany they did this for its army and were classed as having a great army with that being one of the reasons. A country could also end up with a lot of same type people which I think we are heading to. We really need some new blood in top colleges, govt. and business.

[unblock]

5. i must confess to being a princeton legacy myself

although there are at least a few differences -

- i was also admitted to several other prestegious schools, including haverford, swarthmore, and oberlin.
- i was in the top 10% of my high school (i think i had all a's except for only 1 b)
- at princeton i completed a 4-year computer science program in only 3 semesters (after spending my first 5 in the economics department)
- my father never gave them a dime after he graduated
- i fully support affirmative action
- i recognize that i had an advantage in admissions and i live with knowing that i'll never know if i would have gotten in were it not for my father's attendance years earlier.

the ivies actually have a formula for legacies, which is that they score all applicants on academic record, sat scores, extracurriculars, etc.; each of these factors has a weighting, and being a legacy counts for 10% of the weighting, i think. meaning it's a help, but it's not an automatic in.

then again, i'm willing to bet they goose the weighting for people who make multi-million dollar donations....

[question everything]

23. And differences that give you merit, but not to Frist Jr. (nt)

[unblock]

28. one point of interest for fans of the tv show "house"

the helicopter view of the ficticious princeton-plainsboro hospital is actually the frist student center at princeton university.

[no_hypocrisy]

6. Semi-firsthand experience.

I taught as a substitute teacher at a "private academy" (junior year high school) in an upscale community in New Jersey for a week. My "charges" were progeny of business leaders, etc., meaning CEOs of corps, some of whom may have been "famous" and/or "influential". They were pitiful in language skills. Their spelling was on the level of second graders. Their use of vocabulary was atrocious and to an extent, shockingly ignorant.

I went to the headmaster with their papers and told him these kids were in trouble and had serious problems with the prospect of advancing to college. He smiled at me, and told me the gospel of "rich kids".

Rich kids don't have to work and/or study. Rich kids go to college, no matter what. Rich kids don't have have to learn to read, write, calculate, and/or think. Rich kids graduate from college as idiots, go to work as executive vice presidents due to their fathers making phonecalls, and rich kids have educated idiots (like me) work for them in their new positions as VPs and correct their grammar and spelling as their secretaries.

[The Backlash Cometh]

13. Thanks for pointing out that the Affirmative Access doesn't stop

with Admission. It continues after graduation. That's where you get a core group of these people who learn that you can get away with doing lots of things that the laws forbid the rest of us to do. And there's no one to prosecute them because they're too politically connected.

[karynnj]

19. I don't know the school that you worked for for a whole week

But I seriously doubt you saw a good sample of its students or it was less prestigious than you describe. The reputation of the school would suffer if the students came out as badly as described here. Just as being wealthy doesn't mean you are smart, it clearly doesn't mean you are stupid or lazy either.

My oldest daughter attended the local public school, while her younger sister chose to attend a private school. The intensity of the academic work and what was expected was higher at the private school. The students were also required to perform 16 hours a year of community service - and most students far exceeded this requirement. Some students she met were brilliant, some not. Some were great people, some you wouldn't want to meet. The same could be said of the kids my other daughter met in the public school.

As to writing skills, a girl at the private school, who was a skilled writer, was very surprised to get her first paper back covered with constructive comments suggesting changes and the letter, "B". In the public middle school, where she got the 8th grade award in English, the comments had always been limited to "excellent". The girl found the comments useful and re-wrote the paper and to this day considers that teacher one of her first mentors.

The advantage here was that the private school teacher, who had a PHD in English, had only about 10 to 12 students in that class. She had the time to really teach a girl who was far above the average of the honors level freshman English class. There are many excellent teachers in the public schools, but they had about 25 kids in a class and they had more classes a day.

It may be that you were subbing in a modern day "Welcome Back, Kotter" class, but I seriously doubt what you described was representative of the school. Your opinion seems pretty jaundiced.

[aquart]

7. When do Sen. Frist's sons plan to enlist?

Or haven't they been informed that our military is in desperate need of recruits?

[tanyev]

9. My goodness. The ever-decorous Senator Frist sure has spawned

a bunch of rambunctious whelps. He must not have used James Dobson's parenting techniques.

[Joanne98]

10. The soft bigotry of low expectations......

The idle rich should be made to work hard to get their privileges. To whom much is given, much is expected. It's SO UNFAIR, to the little rich children, that they are given something for nothing. It promotes a WELFARE MENTALITY. Harrison will probably EXPECT to be crowned Resident of the White House someday.

[gratuitous]

17. As good an argument for keeping the estate tax as I've seen

And of course Dr. Frist is against affirmative action. You think his sons should have to rub elbows with hoi polloi when they're at their eating clubs? Heavens! Oh, the humanity.

[Hosnon]

11. Legacy Admissions like these should really piss off students who got in

on merit.

Every Ivy Leaguer is automatically under suspicion as to how and why they got there.

[spooky3]

15. and should piss off those who were excluded even though they

had far better qualifications.

And don't forget--another key difference why this is far worse than affirmative action for the rich, is that they have no disadvantages or "isms" to overcome in the first place, such as deficient elementary schools and blatant discrimination in admissions.

I personally know of a case in the late 70s of a woman who was valedictorian from a large public high school, graduated in three years in the top 5% of her class at a top public university, scored in the 97% percentile on graduate school admission tests, but was rejected from these elite schools. Many men with much less impressive qualifications were admitted to top graduate schools every day. I am sure there were many more of these cases then and hope there are fewer of them today.

[question everything]

24. The photo that accompanied the story had papa Bush holding Junior

on his lap, both wearing a top with Y on it... from 1946.

[The Backlash Cometh]

12. Affirmative Access rears its ugly headl

When will they see it before it bites us in the ass?

[Fabio]

14. I am a legacy. Full on.

A son of the rich and powerful, too.

My dad went to Yale. I didnt ever want to go to the School originally for fear of constantly discounting the achievement in my mind as a legacy. But, on the day I was accepted, my dad died in an accident. I immediately decided -- I was going to Yale and embracing his memory. I spent my first year and a half at yale in a daze over his loss, but did very well academically the final 2.5 years. No honors for me, though, the damage was done early on to my transcript.

I busted my ass for three years in a job advising non profits on investment strategy.

My dad went to Harvard Business School. I was very nervous about following in his foot steps. I applied to a variety of different schools. Once I got into Stanford BSchool (the most selective, and a school at which I had no connections), I knew that I deserved to get into good schools and that legacy and nepotism, two things that scared the crap out of me, were probably a factor, but not defining. I ended up going to Harvard.

So, in the end, I followed exactly in my dad's shoes. Am I proud? Yes...and...No.

Yes, because I embraced my dad's legacy, which is a good and noble one defined by high achievement and public works.

And No, because it turns out GWB went to Yale and HBS and soiled that path.

Anyhow, interesting discussion in the above posts. Give and take is rampant in college and secondary school admission. The schools I went to were full of bright people -- some wealthy and connected, others not. I know many well connected, bright kids who were, frankly, unmotivated in college. Turns out, though, that I know a lot of kids who came unconnected and motivated to college, and left a little listless. So, it's hard to make generalizations.

[Straight Shooter]

21. Thank you, Fabio, for the input.

That must have been very hard for you back then. I can still hear the struggle through your words.

A friend of mine is also a "legacy" of a wealthy family. He is also probably the smartest man I know, and continues to study and learn as much as he can about history, politics, and the environment. He basically turned his back on the wealth and made his own way. That was his choice, and he ended up living a very remarkable life.

Not all rich kids are brats. I wonder if the kids of politicians, though, are more prone to a sense of entitlement than others. America seems to have bred its own form of hoity-toity royalty.

[question everything]

25. I second that

Clearly following a loved parent's footsteps is an important motivator.

And, yes, there are brats who enter the family business as VPs, knowing nothing about the business, relying on us, the hard workers masses, who worked hard to earn their degrees. But I would like to think that even for the rich kids, at some point they will have to earn their keep.

[LiberalCommiePinko]

16. Did anyone watch

the documentary on HBO a couple of years ago called "Born Rich." Watching that and knowing that these douchebags and a-hole's will be future senators and CEO's made me want to take a flying leap. It shows you the kind of background that W came from and makes you understand why he is what he is, a spoiled and arrogant brat.

[Cha]

18. Nothing as obnoxious as

rich white trash. "Eating club"!? At least he didn't join the cat-killer club.

Is it just me or do the kids of Democrats seem to do better than the offshoots of repukes especially the ones who bow at the alter of bushco?

[question everything]

26. Thankfully, there are enough Kennedys around to cover the full spectrum

from dedicated public servants like RFK Jr. to some of his brothers "the poster boys of bad behavior."

[Cha]

30. I know, but it's not every child

whose father gets gunned down while running for president and is against the damn Vietnam War.

[chat_noir]

20. Presidential Legacy

President George W. Bush was an affirmative-action beneficiary, at Yale University and then at Harvard Business School. Now he wants the University of Michigan to end its policy of considering applicants' race, among other factors, in admitting students. According to Bush, this approach "amounts to a quota system that unfairly rewards or penalizes prospective students based on their race."

Bush was admitted to Yale in 1964 under an affirmative-action policy for children of alumni -- what colleges call a "legacy" system. Legacy preferences still exist, of course, at most selective schools, including Michigan and Yale. But they no longer carry quite the same weight they did at schools such as Yale, Princeton University and Harvard University when Bush was applying to colleges in 1964

From what is known about Bush's academic performance at Andover, it is doubtful that he would have been admitted to Yale unless his father (at the time a Texas businessman running for the U.S. Senate in a race he eventually lost) and grandfather (Prescott Bush, a former Republican U.S. senator who represented Connecticut from 1952 to 1962) had been Yalies (from, respectively, the classes of 1948 and 1917). In fact, as a student, Bush studied in the Yale library's Prescott Walker Bush Memorial Wing.

Other than being a legacy, Bush had no qualities that would have gotten him into Yale. Had he been a National Merit Scholar finalist, an outstanding athlete or actor or editor of the Andover newspaper, or had he perhaps organized his fellow students to tutor underprivileged kids, we probably would know by now. In fact, he was a mediocre student -- he never made the honor roll -- and demonstrated no particularly outstanding talents to warrant being admitted to Yale. He was head cheerleader during his senior year, organized the school's stickball league and played baseball, basketball and football. But, unlike his father, who was an outstanding baseball player, W. was not a star athlete, and certainly not good enough to be recruited by Yale's coaches. Perhaps Yale was looking for students from west Texas to add some cultural and regional diversity, but, if so, why accept a kid from Midland, Texas, who had attended prep school in Massachusetts?

http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2003/01/dreier-p-01-27.html

[yellowcanine]

22. Let Princeton have them. Keeps them from taking up space at community

colleges where serious students are trying to get an education and build a good academic record that will allow them to transfer to a more competitive 4-year college.

[Igel]

27. I don't like the idea of legacy students, but I

understand why colleges/universities have them.

The schools I went to, the legacies just got a few points added to their admissions scores *after* they met minimum requirements. From the admissions office's POV, they were eligible in any event. But they may not have placed as high on the actual list of students offered without the legacy points.

They graduated as well as the rest of the class, similar everything. That's because they were fairly similar; most weren't wealthy; a more than average number were well-off, but hardly what I'd call wealthy. Compared with the affirmative action admits, they had higher grades and graduation rates.

On the other hand, as a group they accounted for the ability of the school to have some of those affirmative action admits, and for some classroom/office space and research. Their parents, as a group, were among the top contributors and school boosters: if they couldn't afford to donate money, then they were prominent in alumni organizations that raised money and preached the merits of the school.

Admissions at the school I was most involved with hated the legacy program because it violated both their sense of merit-based and affirmative-action-based admission standards. But they defended the system because it was good for the school.

[unblock]

29. one point for fans of the tv show "house"

the helicopter view of the ficticious princeton-plainsboro hospital is actually of the frist student center at princeton university.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

31. The Frists bought Princeton a building? That'll put you a few notches

higher on the legacy priority list.

I went to one of the Ivies for college (nonlegacy), was told at the time I was there that legacy approximately doubled your chances for admission vs. nonlegacy.

[Greyhound]

32. Does the fact that the ruling class takes care of its own surprise you?

Do you ever wonder why corporations are mismanaged so badly? Couldn't have anything to do with the fact that most, if not all, of the executives are in their positions because of the tie or ring that they wear, could it?

If we don't demand this kind of change, nothing ever will. It is a certainty that they will never give up their power, it will have to be taken, and they will require that we take it by force, for that is all they respect.