Getting In: How Elite Schools Play the College Game

For those of us who came to Berkeley a year ago, or two, or three, the college admissions progress was not too long ago and some of us can still remember the disappointments, or joy and relief, that it brought with it. As students at one of the most prestigious universities in the United States, I would be safe in saying that a good number of the students here applied to one or more of the Ivy League schools. We would like to think that our efforts and test scores and essays and activities all put us on equal footing with others that attended elite boarding schools, and while some people attending Berkeley could have come from those very schools, I will ignore that for now and mean students that have gone from those elite schools into one of the Ivies when I refer to them.

In a world today where merit is valued more than ever and any other sort of bias and preference otherwise, whether it be for a certain class or income bracket is frowned upon, it is discouraging to learn that such practices are still going on. In Khan's article, a world in which the elite maintain their positions by easy access to elite universities is described. Implied by this, or at least, by my judgment, some of the students attending Berkeley right now have had their spots at the Ivies "taken," in a sense, by students that could have been less qualified academically than them, just because they were attending the right school and had the right connections with a counselor to help them get to their college of choice. I find this more than a little disturbing, especially the descriptions of phone calls between counselors and college admissions officers. If all high school counselors were able to do that, everyone would be able to get into the college of their choice, where they fit the best. However, because not everyone can afford such institutions where the counselors are paid to pay attention and call up colleges and persuade them to accept so-and-so, some students are at a definite disadvantage just because of their economic situations.

This article points to evidence that the country is still far from a truly education based meritocracy where how much your family makes does not influence your life chances. It reveals that preferential practices are still in place, and I believe that sweeping changes to education or admission policies will have to be made in order to address these problems, which are timely and costly. However, I do not think that because it is difficult, that we shouldn't try; I, for one, do not want my future children to have their opportunity to go to a top college jeopardized by the fact that I did not send them to a high school whose tuition is five, or perhaps in the future, six, digits.