Trump’s Deals With Top Colleges May Give Rich Applicants a Bigger Edge
(Trump got into Whortomn's undergraduate school after his brother made a large donation.)
"The public release of data on test scores and race could wind up making wealth even more influential in admissions.
In recent deals with Columbia and Brown, the Trump administration demanded that they publicly share anonymized data about all applicants, including their standardized test scores, grade point averages and race.
Linda McMahon, the education secretary, said the agreements with the two Ivy League colleges would ensure that “aspiring students will be judged solely on their merits, not their race or sex.”
But another factor strongly influences students’ chances of being admitted to an elite college: their parents’ income. Rich parents generally spend more time and money on children’s education throughout their youth, so by the time they apply to college, they tend to have higher test scores and other qualifications elite colleges seek.
In effect, the administration’s efforts to prioritize standardized tests and G.P.A.s could make wealth even more influential in admissions at top-tier colleges across the country.
“This move could also further entrench advantages for wealthy applicants rather than reduce bias,” especially if colleges feel political pressure to admit only applicants with the highest test scores and grades, said Adam Nguyen, founder of Ivy Link, which provides college admissions advice to families with students as young as fifth grade and charges up to $750,000 for the services.
“Equally talented low-income or even mid-income students rarely have access to that level of strategic guidance,” he said. “Any selective admissions process that ignores income, privilege and structural access while targeting race‑based efforts to increase diversity isn’t leveling the playing field. It’s cementing it.”
The Supreme Court rejected affirmative action in college admissions in 2023, but it still allowed colleges to weigh applicants’ personal stories regarding race, like how they might have braved discrimination. But the Trump administration argues that such considerations may be illegal proxies for giving preference based on race.
A spokeswoman for the Education Department did not reply to a request for comment.
A recent study showed just how much having rich parents benefits applicants to Ivy League colleges. Even when applicants had the same SAT or ACT scores, those from the richest families were more than twice as likely to be admitted, according to the study, which analyzed data on test scores and parental income taxes for nearly all U.S. college students from 1999 to 2015.
Admissions rate at elite colleges among students with the same test scores
Students from rich families benefited for three main reasons, the researchers found: The colleges gave preference to applicants who were athletes, legacies (typically children of alumni), and attendees of private, nonreligious high schools. The researchers, from Opportunity Insights, a group of economists based at Harvard, obtained internal admissions assessments from several elite colleges.
In addition, they showed, students from the richest families were much likelier to have high SAT scores in the first place: Children whose parents earned in the top 1 percent were 13 times as likely to score 1300 or higher compared with those whose parents earned in the bottom 20 percent.
This reflects, in part, how poor children receive vastly different educations, in school and out, than rich children. Those with high-earning parents tend to go to schools with more resources, and grow up with less family stress and more opportunities like extracurricular classes and tutors.
Among American schoolchildren today, research shows, achievement gaps are driven by family income, not race.
Elite colleges favor students from rich families no matter their race. Even looking at students of the same race, those in the top 1 percent had an advantage, the researchers found. But admissions practices often end up benefiting white students, a variety of research shows, because those who are legacies or athletes or whose parents are very rich are disproportionately white.
“If you’re just trying to admit the students who were most academically prepared, you would in fact end up tilting a lot toward white students and toward richer students, because those are the ones who have had access to the schools that would get them prepared,” said John N. Friedman, an economist at Brown and an author of the Opportunity Insights study.
Test scores are strongly predictive of success in college and beyond, his group’s research has found. So in one sense, focusing more on test scores, as the Trump administration seems to be pushing colleges to do, could produce a class that is more ready for elite higher education.
But it could also produce a class that favors the children of the rich — and Asian and white students, who score highest on tests overall — even more than these colleges already do. If another goal of universities is to address inequality, they would look beyond just high test scores, Professor Friedman said.
Colleges generally seek to build a diverse class in many dimensions, not just race, by assessing applicants in the context of the opportunities available to them and considering their potential, not just their past performance. This process is known as holistic review.
If applicants grew up poor, for example, a test score that was lower than that of someone with more resources might still reveal their high potential to thrive despite disadvantages. But colleges might now be wary of admitting such students because of their lower scores.
Focusing more on high test scores and grades could also lead to decreased admissions for other groups of applicants, like rural students or the children of parents who did not go to college, said Michael Bastedo, a professor of education at the University of Michigan.
Holistic review can also indirectly increase racial diversity, because Black and Hispanic students — who are much less likely to earn high scores on standardized tests than Asian or, to a lesser extent, white students — are also more likely to grow up poor or attend schools with fewer resources than white or Asian students.
Their potential for success is not reflected in SAT scores or grades alone. But the requirements of Brown and Columbia — to publish data on test scores by race — could make it hard to explain this nuance in admissions decisions, researchers and admissions consultants said.
Additional work by Aatish Bhatia and Francesca Paris.
Claire Cain Miller is a Times reporter covering gender, families and education."
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