Enter the alumni children

The American system of higher education is huge and unorganised; its quality varies from stellar to crepuscular; and in everything from curriculum to administration it presents an astonishing combination of enlightenment and reaction.

The bare numbers are startling. Almost 14m Americans attend college. It was 2m after the war, about 3.5m at the beginning of the 1960s, and 12m at the end.

Three-quarters of a million "instructors with the rank of professor" teach these numbers, along with graduate students, adjuncts, and people moonlighting from their real jobs as cab-drivers. Colleges range in size from behemoths of 53,000 students-such as Ohio State-to Christians colleges and naval navigation schools of 50.



Except for a few "Negro Colleges" and up-market girls' schools such as Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley, colleges were once white, upper-class and male. They were invariably the preserve of late adolescents. Now, however, they are infinitely varied.

A majority of students is female-about 52 per cent; 40 per cent of these are part-timers; 40 per cent "returnees." Black Americans are under-represented in higher education-but not by much: about 9 per cent of the college population against 12 per cent of the population. Hispanics do worse.

The doubling of the number of so-called universities in the UK leaves British spectators less surprised than before that all 3,400 institutions which are listed in US college guides claim to offer "higher" education. But the urge to ask "higher than what?" should be stifled by the reflection that the part-time, post-18, female student population in particular is taking the only route out of poverty, dead-end employment, and miserable family circumstances.

From the vantage point of high culture, it is sad that three quarters of such students study "business ed." From the vantage point of business education, it is sadder that too many schools are fly-by-night operations that do a poor job-and rip off their students.

But, in gross, the system does what Americans think education should do; it lifts the aspirations and improves the skills of people who lost out in childhood. Colleges are full of doubly poor students-unequipped and broke-desperate for a break.

Such is the background to this year's exercise in bad faith and duplicity known as "a reconsideration of affirmative action policies." In 1992 the North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms beat out a charming, intelligent, liberal-and black-challenger, by trading on white male resentment of affirmative action. A television advertisement showed a pair of white hands opening an envelope containing a rejection notice, while a voice-over explained that the job had gone to someone else in order to fill a government quota. The presumption that the other person was black, unqualified, and incapable of looking after himself or herself without government aid, was not spelled out-it didn't have to be.

The latest recruit to the politics of resentment is Pete Wilson, the Governor of California. He rescued his campaign for the governorship last year on the coat-tails of the campaign for Proposition 187-the referendum that would deny health-care, schooling and any other services to illegal immigrants. Now he hopes to bolster his appeal to conservatives by attacking affirmative action.

On July 20th, he persuaded his appointees to the Board of Regents of the University of California to throw out the affirmative action programmes they had been operating for 20 years. From now on, they agreed, "race and gender" must never be factors in appointing faculty or admitting students.

Liberals are in a bind. On the one hand, they would like to live in a genuinely colour-blind and gender-neutral society, where students are admitted to college on merit. On the other hand, they know they don't live in any such society now.

They flinch at giving black kids a leg-up in admissions when their Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores are between 95 and 250 points lower than those of their white peers; and they flinch at not doing so.

It seems unfair to penalise a bright kid with an A average in high school and 1,300 on the SAT-the top 5 per cent of the age group-to let in a black or Hispanic kid with worse scores and a lower likelihood of graduation.

It also seems unfair to tell poor black and Hispanic kids that unless they can purchase the parents and teachers that produce good scores, their taxes will keep the University of California in business, but they shouldn't expect to go there.

But what reveals the bad faith of the opponents of affirmative action and the sleaziness of their politics is what they do not say.

In all good schools, two forms of affirmative action reward the undeserving and give a leg up to those who don't need it, and none of the people who complain at the help given to blacks and women say a word against them.

The first is the advantage enjoyed by athletes. This is a large and visible scandal at the big state universities which take in illiterate footballers and basketball players and hardly pretend to teach them, but it is quite bad enough at Ivy League schools, and worse at Duke and Stanford.

The second method is more visible at elite colleges. This is "alumni preference," or "legacy admission" -the process whereby the children of old members of the university get extra help in admission.

At Princeton University-the college I know best, but typical of its peer group-about 14,000 students apply; some 2,200 are offered places. As with most Ivy League schools, only half that number end up attending, but the crude chance of success is about one in seven.

What few people know is that 200 students in an entering class of 1,150 are there for their athletic skills. They will have been chased up by the coaches, and their chances of admission are nearer one in two. A further 150 of the remaining 950 places go to minority students; these are in short supply, and their chance of admission, too, is nearer one in three than one in seven.

So we have 800 open places, and the odds against the good student without a boost from race, brawn or family have become much higher than seven to one.

Enter the alumni children. Not quite 400 apply, but their chance of acceptance is one in two. Moreover, the rate at which they accept offers once made is higher than the average-70 per cent.

Children of alumni thus make up a fortieth of the applicants but an eighth of the class. Conversely, not many more than half the places on offer are genuinely available to nine- tenths of the students.

The same is true at every Ivy League college, at the elite of comparable small colleges, and at places such as Duke and Stanford.

Does all this matter? Opinions vary. One of this summer's excitements was the discovery of an American "overclass," the 10 per cent who monopolise jobs, political power, education and a secure future. If the magic 10 per cent can also secure extra advantages when their offspring head for college, so much for social mobility and American democracy.

Such is the burden of Michael Lind's recent bomb-throwing essay, "The Next American Nation."

Critics point out that alumni children today account for a tenth of the students at Harvard, Yale and Princeton, while 20 years ago they accounted for a quarter. Unlike the athletes, they are academically almost as good as everyone else, too. Hence "jocks out" should take precedence over "alumni out."

Still, as a matter of justice it remains indefensible. It is squarely at odds with the American passion for upward mobility, and the sceptical observer finds it hard not to wonder why Republican politicians who are so fastidious about the injustice of helping the disadvantaged should be quite so complacent about the injustice of helping the advantaged.

Perish the thought that it might have anything to do with where they went to school-and indeed, which school they expect their own children to go to.