Back To The Foreign Students At MIT

I've already posted on MIT backing down on its threat to suspend the foreign students who violate policy during their pro-Hamas or anti-Semitic demonstrations. This story at the Washington Free Beacon adds only one new tidbit:

At elite institutions like MIT, nearly a quarter of all students hail from another country.

The story goes on to make the already recognized point that administrators want to keep them on campus; suspending them would threaten their visas, and since foreign students pay the published full fees, it would badly hurt the school's revenue. The only new point here is the size of the foreign-student contingent at ostensibly highly selective schools like MIT.

Nobody so far is putting two and two together. As writers like Jerome Karabel have pointed out in The Chosen, universities have separate admissions categories for high-profit markets like the children of alumni and other major donors, as well as the children of politicians, celebrities, and other public figures. These simply bypass the ordinary high requirements for SAT scores, GPA, and extracurriculars to which ordinary middle-class applicants are subject.

To these high-profit markets, we may also add foreign students -- except the Beacon is now telling us this category of exceptions to the ordinary admissions standards alone at highly selective elite schools is nearly one quarter of each entering class. (If I were arguing on behalf of the Ivies, I'd question where the Beacon got this information, as the size of the admissions bypass categories at each institution is highly confidential, but we'll accept this figure for now.)

But if we accept the Beacon's estimate of nearly 25% for just one admissions bypass category, how big are the others, for instance for major donors, alumni, preppies, and the rest? Joe Biden's son Beau, his daughter Ashley, and his granddaughter Naomi all got into Penn; Hunter's laptop carries details of at least one personal meeting between Joe and Penn's president to facilitate Naomi's admission. Presumably similar influence was applied in each of the other Biden cases -- but let's consider that when the elite schools also give this consideration in each entering class to the families of members of Congress, cabinet secretaries, and the like, this is not a small number of exceptions.

Is this bypass category, adding the offspring of politicians and celebrities to the children of major donors and alumni, as big as the nearly 25% just of foreign students in each entering class? It's not beyond the realm of possiblity, which is one reason these figures are highly confidential. And let's recognize they stay confidential because the president, vice president, members of Congress, cabinet secretaries, and the like whose children benefit from such preferential treatment will quietly assure that issues like the size of elite-school endowments or the preferences in elite-school admission that benefit their families never come under serious legislative threat.

I do think it's reasonable to estimate that as a rule of thumb, as much as half of each entering elite-school class is admitted under relaxed standards that are below the SAT and GPA ranges that are published for the high school guidance counselors for the US middle-class students who are making their good-faith applications each year. Yet the prestige of Harvard, MIT, Chicago, and Stanford is based entirely on their selectivity from the ranks of the ordinary middle-class applicants. (It's worth noting that the foreign students who pay full freight are also from wealthy and influential families in their home countries, who use their US elite-school degrees to reinforce their prestige.)

This is certainly one reasonable explanation for how someone like Sam Bankman-Fried could be admitted to MIT. I suspect there's a "professional courtesy" category for bypassing admissions standards as well. Isn't it odd that the unpromising Caroline Ellison, daughter of MIT faculty, should get into Stanford just as the unpromising Sam, son of Stanford faculty, should get into MIT?

There's another conclusion we might draw from the MIT vignette and its reluctance to enforce policy on high-profit-margin students: the graduation rate from elite schools, already remarkably high, is bolstered by a general willingness to coddle those students. I recall an instance in my own time as an elite-school undergraduate in which the Dean of the College was called away from his normal schedule to address a family rift among the highly prominent ___________s, because a scion of that family, currently enrolled at my alma mater, had decided he no longer wished to attend. (Come to think of it, this was the man who served as the model for Dean Wormer.)

I don't recall the upshot, but poor Dean Wormer spent the better part of a week putting out that fire. If it had been me, it would have been half an hour in the dean's office to tender my withdrawal, if that. Sorry to see you go, John, good luck! The same influence that creates widespread exceptions to elite-school admissions standards seems to ensure that the students who get in on privilege stay in.

For the middle-class families who are caught in the college admissions rat race, if only half the applicants are admitted via the published criteria, no matter, that just means those who get in that way have acquired even more merit. The families of those who win that lottery aren't going to complain, any controversy will simply diminish the value of what they've worked so hard to get. The families of those who can bypass the middle class standards are just going to keep quiet, and when they can, they'll also work to keep things quiet.