Bostonian, if you read the articles I linked to, you'll see that they admit kids who had been
rejected BEFORE the college considered the family's situation. No one is slandering anyone, unless the students they interviewed and the email writers were slandering themselves.
You've contradicted yourself:
If there are many more applicants than seats, I can't think of a better way of admitting people than the quality and quantity of academic output.
Which one is it? Do you favor admitting kids because of academic success or because of donations? You've argued against affirmative action here in the past as a process that admits people who aren't capable. Isn't admitting donor kids doing the exact same thing?
You can't claim that they only take a tiny number of students whose parents bought the kid's way in. In the WSJ story I quoted, Duke admitted 125 wealthy students because of family connections. That's nearly 4% of total admits. All of them had been either rejected or wait-listed. That means that 125 academically more-deserving students were rejected outright or didn't get off the wait list because of donor admits.
The daughter of an investment banker, [Ms. Diemar] applied early to Duke despite an 1190 SAT score. Her candidacy was deferred to the spring.
She then buttressed her application with recommendations from two family friends who were Duke donors, and she was accepted. "I needed something to make me stand out," says Ms. Diemar, a sociology major with a 3.2 grade point average, below the 3.4 average of the senior class.
A 3.2 high school GPA is not exactly the stuff of valedictorianship. How many valedictorians got rejected in favor of this young woman and her 1190 on the SAT?
