How many valedictorians got rejected in favor of this young woman and her 1190 on the SAT?
That's easy. One, at most.
Is it unfair? Sure it is. But these days $1M only gets you consideration into lowly Brown. Duke might well be higher than that now, and the prices go up exponentially as school selectivity increases. Because the price is now so high, in the grand scheme of things, there aren't that many rich people that can buy their admission that it has a major effect. At most schools, the number of development cases is certainly less than the number of recruited athletes.
I live in a Boston suburb. I know plenty of families not in the top 1% whose kids got into Harvard and MIT on merit. Our high school sends between 5-10 kids to those schools each year (almost all non-legacy), and the activities my kids participate in expose us to many more such families outside of our town. On the flip side, I also know a 0.1% family with a double Harvard/Radcliffe legacy that has donated continuously to Harvard, and yet their kids didn't get in.
We face the college application gauntlet next year. I am confident that my daughter will get into a good school that will prepare her well for her future. But I don't have the foggiest idea which college it will be, and I am really not that stressed about it (yet anyway).
