One in Four Colleges Say They're Pressured to Rig Admissions
While students are trying to break open secretive college admissions decisions, the people who make them are openly admitting bias
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Twenty-five percent of college admissions officials said they are pressured to admit low-quality students because of their connections, according to a survey released on Wednesday by Kaplan Test Prep. The poll asked officials at 400 U.S. colleges a question currently torturing scores of American parents and high schoolers: Do connections matter more than a carefully curated résumé?
The college gatekeepers acknowledged that they'd been nudged toward “accept[ing] an applicant who didn’t meet [their] school’s admissions requirements because of who that applicant was connected to.” As for who got an edge, 16 percent of officials said that they look particularly closely at the children or siblings of alumni from their school.