Dartblog

On Friday we took a look at the bind in which elite colleges finds themselves with regards to lowering admissions standards for the children of major donors. We promised a novel approach to the problem; today we deliver.

To summarize Friday’s analysis, the question of whether to give admissions preference to donors’ children boils down to whether the direct financial gain is worth the public relations trouble. But broadly speaking, colleges seem to have acquired a reputation for doing this whether they actually do it or not. This reputation has become such received wisdom that it is colleges’ very denial of the practice that strikes many observers as slimy.

(See Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton for both an example and an extensive explanation. “Getting In,” a 2005 article in The New Yorker, is another example.)

In view of this, the thrust of my proposal is encapsulated by the quotation in the title, which could easily refer to spots in Dartmouth’s entering class—despite that in its initial context, sung by Aldonza in Man of La Mancha, it referred to something else.

What would happen if tomorrow, Dartmouth issued a press release announcing that it will set aside 20 places in the class of 2014 to be put up for auction? To be sold to the highest bidder, literally?

Such an auction could be structured as follows. The bidding period would begin immediately at the time of the press release and close at 11:59:59 p.m. on March 31, 2010, just before admission decisions are sent to applicants. A “bid” would consist of a certified cheque made out to Dartmouth College for a minimum of $1 million, along with the name of a chosen applicant; bids would be mailed to a third-party auction administrator who would hold them in escrow until the close of the auction. At that time, the administrator would compile a list of the 20 applicants associated with the largest cheques, and turn this list over to the College, along with all cheques received—not just the 20 largest. Then, just before admission notifications go out, the dean of admissions would check the admission decisions of the 20 applicants on the list and change them all to acceptances, regardless of what they were before—acceptances, wait lists, denials. The list would then be destroyed. The College, of course, would keep all the cheques.

Except for the above bidding procedures, everything would happen as usual. Any accepted students who would not have been accepted but for the auction scheme would not be told of this fact. Nobody except the dean of admissions would ever know which applicants’ admission decisions were affected by the auction. An auction participant whose associated applicant was rejected would know that his cheque was not one of the 20 largest, but that’s it. To preempt any accusations of foul play on the part of the College, the independent administrator would conduct an audit of the admission decisions of all applicants named in auction bids, to ensure that those tied to the 20 largest cheques were in fact accepted.

Those accepted under the auction scheme would be subject to all the same rules and regulations as other accepted students—notably, they would pay the same tuition and suffer the same consequences for poor academic performance. So it is unlikely that wealthy families would enter bids for their dullard progeny—if accepted, these students would flunk out. The bulk of the bids would probably come from the families of applicants in the middle of the pool—solidly among the 80 percent or so who could handle the workload at Dartmouth, but maybe lacking that special exceptional something to set them apart. Thus this auction scheme would not measurably drag down the academic caliber of students at the College. And in any case, as is immediately obvious to anyone who experiences a Dartmouth class, there are already many students at the College who were admitted for reasons other than intellectual prowess.

So what would this auction scheme bring? Many millions of basically free dollars, it seems to me. That and a lot of press attention. At a time when Dartmouth’s finances are so deep in the toilet that President Kim has put “everything on the table” to be potentially cut, including the formerly sacrosanct need-blind admissions policy, it might not hurt to do a little thinking outside the box. Good leadership is made of bold moves. This one sounds absurd, but it just might be worth some thought.

Something to think about: Would it be preferable to end need-blind admissions for everyone, or auction off 20 seats per class and keep need-blind admissions for everyone else?