Can you buy your way into college?

However, with the current financial crisis and the slowly recovering endowments of many private schools, the financial status of applicants is starting to matter at some highly ranked colleges and universities. An article in The Wall Street Journal published on Feb. 19 explored how an applicant’s ability to pay the full tuition price is becoming an admissions factor at some private colleges and universities. After all, many top-tier private schools were hit hard by the financial crisis and still have not fully recovered their investments and endowments. That may be why last fall, Williams College started to admit more international students who could pay full tuition while Middlebury College and Wake Forest University began to consider the financial statuses of their wait-listed students as a factor in admissions.

I consider this move to have highly questionable integrity on the part of these schools. How much money your parents can pay for college should never be a factor in a student’s admission to college — applicants should be solely judged on their qualifications. To say to some students that their financial status is a factor in their admission makes it seem like we might be regressing back to the era when colleges were attended only by the wealthiest 5 percent of the population. When need-based aid was introduced at many top-tier colleges in the last decade, it served as an equalizer to broaden the diversity of many schools and bring in the most qualified applicants, regardless of their socioeconomic status. To start looking at financial status as a factor of admission once more threatens to deny qualified applicants entry as well as reduce the diversity that makes schools such as Princeton so culturally and intellectually rich.

Another point that I found unnerving was the emphasis in this article that financial status is only used as a consideration for the “bubble” students at these schools — that is, the final 5 percent of students that are on the fence, and either get admitted or are at the top of the waitlist. Jonathan Burdick, dean of admissions and financial aid at University of Rochester, phrased it this way in the article: “I’m certain we will be 95 percent need-blind,” he said. “That last 5 percent is in jeopardy.”

Although I’m sure the author of this article thought this statement would be reassuring to most students, it probably had the opposite effect. There are very few students at Princeton and at other top-tier universities that will say, “Yup, I definitely was in; my qualifications were that good.” On the contrary, most students will feel like they were the ones that just squeaked by, that they were in the “bubble” 5 percent. So to say that financial status is a factor in the admission of that 5 percent of applicants, when most students feel like they are those bubble students, risks changing the whole psychology of the process for college-bound students. Namely, it takes away their confidence that they will be graded for their qualifications and admitted on the basis of them. It may also cause people who need financial aid to not apply for it out of fear that it might affect their chances of admission to the school.

To me, the most frightening part about this article was the implicit defense of this renewed practice of looking at the financial status of students as an admission factor. The article emphasizes that this judgment is only applicable to a very small percentage of students at a couple of schools. But what about in the future? What stops these schools from looking at the financial status of 7 percent of its students next, or 15 percent three years from now? Sure, these schools firmly stated that they only instituted this measure now because of the tough economic times and current financial crisis. But what guide is going to tell them when to stop this practice and return to completely need-blind admissions? What will stop more schools from joining this bandwagon and going down the slippery slope that may lead to students’ attending college only if their parents were rich enough?

Scarily enough, only time will tell.

Kelsey Zimmerman is a sophomore from Glen Allen, Va. She can be reached at kzimmerm@princeton.edu.