Given the recent college admissions scandal and the public’s ferocious backlash against elite institutions of higher learning, I feel an imperative duty to pen a defense of the powerless and voiceless victims of this tragedy – Ivy League students from extremely wealthy families.
As an Ivy grad myself, I’m overcome by a need to dispel the many false assertions being coughed up in the phlegm-covered tweets of an undereducated public. You see, wealth and elite education are undeniably linked, but not in the way you understand them to be.
Allow me to explain.
In January of 2017, a study surrounding family income and college admittance made a shocking discovery: 67% of Harvard students come from families with a median income in the top 20% of all Americans. What can be concluded from this study is obvious: the majority of people admitted to Harvard – our nation’s leading university – are incredibly wealthy. Why? Because clearly, wealthy people are more intelligent than the poor.
There is a vast trove of evidence to support the above claim.
A 2015 article from The Chicago Tribune states that one out of every twenty Harvard freshman attended one of only seven elite high schools. The article further explained that one’s chances of admission greatly increase if he or she attends “a high school (with) a top-notch college counseling program and a curriculum that prepares you for rigorous academic achievement in college.”
So why don’t lower income families recognize this trend and simply send their children to elite feeder high schools? For the rich, the solution is clear, yet the inferior-brained caste seems incapable of identifying this trend, instead opting to send their children to poorly funded, understaffed public schools. If poor people are as intelligent as the wealthy, why would they do this? It’s simply illogical.
Legacy admission practices are another key piece of evidence supporting the superiority of wealthy minds. The Ivies and other elite institutions give preference to an applicant based on whether he or she has a family member who formerly attended their university. Legacy students are nearly four times more likely to be accepted than a standard applicant. Harvard’s 2017 freshman class was one-third legacy students.
Why would a university run by some of the smartest people in the world give preferential treatment to legacy applicants? While perhaps a hard pill to swallow for the feeble-minded proletariat, the answer is simple.
When wealthy Harvard grads procreate, they pass their wealth, and therein their intelligence, to a new generation. When this new generation eventually applies to Harvard, it is only fair that the Harvard admissions team gives them an unfair advantage over the general populous. The genetic connection between wealth and intelligence is not lost on the admissions team, whose job is to admit the best and brightest.
While I do not expect the lesser-informed to understand the complexities of wealth genetics, I believe the reasoning I’ve put forth for this practice performed by top universities is irrefutable and seems extremely unlikely to be propelled by any condemnable motivation or unacknowledged variable.
While I could go on to offer statistic after statistic in support of my argument, everything eventually leads back to the ideological blood that pulses through the veins of our nation – the American Dream. This dream, from which our country was born, rests on the notion that any person, regardless of race, background, or socioeconomic status is capable of taking advantage of the opportunities provided by our nation’s liberties in order to become upwardly mobile.
We must acknowledge that the poor often do not better their place in society for no reason other than the undeniable fact that they are inherently less intelligent than the wealthy. While in high school, low-income students frequently opt to spend their time working low-paying jobs instead of attending private SAT tutoring sessions or working unpaid internships that would unquestionably bolster their college resumes.
Time and time again, the poor unintelligently bat away America’s benevolently outreached hand of equal opportunity.
Unless we are to question a foundational American doctrine, which we musn’t, we must accept the hard facts – the extremely wealthy earn their spots in our nation’s top universities based purely on merit. The American Dream is nothing short of a reality and wealthy Ivy League graduates are all the proof we need.
