We don’t suppose that being a college president has ever been easy, but the minefield of potentially explosive issues — both national and local — that Dartmouth’s new chief, Sian Beilock, is being asked to traverse seems particularly daunting.
On the other hand, Beilock, 19th president of Dartmouth and the first woman to hold the job, would seem well qualified by dint of scholarship and administrative experience at the University of Chicago and Barnard College to bypass or defuse those issues. And the pressure is not likely to get to her: Her academic specialty, after all, is the brain science behind choking under pressure, and the brain and body factors that influence all types of performance.
Money, at least, should not be a problem, as Beilock takes the helm of an institution with an $8.1 billion endowment. But other pressure there certainly will be. All the issues that roil higher education in general are in play: among them, affirmative action; diversity; free expression on campus; sexual assault and hazing; artificial intelligence.
And as our colleague Frances Mize pointed out in last Sunday’s profile of the new president, local and regional issues such as the housing crunch, campus expansion, town-gown relations, environmental sustainability and unionization of college workers are all awaiting her attention. Those are, of course, the ones that this page is most concerned with, and we will return to them on a future occasion.
Anyway, we were particularly struck by this passage in Mize’s story: Beilock observed that “we think of free expression as the antithesis of diversity and inclusion, but really you can’t have true free expression and thought unless you have different viewpoints pushing at each other.”
To that end, Beilock wants Dartmouth to promote what she calls ideological diversity. “It’s about having people with different political views at the table, but it’s also about having people at the table who grew up in very different ways, who experienced the world in different ways and our systems in different ways.” With the U.S. Supreme Court having abolished by judicial fiat race-based affirmative action in higher education, getting those people together at the table would seem more difficult than ever.
New research produced by three Ivy League economists points one way forward. Their study confirmed what most people already believed: America’s most prestigious private institutions of higher learning favor applicants from wealthy families over those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, even when they have comparable academic qualifications.
Analyzing data from classes entering between 2010 and 2015, the researchers concluded that legacy applicants — those with alumni connections — “are five times more likely to be admitted” to an Ivy League college or its equivalent than are “peers with comparable credentials whose parents did not attend the college.” Recruited student athletes, many of whom come from wealthy backgrounds, also receive a big advantage in admissions, as do those applying from exclusive private secondary schools, the economists said.
Certainly many legacy applicants are highly qualified; they enjoy the natural advantages of the best academic resources money can buy. But the study concluded that increasing socio-economic diversity need not compromise academic standards because so many highly qualified lower- and middle-income students are currently denied admission.
The stakes are high not just for individual applicants, but also for society. Although elite schools account for only a small percentage of all college graduates, those graduates disproportionately become the highest earners and the most influential national leaders, facilitating the transfer of wealth and power from one family generation to another.
Not all elite private institutions favor legacy applicants. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for one, does not. “We just don’t find it relevant to assessing the talent and potential of the individual,” Stuart Schmill, M.I.T.’s dean of admissions, told The Boston Globe. And Wesleyan University, a highly selective liberal arts college in Connecticut, announced this month that it was ending legacy preferences.
This is perhaps a particularly thorny issue for Dartmouth, which has long depended on an intensely loyal alumni base to open its heart warmly and its wallet generously to its alma mater. So perhaps it’s not surprising that the college said recently that it would continue to use legacy connections as “one factor among dozens that Dartmouth considers when evaluating applicants.”
And, in fairness, the college does cover the cost of full tuition for families earning $125,000 or less. Nevertheless, we submit for President Beilock’s consideration the argument that her goal of getting people to the table with different views, different experiences and different backgrounds to promote ideological diversity is a much more difficult proposition while affirmative action for the wealthy remains in place.