Should Harvard Admit More Rich Kids? Actually, Yes

Harvard lives on donations. Funding for the University’s research centers, financial aid, and career services all depend on generous gifts from wealthy donors. In return, Harvard’s patrons receive an unspoken guarantee that their children will receive special treatment in the admissions process.

Is that a fair system? Actually, yes — it is.

I realize donor admissions preferences are unpopular. The optics aren’t great; it doesn’t look good for Harvard to admit yet another Kennedy when plenty of deserving students born without a silver spoon salivate outside Harvard’s gates.

While this concern may be somewhat true, donor preferences get an unfairly bad rap. Unlike legacy preferences, which have only a limited impact on overall alumni giving, donor preferences almost certainly result in increased funds for universities; wealthy patrons often make substantial donations in the few years before their children apply — sometimes on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars.

The positive impact of these donations cannot be understated. Several years ago, Leonard Blavatnik’s foundation committed $200 million to Harvard Medical School to fund cutting edge biomedical research. David E. Goel ’93 and Stacey L. Goel gave Harvard $100 million to fund a research and arts performance center in Allston. Both of these donations will benefit thousands of people — Harvard students included — for generations to come. Admitting the children of donors like these seems like a small price to pay.

To the extent that these funds are used to grow the pot of money for financial aid, donor admissions preferences might actually increase access to elite education for students from less wealthy backgrounds by reducing tuition for everyone else.

Plus, the downsides of donor preferences to the Harvard community may not actually be as large as one might think.

To see this, I combed through the six years of granular undergraduate admissions data that Harvard was required to release during the Students for Fair Admissions affirmative action lawsuit. Using the expert witness reports, I was able to estimate the number of students admitted each year off the “Dean’s Interest List,” which flags applicants of special importance to Harvard, including relatives of the University’s top donors. I also computed the demographic distribution of a Harvard class in a hypothetical world where the University did not give preference to such applicants.

This analysis shows first that the overall number of admitted Dean’s listers is quite low. Not surprising, given how few families can afford the price required to give their children preference.

Indeed, while the rate of admission off the Dean’s list is high relative to the rate for regular applicants — 43 percent compared to 7 percent — over the course of six years, only 1,000 students were admitted off the Dean’s list, or an average of about 167 students each year.

Many of these students were likely exceptional applicants who would have been admitted even without the admissions bump. Using a model from Duke Economics Professor Peter S. Arcidiacono, which quantifies the effect of admissions preferences for Dean’s listers, I estimate that about 30 percent of these students would have been admitted anyway. Really, then, about 117 undeserving applicants are admitted each year due to donor preferences. Whether that’s a lot or a little — you have to decide for yourself.

Eliminating donor preferences also does not substantially change the demographic composition of Harvard’s class — holding all other preferences constant. Although it is true that a supermajority of Dean’s listers are white, there just aren’t enough of them to make much of a difference.

The figure below indicates that without preferential treatment for Dean’s listers, the number of white admits would fall by about two percent, whereas the number of Black, Hispanic, and Asian American admits would each increase by less than one percent.

Of course, these data don’t tell the whole story. I wasn’t able to measure the impact of donor preferences on socioeconomic diversity, because Harvard doesn’t release data about applicant wealth. It’s reasonable to assume the effect would be substantial, though, because only the very wealthy can make the kind of donations that get you on the Dean’s list.

But the real socioeconomic problem with college admissions isn’t the donor preferences that go to such a small number of applicants.

Instead, it’s that rich applicants who are not on the Dean’s list are nevertheless far more likely to be admitted than poor ones.

Rich students have access to better schools, tutors, and extracurricular opportunities. They are also more likely to be legacies. Compared to the number of students who benefit from these systemic inequalities, the handful of spots going to donors’ children is a rounding error.

To be sure, the system of donor admissions preferences isn’t meritocratic, and that might rub some people the wrong way. But university admissions have never been meritocratic — not really.

Rather than pretending donor preferences don’t exist, universities should be upfront about how they work. Tell us how many students get in this way. If anything, push the Dean’s list price tag even higher, and then earmark those extra funds specifically for financial aid to disadvantaged students. Let us decide whether the tradeoff is worth it.

In a moment when Congress is threatening to strip Harvard of its federal funding and impose enormous taxes on its endowment earnings, we need our donors now more than ever. Harvard can’t afford to turn off a multimillion dollar spigot for such negligible changes to class composition.

So, sure, get rid of admissions preferences for legacies. Hell, do the same for recruited athletes. But maybe it would be best for Harvard to avoid biting the hand that feeds it.

Julien Berman ’26, a Crimson Editorial editor, is an Economics concentrator in Adams House.