No need for Yale to stay in the family

By Dan Dudis

Affirmative action for legacies quickly leads to lively debate among students here at Yale. I am surprised to hear friends whose blood is decidedly more red than blue argue in favor Yale's policy of perks for the privileged. Yale is the training ground for the elite, I'm told. Thus the very act of attending Yale makes us part of said elite. And as the elite, we are entitled to certain perogatives, one of which is the right to send our children to Yale, qualified or not.

As someone who came to Yale for the excellent educational opportunities it offers, discussions such as these are a wake-up call. Is it because I am now a junior that people feel it's time poor little naïve me should be informed of the real purpose of attending Yale? Dan Dudis, by virtue of attending this fine institution, you are now a member of the elite.

OK, but I have a question: which elite? Well, let's see. I consider Anne Rice and John Grisham to be better authors than James Joyce. I guess that precludes me from being a member of the litterati. Well what about the glitterati? I don't exactly have Brad Pitt's looks or body, and my acting skills pale in comparison to those of Anthony Hopkins, so I can't be part of the Hollywood elite. Then there's the Washington political elite. No, not a chance--I've previously used this space to call for the legalization of drugs and incest. My political career should have been over about two months ago. But there's always Wall Street, you say. Yes, but investment banking never really appealed to me.

Well, I guess they were wrong: I'm not part of the elite. And I suspect that the same holds true for most other Yalies. I don't mean to insult, but there just aren't many Joyces, Fitzgeralds, or Faulkners, Pitts, Paltrows, or DeNiros running around our campus. And sure, Yale has a lot of hacks, but I doubt that the vast majority of them will find the Washington power or Wall Street megabucks that they crave. Which isn't to say that we won't be successful. Almost all of us will be quite successful at whatever it is that we choose to do. But there are lots of successful people in this world, most of whom didn't go to Yale. The successful are hardly the elite.

All delusions of grandeur aside, the real elite at issue here is the one I alluded to at the beginning--the bluebloods, the old money. This is the elite that really matters; they are the ones who have given mother Yale whole buildings at a time. But that's not all they've done, my red-blooded friends argue: the largess of the blue blooded in large part funds the educations of the red blooded. Even an egalitarian must admit that this is a powerful argument. By ending preferences for wealthy legacies, Yale might actually find itself in a situation where it could no longer afford to offer financial aid to the children of the middle and lower classes. Thus, ending affirmative action for the wealthy would have the perverse effect of denying a Yale education to the less privileged.

But it's not fair. It's not right that more qualified applicants are turned down for less qualified, though better-connected, applicants. "Life isn't fair!" they respond. But what if I could prove that affirmative action for legacies was actually financially detrimental to Yale?

Yale's current admissions system is like cannibalism. Every step up the food chain results in energy loss. The predator is only capable of extracting a small percentage of the total energy stored in the prey. This is why a society of cannibals couldn't survive. It would take many humans to feed just one other human. Such a society would eat itself to extinction. Not a pleasant analogy, but one that I think is applicable to Yale's admissions process--Yale feeds (repeatedly) on its own.

The fact is, old money doesn't grow. Look at the Fortune 500--Rockefeller and Carnegie are fading fast. The same probably applies for Luce and Sterling. For every child of old money that Yale accepts, someone else gets turned down. In essence, Yale is making the safe bet--a Sterling is probably still good for a renovation or two. But it is the unconnected--and rejected--child who is far more likely to strike it truly rich. And while I've already argued that most of us will not amount to much more than mere successes, there are probably a couple in every class who are destined to become fabulously wealthy. Wouldn't it be just awful if Yale rejected one of these future wunderkinds--someone who would be worth entire new buildings--for the couple of renovations that the blue-bloods have left in them?

Dan Dudis is a junior in Pierson.

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