This fall has seen some hopeful winds of change for low-income students in higher education, including a call for a substantial increase in Pell Grants from a major education commission and announcements by some leading universities that they will end early admissions programs which tend to advantage wealthy applicants. But amidst these genuinely positive developments comes publication of Daniel Golden’s devastating new book, The Price of Admission, which documents in greater detail than ever before the massive affirmative action programs colleges provide for the children of wealthy alumni and the otherwise rich and famous.

Golden, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on college admissions, and in The Price of Admission his investigative skills are on full display. Providing extensive insider data and numerous concrete illustrations, Golden contends that up to 60% of slots at selective colleges go to candidates who have some sort of “hook”—as legacies, recruited athletes, minorities, or the children of professors, celebrities and potential wealthy donors. The preferences are bipartisan— benefitting the sons of Al Gore and Bill Frist alike, as well as George W. Bush’s niece, who was admitted to Princeton despite low grades and test scores, and having missed the admissions deadline. As a result of the various admissions breaks, says a Notre Dame official, “the poor schmuck who has to get in on his own has to walk on water.”

The main justification for preferential treatment for the wealthy, of course, is the need to raise funds. According to the Council for Aid to Education, alumni contributed $7.1 billion to higher education in 2005, some 27.7% of all private giving to colleges. But Golden is skeptical. He notes that Cal Tech has a thriving endowment, even though it provides no legacy preferences. And Oxford and Cambridge seem to be doing fine even though they no longer ask applicants whether their parents are alumni.

Golden is particularly good at quoting the defenders of privilege, and their strained rationalizations. The lawyer for Hollywood powerbroker Michael Ovitz says Ovitz’s son deserved to get into Brown University , despite a mediocre academic record, because the children of a Hollywood mogul add diversity. They “have perspectives and experiences and backgrounds” that are “tremendously valuable and unique and would be a benefit to any campus.” Letting in low scoring athletes—many of whom come from very advantaged homes—makes sense, says a coach at the University of Virginia , because “It’s not just about having the best and brightest students. You should have academic diversity as well. If you have kids who have to struggle, it brings a good mix.” A Harvard admissions officer justified various admissions breaks because assembling a freshman class is like putting together a symphony; one wouldn’t just want violists, you need oboe players and percussionists too. The problem with the analogy, Golden points out, is that orchestras pick the very best players, through blind auditions in order to avoid favoritism, and would never turn down a top violinist “in favor of a second-rate one with a screeching bow because his father had played in the orchestra himself.”

The upshot is tremendous stratification. Golden cites The Century Foundation’s 2004 study by Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose, which found that just 3% of students come from the lowest socioeconomic quartile and 74% from the richest at the nation’s most selective 146 college and universities.

Why does it matter? While it is true that students from a variety of nonselective colleges—or even those without a bachelor’s degree—can do well in American society, attending a selective college or university can put students on a completely different trajectory. Golden cites a study by Thomas Dye which found that 54% of corporate leaders and 42% of government leaders have degrees from just twelve elite universities.

Given his passion for the underdog, Golden is surprisingly critical of California’s efforts, in the wake of Proposition 209 banning the use of race in admissions, to give a leg up to low-income and working-class students who have overcome obstacles. One of the factors counted in favor of an applicant is coming from an economically disadvantaged school district. Golden says this rule “penalize[s] low-income families, many of them Asian, that have sacrificed to move to districts where their children can attend better schools.” Golden seems not to have much sympathy for poor kids unlucky enough to have parents who lack the money, or the drive, to live in a good school district. Likewise, Golden says UCLA Law School “phased...out” a 1997 program for socioeconomic admissions preferences because “the main beneficiaries were working-class and lower-middle-class white and Asians students.” But UCLA Law School continues to look at socioeconomic diversity in admissions. And while many of the beneficiaries are white and Asian, a significant proportion are black and Latino. In the fall 2002 entering class, for example, 41% of socioeconomic admits were African American or Latino, compared with 6% admitted through other programs. African Americans were 16 times as likely to be admitted under the socioeconomic program as other programs, and Latinos were 6.8 times as likely to be admitted.

Golden raises another concern about recent efforts to bring more low-income students on to campus: if admissions preferences for legacies and other wealthy candidates remain in place, the middle-class may get squeezed. This is a legitimate concern, for Carnevale and Rose’s study found that the two middle socioeconomic quartiles at the most selective colleges and universities are also substantially under-represented. To address this problem, institutions of higher education should report socioeconomic diversity by all quartiles, so that colleges and universities can be held publicly accountable.

Inevitably, Golden’s message is dismissed with the cynic’s retort, what did you expect? But as Golden notes, selective institutions are not private clubs or for-profit corporations with a duty to shareholders to maximize profits. They are nonprofit educational institutions that pride themselves on having a liberal outlook. And even private colleges and universities receive enormous public support in the form of tax subsidies and billions of dollars in government funding. As Harvard’s former president Lawrence Summers notes, “An important purpose of institutions like Harvard is to give everybody a shot at the American dream.”

The belief in the importance of the American dream may explain why polls find that 75% oppose preferences for alumni in college admissions. “The last thing we need in American education is a caste system,” argues former Senator Bob Dole. “ These alumni perks have absolutely nothing to do with an individual’s qualifications on merit.” Likewise, former Senator John Edwards denounced legacy preference as “a birthright out of eighteenth-century British aristocracy, not twenty-first-century American democracy.”

So why have Oxford and Cambridge led the pack on this, while American higher education lags behind?

Richard D. Kahlenberg is a Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation.