The Dirty Secrets of Elite College Admissions

The Supreme Court is set to kill affirmative action. Just not for rich white kids.

- By Evan Mandery

When he was 8 years old, Michael Wang decided he wanted to go to Harvard. "I don't know if it's the Asian stereotype," he told me, "but I saw it as an avenue to social mobility." Though he wouldn't have thought of it in these terms when he was 8, Michael meant the sort of upper-echelon mobility familiar to graduates of elite colleges. Specifically, he wanted to be a neurosurgeon. Because he was that sort of kid, he read several peer-reviewed articles about cloning and checked the authors' credentials. When he saw that many of the researchers had gone to Harvard, he knew that was the college for him.

From that point forward, Michael's parents made it their life's work to help their only child achieve his goal. Michael's dad-who goes by Jeff-had a sense of what it would take. He'd come to the United States from Shanghai in the 1980s as part of the wave of Chinese students who had emigrated to the West when Deng Xiaoping implemented the Four Modernizations following Mao Zedong's death. Jeff got a PhD in physics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, worked in banking for a while, and then transitioned to tutoring students in math and science. Today he runs a Mathnasium franchise in Union City, California, where Michael grew up. Many of his students went on to top colleges, and Jeff watched and emulated the parents' tactics. Sociologist Annette Lareau would call it concerted cultivation. Yale Law professor Amy Chua might say that he became a Tiger Dad.