It’s a glimmer of hope for patients and families — if the US health system can handle it.
A proven treatment to slow down the progression of Alzheimer’s — a devastating disease that robs individuals of their personality, autonomy, and ultimately life — has long been out of reach.
But within the next year, Alzheimer’s patients could conceivably have access to not just one such treatment, but two.
This new era for Alzheimer’s treatment began this week, when the Food and Drug Administration granted full approval to a new Alzheimer’s drug, lecanemab, which is being sold by its manufacturer Eisai under the brand name Leqembi. Memory clinics are already reporting increasing curiosity among patients about the new treatment, and they expect interest will only grow following the FDA’s final sign-off.
In the next few weeks, new clinical trial results are also expected for another treatment candidate, donanemab, which has had impressive preliminary results.
Just two years ago, the Alzheimer’s community was in turmoil. An earlier drug, called aducanemab and known by the brand name Aduhelm, had reported disappointing clinical trial results, but the FDA, over the objections of its scientific advisers, still decided to grant “accelerated approval” to the drug, which has a lower threshold for approval and is reserved for drugs that address an unmet need. The controversy cast a pall over the medication, Medicare severely limited coverage, and few prescriptions were written for a treatment once hoped to be a breakthrough.
People who work in the field describe a community at war with itself, as some advocacy groups pushed for more access to aducanemab even as many clinicians remained unconvinced.
Lecanemab could offer a fresh start. The clinical data appears more promising. The FDA’s advisers endorsed it last month. The preliminary results from donanemab appear even more impressive, though they need to be confirmed in forthcoming reports.
It is still a fraught moment for providers and patients. The treatments require an extensive patient evaluation before being prescribed, regular infusions in their administration, and careful monitoring over time to catch potentially dangerous side effects — all a challenge for the US health system. Not enough doctors are trained in caring for patients with memory problems. There are not enough infusion centers. Medicare covers some of the scans that could be used to identify patients who may benefit from lecanemab, but not others.
The logistical challenges could be daunting, said Sanjeev Vaishnavi, a clinical neurologist at the Penn Memory Center who is helping to lead its planning efforts. The center sometimes has a months-long waiting list from patients who are seeking more specialized care than their primary care doctor is able to provide. If the demand for lecanemab is high, new patients could end up waiting for years — at which point, they may no longer benefit from the drug.
“I think the concern is, how can we deliver appropriate care to the right individuals in a timely manner?” Vaishnavi said, articulating his fear that patients could end up “stuck in a morass of bureaucracy.”
Nevertheless, he said, “it’s an exciting time.”
Alzheimer’s afflicts at least 6 million Americans. While only a subset may benefit from lecanemab, it holds enormous promise for those patients and their families — and for the many Alzheimer’s patients who will follow in the years to come, as the country’s population ages. This disease is distinct not only for its prevalence but also for the way it works. Over time, it wears away a person’s personality and sense of self. Ultimately, it is 100 percent fatal.
Science has searched for an effective treatment; for decades, potential breakthroughs would show promise and then flame out. The failures led some researchers in recent years to question the entire premise of most Alzheimer’s research, though lecanemab may prove to be a kind of validation of the amyloid hypothesis that has driven drug development.
Jason Karlawish, the co-director at the Penn Memory Center, described his colleagues, patients, and their families as “travelers who finally see they arrived at land after traversing a dangerous ocean.”
“I’d much rather be in this place than where things were two or three years ago,” he told me. “This is what we’ve been waiting for for decades.”
Lecanemab, the new Alzheimer’s drug approved by the FDA, explained
Lecanemab doesn’t cure Alzheimer’s disease. Patients will still decline — but not as quickly. For certain patients who are still in the early stages of the disease, the drug appears to slow down the loss of cognitive function, buying them months — and maybe more — of quality time with their families and loved ones.
This is a breakthrough that has eluded scientists for years. Still, exactly how long patients get will vary, and the longer-term effects remain unknown. A clinical trial of 1,800 patients, the results of which were released last September, found lecanemab slowed cognitive decline by on average of 27 percent over 18 months.
The goal is to slow down the speed of decline from mild cognitive impairment, usually the first recognized stage of Alzheimer’s disease, to dementia, the more advanced loss of cognitive function. Karlawish said he explains lecanemab’s effects to patients like this: 33 percent of the patients on a placebo transitioned to a more advanced stage of the disease during the 18-month study, but 22 percent of the patients on lecanemab did.
In the earlier stages of the disease, patients can still often seem and feel like themselves. In a recent conversation with Karlawish, the husband of a patient with Alzheimer’s had told him that, when describing his wife at her current stage, “Susan is still Susan.” (Susan is an alias.)
“For him, the idea of keeping Susan still Susan is pretty valuable,” Karlawish told me. “But some people will say to me, ‘My wife is not my wife anymore.’ I don’t know how they’d think of slowing down progression.”
That is the first qualifier for lecanemab: It will only help patients who are in that earlier “mild” stage of the disease. For people who have already progressed past that, the pending approval may be bittersweet. Attitudes among families are complex. Alison Lynn, a social worker at Penn who works with caregivers, said she recently spoke to a man who is both a physician and the husband of an Alzheimer’s patient. He said he would not want his wife to be prescribed the drug.
In his words, “both of us are suffering right now. Why would I want the suffering to last longer?” Lynn said. “I don’t think that is an easy thing for him to say.”
But even for patients for whom lecanemab may be appropriate, there are qualifiers. About one in five patients in the clinical trials experienced brain swelling or bleeding. In a few cases, the symptoms were severe and at least three deaths have been associated with it. Still, the FDA’s scientific advisers, who had previously decided the risks of aducanemab were not worth it, reached the opposite conclusion with lecanemab. Alzheimer’s disease is, after all, a terminal illness. Still, doctors will need to explain the risks to patients and watch for side effects.
In part because of that need, lecanemab will not be a simple drug to offer patients — and the demand unlocked by its FDA approval will only further strain health care providers. Full approval, as opposed to the accelerated approval granted to aducanemab, should lead to Medicare covering the drug more readily. But for every patient who walks through the door asking about lecanemab, there will be multiple steps to take before they are prescribed the drug — and another complex process to follow after their treatment begins.
What patients should know about getting prescribed lecanemab
For patients interested in lecanemab, the first step will be screening.
Primary care doctors could be helpful in identifying patients who are too impaired to qualify, Vaishnavi said. But they are generally not in a position to do the kind of intensive testing needed to distinguish normal cognitive aging from the mild cognitive impairment that would make a patient a candidate for lecanemab. Those people will often end up at a clinic like the Penn Memory Center.
After cognitive function tests, patients will need physical scans to make sure there is not another cause of their symptoms or a high risk of brain bleeds, and to identify the biological markers that the drug is designed to target, amyloid plaque. Penn will also administer genetic testing to identify patients who may be less likely to benefit and at higher risk of serious side effects.
For patients who are prescribed lecanemab, they will be back at the clinic regularly. Infusions are given every two weeks (with some leeway) and last for 30 to 60 minutes. For the first few infusions, patients may need to stay longer to monitor for any adverse effects.
They will also need to come in periodically for brain scans to make sure there are no signs of swelling or bleeding, as patients with side effects usually have no outward symptoms. On top of that, there will be some unknown number of unscheduled MRIs for patients who do experience some concerning symptoms on their own. For the patients who have side effects, they may need to pause treatment. Some might never be able to go back on the drug, but others could if further exams reveal their issues have stabilized or reversed.
It will be a logistical nightmare. Administrators will be playing a neverending game of scheduling Tetris. Vaishnavi said infusions can be moved up or back by a week, but that is about the extent of their flexibility. They can only guess how much demand they will see and, for the foreseeable future, they will be fielding most patients who want this drug, as specialized clinics are best outfitted to perform the infusions.
Down the road, the hope is that it will be easier for other clinics to administer lecanemab and, maybe someday, patients could be able to do it at home. But when this drug hits the market this summer, there is likely to be a bottleneck at clinics like Penn, because they are among the few who can appropriately provide it.
Even there, Vaishnavi said they could use more clinicians — doctors, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners — given how much work will go into monitoring for side effects. There will be additional administrative work for them, too, as Medicare will require providers to put their patients in a registry and report on the real-world outcomes they see.
“We don’t have the appropriate health care system for these drugs,” Karlawish said, warning there would be “a lot of bumps in the road.”
This pivotal moment for Alzheimer’s treatment promises both new hope for patients and a reality check for a health care system that continually struggles to make the most of novel medicines for diseases that affect millions of Americans.
“Everyone’s feeling excited by this,” Lynn said. “It’s exciting but fraught.”
Security footage, unwitting lawyers, and more details in the Mar-a-Lago search warrant affidavit reveal how prosecutors built their case against Trump.
We now have more information about how prosecutors conducted their search for classified documents that former President Donald Trump kept after leaving office, despite court orders requiring that he turn them over.
On Wednesday, a magistrate judge unsealed additional portions of an affidavit submitted by federal authorities when they sought a court order allowing them to raid Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida last August. It has new details on security footage that showed boxes of documents being moved and the interactions Trump’s lawyers had with prosecutors. But it still leaves some questions about the case unanswered, including how prosecutors came to suspect that Trump hadn’t turned over all of the documents in his possession.
The new version of the affidavit was released just before Trump’s body man Walt Nauta, who was indicted last month alongside the former president, pleaded not guilty to the charges against him Thursday. He has been accused of allegedly acting at Trump’s direction to move boxes of documents at Mar-a-Lago in an attempt to hide them from prosecutors. Trump has also pleaded not guilty to all 37 counts in the indictment, including willful retention of national defense information under the Espionage Act and one count of false statements and representations.
Here are the latest revelations from the affidavit:
- Prosecutors relied on security footage to build their case against Trump
Newly unsealed parts of the affidavit cite security footage of a hallway in the Mar-a-Lago basement, which led to the storage room where many of the documents were kept. The Trump Organization turned over that footage in response to a June 2022 subpoena.
The affidavit describes footage showing Nauta moving boxes out of the storage room and the anteroom leading to it on four separate occasions between May 24, 2022, and June 2, 2022. During that period, the FBI questioned him about the locations of the boxes. The affidavit said that the footage shows him moving “approximately 64 boxes from the storage room area” and “only return[ing] 25-30 boxes” to that room.
The indictment accuses Nauta of making false statements to the FBI about how the documents got to Trump’s residence and whether they were stored in a secure location. At Trump’s instruction, he also allegedly moved more than 60 boxes of documents before one of the former president’s attorneys was supposed to review them as part of their response to a Department of Justice subpoena.
- Trump didn’t initially argue to prosecutors that he declassified the documents
Trump has publicly maintained that he had a “standing order” to instantly declassify documents that he retained from his time in the White House. But according to reporting from Bloomberg, neither the Justice Department nor Office of the Director of National Intelligence has managed to find any such document. And the newly unsealed parts of the affidavit show that his lawyers — including M. Evan Corcoran, whose exhaustive notes helped prosecutors build their case — didn’t make that defense when they turned over an incomplete folder of classified documents before authorities raided the estate.
That throws doubt on the notion that Trump tried to declassify the documents he had maintained and whether his attorneys knew about the papers he failed to turn over.
- Trump’s lawyers probably never looked beyond the storage room for classified documents
The newly unsealed parts of the affidavit also show Corcoran was “not advised there were any records in any private office space or other location in Mar-a-Lago.” That suggested to prosecutors that it was “very likely” that his legal team never searched beyond the storage room for classified documents.
Authorities later found documents throughout Mar-a-Lago, including in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, and Trump’s bedroom. The indictment alleges that Trump and Nauta knowingly conspired to prevent the former president’s lawyers from reviewing most of the boxes of documents. Corcoran, who was ordered by a Washington federal judge to provide records and testimony to the grand jury in the case, has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
- We still don’t know all the reasons why prosecutors believed that Trump still had documents in his possession
Big chunks of the affidavit still remain under seal. And while the security footage showed that Nauta moved the boxes, it’s possible that prosecutors had additional reasons to believe that Trump was willfully retaining documents in brazen violation of a subpoena.
Former US Attorney Barb McQuade, a University of Michigan law professor, told MSNBC Wednesday that there could be “some witnesses that they are trying to protect … or some lines of inquiry they are trying to protect.”
Given that the grand jury’s investigation in the case is still ongoing, we may not find out what it is that prosecutors are trying to keep under wraps until the case goes to trial, which is currently scheduled for August 14.
Legacy admits, athletic recruits, and the children of donors, faculty members, and VIPs still have a leg up under the Supreme Court’s new ruling.
The Supreme Court’s decision to effectively ban the consideration of race in college admissions reversed more than 40 years of precedent. It also left other kinds of admission preferences in place — ones that often benefit white students.
For decades, the Court held that schools could consider race as one of many factors in the holistic review of an applicant, a consideration that could help foster diversity on campus.
The majority opinion laid out how it worked. Harvard’s final stage of deciding to admit or reject students is a step called the “lop,” in which four factors are evaluated: whether an applicant is a legacy, meaning an immediate family member went to Harvard; whether they were recruited as an athlete; whether they are eligible for financial aid; and their race.
Race is now unconstitutional to consider, but other preferences remain.
One study found that these preferences give an edge to white applicants. Among white students admitted to Harvard, 43 percent received a preference for athletics, legacy status, being on the dean’s interest list, or for being the child of a faculty or staff member, and without those advantages, three-quarters would have been rejected.
Many colleges don’t have selective admissions at all. But at those that do, the Supreme Court, in other words, left plenty of discretion for college officials to fill their student bodies with the children of donors or employees, or with lacrosse, tennis, or football players, or with the children of alumni. Only the effort to create a racially diverse student body is now all but banned.
While the Supreme Court left these preferences untouched, the Court’s decision is already renewing the debate over them. “Well before the decision came down there have been conversations about what to do about the legacy boost, for example,” said Adam Nguyen, the founder of Ivy Link, an organization that advises families, who pay at least $150,000 beginning when their child is in middle school, on college admissions. “People have long questioned why legacy even exists. In a democratic society, it seems intrinsically unfair that the children of alumni, generation after generation and by virtue of birth, get that privilege. These conversations are still sensitive but they shouldn’t be happening behind closed doors anymore.”
Protests and lawsuits against “affirmative action for white people” have already ensued.
The advocacy group Lawyers for Civil Rights filed a complaint with the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights following the Supreme Court’s ruling, urging the department to investigate the legacy and donor admissions policies at Harvard, which they say discriminate against qualified Black, Hispanic, and Asian applicants in favor of less qualified white applicants. The complaint asked more than 1,500 colleges and universities to end legacy and donor preferences.
“There’s no birthright to Harvard. As the Supreme Court recently noted, ‘eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.’ There should be no way to identify who your parents are in the college application process,” said Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, the executive director of Lawyers for Civil Rights. “Why are we rewarding children for privileges and advantages accrued by prior generations? Your family’s last name and the size of your bank account are not a measure of merit, and should have no bearing on the college admissions process.”
Legacy status gives students a significant leg up
Legacy students receive a boost during the admissions process because they are a family member of someone who attended the college — in some cases just parents; in others, grandparents, cousins, and even aunts and uncles count, too.
Some schools draw a distinction between primary legacies, whose parents attended as undergraduates, and secondary legacies, a lesser preference for those whose parents attended as graduate students, Nguyen told Vox.
Colleges say they use legacy admissions for a few reasons. One is to bolster their yield rates — the percentage of accepted students who choose to enroll, and a crucial number that admissions offices watch closely. Applying as a legacy student suggests that you’re more likely to attend if you get in.
A bigger reason, though, is alumni engagement and funding. According to schools that consider legacy as a factor during holistic reviews, legacy students are more likely to stay connected to the college over generations and then are hence more likely to donate to the institution later on. (One study suggests the benefits to colleges might be overstated: Looking at data from 1998 to 2008, of the nation’s top 100 schools, “there is no statistically significant evidence of a causal relationship between legacy preference policies and total alumni giving among top universities.”)
Schools that offer legacy preference say it is only one factor in an applicant’s profile. That means that legacy can boost an otherwise strong application, but doesn’t typically have the power to sway admissions officers to move a student from the “no” to “yes” pile on its own.
Still, the difference between admission rates for legacy students and everyone else is striking. The Harvard v. Students for Fair Admissions case brought attention to the fact that between 2010 and 2015, the admission rate for legacy applicants at Harvard was higher than 33 percent, compared to 6 percent for non-legacies. More than 20 percent of white students admitted to Harvard during that period had legacy status.
Of the nation’s top 100 universities in the U.S. News and World Report, about three-quarters use legacy preferences; virtually all of the nation’s top 100 liberal arts colleges do. Georgetown University’s 2024 class of 3,309 admitted applications is 9 percent legacy; Princeton’s 2025 class has 150 legacy students, 10 percent of the class; at Yale, it’s 14 percent. Stanford admitted just 4 percent of applicants to the class of 2023, but 16 percent of those admitted had a legacy background.
Legacy admissions developed in the 1920s to discriminate against Jewish and Catholic applicants and favor Anglo-Protestant dominance. A century later, it still reinforces privilege: Underrepresented students of color make up 12.5 percent of applicants at selective colleges but only 6.7 percent of the legacy applicant pool. One study found that in Harvard’s class of 2019, 70 percent of legacy students were white and 41 percent of legacy admits had parents who earned more than $500,000 per year. At Princeton, 73 percent of legacy students in the class of 2023 are white.
Criticism of legacy admissions is nothing new. But whether the Court, or anyone else, will step in and ban universities from considering legacy status remains to be seen. A number of elite private schools, including Amherst, Johns Hopkins, and Pomona, and public institutions, including the University of Texas and the University of California, have ended legacy admissions preferences in the past few years; some, including MIT, have never used it.
But others have recommitted to legacy preferences. A spokesperson for Princeton told the Wall Street Journal in 2020, in the wake of the college admissions scandal, that “as our student body diversifies, our alumni body diversifies, and, in turn, the children of alumni diversify.”
“Some schools are slicing the data to examine which alumni actually donated and how much they donated, and in some cases choosing not to give boosts to alumni who don’t participate or give back to the school,” Nguyen said.
Legacy admissions have also divided students, including legacies themselves: In 2019, one legacy student at the University of Pennsylvania wrote that she was proud to embrace “her Penn heritage” since “we need legacy admissions” for “potential philanthropy,” brand building, school spirit, and community. Legacy allows families to “gain wealth and prestige,” the student wrote; in response, a legacy student at Princeton — the seventh in her family to attend the institution — argued that “Princeton does not need legacies to maintain its standing” nor should legacy preferences at the institution “increase an applicant’s chances of admission nearly fourfold, from 7 to 30 percent.”
Being an athlete is the strongest admissions preference of all
The recruitment process for athletes at Harvard is well-documented. Student-athletes admitted to Harvard receive “likely letters,” advance notice from team coaches that they likely have a place in the incoming freshman class. Some are recruited as early as sophomore year in high school. Prospective athletes are usually invited to campus during junior year, the fall before they apply to Harvard, to meet with current student-athletes and attend classes and practice. Coaches also write special recommendations for recruits, which the admissions office takes into consideration during the holistic review process, and give advice.
This is typical at selective colleges, and it tends to benefit white students. Excluding football, basketball, and track and field, college athletes are “disproportionately white, wealthy, and suburban.” In 2018, the Atlantic reported that 65 percent of Ivy League athletes and 79 percent of Division III New England Small Collegiate Athletic Conference athletes are white, and that nearly half of Harvard athletes in the class of 2022 come from households with annual incomes above $250,000. Research shows that great access to athletic facilities, recreation centers, and parks increases the likelihood that a student will become a student-athlete.
Critics say that the admissions process benefits students who are already privileged. Recruited athletes tend to have had opportunities that allowed them to hone their skills, like the chance to attend expensive training summer camps or receive private coaching.
Plus, there’s some evidence that recruits are allowed to meet lower standards. In 1985, the Council of Ivy League Presidents made the Academic Index (AI) to compare the academic qualifications of recruited athletes against that of the general student body, taking into consideration class rank, SAT scores, and SAT subject tests. Historically recruited athletes needed only an AI of 171 to be accepted, on a scale of 170 to 240. (It’s now 176.) Although colleges don’t release their academic index for all students, at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, the most commonly cited number is “around 220,” meaning athletes meet a much lower bar.
The early 2000s book Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values found that athletes with below-average standardized test scores were twice as likely to be admitted and four times more likely to be admitted as applicants from underrepresented groups. A study from researchers at Princeton found that the advantage athletes are given is similar to scoring a 1400 versus a 1200 on the SAT.
The most famous athletic admissions scandal of recent years was the Operation Varsity Blues scandal, in which parents bribed coaches to recruit their children as athletes. In some cases, the children did not have a record of ever playing the sport. At Yale, one student’s parents paid a college advisor $1.2 million to get her into the school. The school’s head women’s soccer coach recruited the student for $400,000.
Duke University economist Peter Arcidiacono, who conducted research for the plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions, concluded that athletic admissions were more troubling than legacy admissions. “If you eliminate athletic preferences at Harvard, white admission rates go down, Black admission rates stay the same, and Hispanic and Asian rates go up,” he said. “Over 16 percent of white admits are athletes at Harvard, which is significantly higher than for Black students.”
Critics also argue that colleges merely place such an emphasis on athletic recruiting due to the revenue athletics bring in. In 2019, the Ivy League made $30.1 million in football alone. For small schools, research has found that they rely on sports programs to maintain enrollment and avoid being shuttered. At some of these schools, athletes make up more than half the student body.
Supporters say athletic recruitment should not be lumped in with legacy admissions since recruited athletes have earned their place. Supporters argue that the talent, work ethic, and skill of athletes diversify campuses. But critics don’t ignore the reality that there are disparities in access to elite training that make certain sports less diverse when it comes to race or socioeconomic status. “Majority-nonwhite and lower-income communities have fewer recreational centers and sports offerings than white, affluent neighborhoods that apply their greater tax dollars and private funding to offer them. So it’s no surprise that children from wealthier communities play sports more frequently,” researchers wrote. Plus, niche sports, sometimes colloquially called “country club sports” such as fencing, lacrosse, crew, sailing, ice hockey, water polo, and squash cost thousands for any child to play in a given year.
Going forward, the pushback may force schools to recruit for fewer teams. “I don’t think the major sports are going to get impacted. It’s really the niche sports since they give preference to children whose families have resources,” Nguyen said. “A lot of these niche sports may just become club sports.”
The future of admissions for children of donors, celebrities, public figures, and college faculty
Other admissions boosts have come under scrutiny in recent years: bumps for the children of donors, celebrities, and the institution’s employees.
Children of faculty, once called “Fac brats,” at public and private institutions have historically gotten boosts during admissions and even free tuition. Harvard’s then-director of admissions told the New York Times in 2005 that “If all else were equal in terms of excellence, we would certainly tip, we would certainly give the advantage to the faculty child. It’s like what we do with alumni. It might even be a bigger tip.”
A report from the Chronicle of Higher Education that same year found that more than two-thirds of the country’s top colleges and universities surveyed gave “extra admissions consideration” and tuition discounts or waivers for children of employees. Colleges have defended this practice by saying it allows them to recruit high-quality faculty and improve employee retention.
In a 2003 Wall Street Journal article Daniel Golden, now a ProPublica editor, noted that in addition to giving preference to the children of alumni, colleges were starting to bend admissions standards “to make space for children from rich or influential families that lack longstanding ties to the institutions.” According to the articles, schools, through referrals or by word of mouth, would identify students from well-to-do families and solicit their families for donations once the student was enrolled.
At the time, the director of development at Duke told the Wall Street Journal that they don’t trade admissions for a donation. But the Journal found that Duke relaxed its admissions standards in those years to admit about 100 to 125 students each year who had been waitlisted or tentatively rejected but came from wealthy families.
While many of these investigations are now decades old, the practice appears to have continued: In 2022, Duke was sued along with 15 other elite private institutions for “maintaining admissions systems that favor the children of wealthy past or potential future donors.”
Jared Kushner, the former senior advisor to former President Trump, is a famous case. The 2006 book The Price of Admission (written by Golden) revealed that he won admission to Harvard in 1999 after his real estate developer father Charles Kushner pledged $2.5 million to the institution in 1998. Kushner’s parents were subsequently named to the school’s Committee on University Resources, its biggest panel of donors.
In 2018, amid the first iteration of the Harvard affirmative-action case, a dean of admissions’ emails with school fundraisers were made public. In the emails, the dean suggested that the fundraiser give special consideration to offspring of big donors or those who had “already committed to a building” or have “an art collection which could conceivably come our way.”
Schools have defended development preferences by saying that development cases bring in money that supports all other students. One analysis of donor giving found that some donations were given with the hope that their child would be admitted.
The affirmative action case also shed light on Harvard’s “dean’s interest list” — students whose parents or relatives have donated to Harvard. Another email that came out of the trial showed the dean of the Kennedy School celebrating the admissions dean for admitting applicants whose families committed funding for buildings and fellowships before their child was even admitted. The trial also revealed a case in which an applicant’s rating on the dean’s list was low because the development office didn’t see a “significant opportunity for further major gifts.”
Also at play are admissions boosts for the children of VIPs. “VIPs, you’re talking maybe the president of China or prime minister XYZ. Their children actually get preferences, believe it or not. Maybe it’s believable but they do and people don’t talk about it,” said Nguyen. “And often, when they get to campus, they attend under pseudonyms or use aliases so you don’t know who they are.” The college admissions scandal revealed that USC officials tagged certain students as “VIP” or “special interest” based on donations and family connections.
But in the end, these admissions preferences remain perfectly legal. It’s only considering race in admissions that is all but banned.
Update, July 6, 3:45 pm ET: This story was originally published on June 30 and has been updated to include information about the Lawyers for Civil Rights complaint.