By Andrew Prokop - Aug 2, 2017

The civil rights division of President Trump’s Justice Department is preparing to shift its resources toward “investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants,” the New York Times’s Charlie Savage reported Tuesday.

Any shift in priorities hasn’t been finalized or announced yet, so it’s unclear where this policy will end up or how specifically it will be implemented. Still, in conversations and debates over just who gets the biggest leg up in university admissions, the tale of how senior White House adviser and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner got into Harvard is an instructive one.

Of course few will be surprised that Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, a wealthy and connected developer and political donor, helped him get in. But the details of just how that happened, described in Daniel Golden’s thoroughly reported 2007 book The Price of Admission, remain remarkable to this day.

What Golden found, essentially, was that Jared’s father handed Harvard (a school he did not attend) a big pile of money just as Jared was starting to apply to colleges. Around the same time, Jared’s dad got his US senator to contact another US senator to arrange a chat with Harvard’s dean of admissions.

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