The college admissions process is inherently unfair. Some students have baked-in advantages, such as their race, their school district, their social class, or their parent’s wealth. Others have disadvantages along the same lines.
“When I counsel students, I am pretty clear that this is not a particularly fair process. I always talk about affordability and the fact that students with financial resources usually have more options,” Myra Ross, a college adviser at Amherst Regional High School, told the Gazette earlier this month.
This may not be shocking to families, no matter how much or how little money they make. Whether we like it or not, wealth and privilege factor into much of American society — the college admissions process is not immune.
But even with this knowledge, the sheer scope of charges brought by the Department of Justice earlier this month in the largest university admissions scandal ever prosecuted is disturbing. It’s galling to see extremely rich, famous and privileged parents game a flawed and unjust system.
How did they do it? Prosecutors allege they used a college admissions consultant to get their under-qualified children into some of the best universities in the country by bribing test monitors, falsifying test scores, fabricating student biographies, faking disability status to inflate SAT scores, lying about their race, and bribing coaches to get onto sports teams — among other nefarious methods.
What’s infuriating are the lengths these families apparently went to buy their kids’ way into colleges, possibly at the expense of more qualified students who were displaced.
Federal prosecutors have charged 50 people in the ongoing case. William Rick Singer, the mastermind of the so-called “side-door” scheme, allegedly said he had worked with nearly 800 families to fraudulently gain their children admission into select schools, according to court documents.
Among those charged are two famous actresses, along with Silicon Valley tech CEOs, real-estate developers, and a fashion designer. A couple is accused of using $250,000 of Facebook stocks to pay for bribes. And a soccer coach allegedly accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to get a recruit who didn’t actually play soccer into Yale.
We’re glad the FBI devoted resources to investigate the case, and we’re hoping it leads to some deep thinking on the part of parents, students, consultants and educational institutions about how admissions processes and athletic recruiting practices can be improved.
Clearly, students with more financial resources have an ability to stack the deck in their favor — and they don’t have to break the law to do so. Paying for an SAT tutor, enrolling students in elite-level youth travel sports leagues, and donating enough money to pay for a building at one’s alma mater are just a few of the ways parents with means give their children a leg up. But that doesn’t mean their children are any more deserving than the kids whose parents can’t afford or choose to not pay for such privileges.
None of the Five Colleges in the Pioneer Valley has been implicated in the scandal to date. That doesn’t change the fact that officials at all institutions of higher education in this country have hard questions to answer when it comes to admission processes and athletic recruiting practices.
Most of us don’t fly first class, have anodized titanium Amex Centurion cards or watch the Red Sox from the Legends Suite. Most of us don’t donate millions to a university and expect that our kids will be admitted. But at least when you’re donating a big check to a school, the school can do something with the money that benefits others, such as fund scholarships, or pay for a professor in an academic discipline that doesn’t generate cash, or build a new engineering school.
What those donations should not do, however, is determine who gets into college. It just seems awful when people can buy a slot that should have gone to another student who actually earned it.