The other set of data I wanted to pass along indicate about half of the most powerful members of our society, i.e. CEO's, billionaires, national-level politicians and journalists/editors, etc. attended these same elite, academic institutions (that taxpayers so heavily finance).
Federal judges 41%
Fortune 500 CEOs 41%
Senators 41%
New York Times Editors/Writers 44%
Forbes billionaires 45%
Wall Street Journal Editors/Writers 50%
World Economic Forum attendees 55%
Forbes powerful women 56%
The New Republic Editors/Writers 64%
Forbes powerful men 85%
(Wei and Perina, Journal of Expertise, 2018)
As George Carlin said, "It's a big club, and you ain't in it"... unless you are. (But then you don't get to laugh with Carlin... unless you've crafted a world of denial around yourself with the help of some of that education).
6
Why is admitting students on the basis of legacy status not discriminatory on the basis of race? Most legacy students are white. To continue to admit disproportionate numbers of students whose parents attended that school is to significantly continue to discriminate in favor of white applicants, and to discriminate against students of color.
1
NYTimes editorial board, before you push for hatred (again) against those you deem rich or privileged, you might want to provide the details of how many kids a) get into college because of legacy endowments and b) how many of those kids actually graduate. We're talking fractions of fractions here, but readers and their comments illustrate that they believe, from your opinion piece, that this happens all the time and 'thousands' are left working part time jobs to pay for Ivy League schools. That is a lie, falsehood, that you do nothing to discourage.
Anyone that believes that Ivy League private schools are the only way to have a good life and support your family is smoking rope. It only matters for your getting your first job, if then. After that, it doesn't matter where you went to school or even if you finished; it matters how hard you work to achieve the goals set by whomever is running the business. I know many very wealthy people that never went to school, and that includes 20 somethings as well as 60 somethings.
1
Maybe admissions departments should demand full disclosure of the tutoring or any outside help that an applicant receives, under penalty of expulsion if found to be lying on the application.
A student that can sit down with a book and prepare themselves for their SATs as opposed to using a tutor, already shows far greater discipline and ambition than the one being forced into it by the parents.
This is especially important in the digital economy, where even many high intelligent people no longer have the discipline to keep their butt glued to a desk to figure something out for themselves.
5
Going to point out here that your newspaper has a fancy pants very expensive high school summer camp using your brand name that is attracting $$$ from these very same anxious parents hoping to get their children into good schools. So there's that.
5
Just hilarious watching the liberal elite fall to pieces over the question of who gets to go to which liberal elite fake-college political-activism factory.
Hilarious for all of us who went to Ye Olde State Flagship and turned out ten times more successful than all you whining snowflake elite crybabies.
Waaah! I didn't get into Yale! Waaaah! I had to go to Georgetown! Waaaaah! I'm too smart and special to go to Georgetown! Waaaaaaah! Some rich guy got my slot in Yale!
Good demonstration just in case anybody thought going to Yale or Georgetown means you're brighter than the average guppy.
Parents who are much richer than Jared's don't even have to bribe (uh donate) their way to a slot for their child. If Little Orphan Annie had applied to Harvard the development office would have attach a note to her application saying, "Daughter of Daddy Warbucks, Please Admit". See, for example: Bok, Derek (2003), Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ISBN 0691114129.
3
Two words...
Jared Kushner
A mediocre student at a NYC provate school gets into Harvard after his father "donates" $2 million to the school. His teachers were amazed, and his father was able to write it off as a charitable donation.
Literally...only in America
6
Looking back to 1964 the cost of admission to Bryn Mawr was a "gift" of $10,000. This was volunteered to me, proudly, by a neighbor who had gotten her degree there. She further indicated that she was told otherwise she would not get in so her father sent them a check. Let's say my neighbor was not a very polished or intellectual woman. Give her credit for honesty.
I visited Bryn Mawr for an interview in 1964 but did not apply. I found them rude. They told me not to apply because they only took valedictorians (second in my class) and I did not have a "tea set"! Tea set!!! Lordy. Did you take one with you to interviews? Cumbersome. Besides I was interested in their archaeology program, not tea sets.
So the conclusion is that prices have gone up based on the article. Give a whole building! I thought that was common knowledge. Then the kid flunks out, drops out, or "leaves" after "issues" (drugs, mental health, legal, new direction, etc) after somewhere between a semester and a year and a half. Too many years in university towns.
1
Parents who are concerned about their children's education should ask themselves what lesson the child learn's when she finds that Mommy & Daddy will game the system for her. I wrote my admission essay alone in my bedroom without benefit of a writing coach and took the SAT without any kind of prep other than a good night's rest and two number 2 pencils. I remember spending loads of time with various college applications strewn about my bedroom. Accomplishing my goal of getting admitted to the college I wanted to attend gave me a feeling of competence. Isn't that what you want your kids to learn.
3
Donald Trump would never have been admitted to the Wharton School without strings being pulled.
2
I don't know what the point of this piece is.
Like that nincompoop girl shilling for Amazon in the videos (in other Times articles), these kids will flunk out after their first class meetings.
I hope.
Harriet
Other than the 350 extra points Malia Obama got on her SAT test scores when she presented herself to Harvard admissions, one now has to wonder whether mom and dad were helping in other ways that wouldn't be considered kosher even in the middle of a deli in Brooklyn.
In the 1970s my doctor father bribed his alma mater Tulane Medical School to take me when I was no where close to qualified. At that time I thought I had it made, but it turned out to be the worst mistake of my life. To this day I hate medicine, the faculty hated me, and I never could pass the licensing exam. Dear old Dad used "donations" yearly for over a decade to buy my spot and I have wondered who was the qualified candidate who I prevented from attending med school. But the real lesson is that overbearing parents who claim they want what's best for their kids should butt out of their lives. It's not bad if your kids attend public schools and even community colleges, and if that is their highest level of academic achievement then so be it. In other words Mom and Dad, BUTT OUT OF OTHER PEOPLES' LIVES including your children.
3
I’m appalled at this NYT editorial. Usually, NYT is right up there on any high horse that rides into town on any given day. This makes me wonder whether there are some editors sweating bullets right now. Moral standards for thee; parsing for me!
What's the point here? As a life-long New York Times reader, it gives me no pleasure to point out that the quality of the paper has declined. Now they are giving us aimless editorials.
Meritocracy? NYT doesn't believe in that. It's offended when lucre greases the skids for college admissions, but when all sorts of other factors--race-consciousness, sex consciousness, underrepresentation consciousness, the consciousness du jour--rears its ugly hand to reverse discriminate, no objections there. Hey, the Times even urges the Supreme Court to protect Admissions offices' rights to maintain such discrimination under the euphemism of "diversity."
And don’t forget...affirmative action also has nothing to do with meritocracy.
What has happened with parents buying admission for their children is sad and deplorable. But it has also exposed the deficiencies of the admission process and how many can take advantage if you have money. I went to an Ivy League for graduate school and did my own application in 1985. When my daughter applied two years ago for college, I made sure that her essay was her own. We need to teach our children that they can do it on their own and be proud of their own achievements. We also need universities to stop taking private money from individuals and have buildings named after them. Money has corrupted educational institutions and as a result, the college or university degree means less today than it ever has. I hope that presidents and boards of college and universities will reevaluate what their purpose is in today's world.
3
Yes, there is space at these top schools for rich kids who really didn't have the grades or SATs to get in but mom and dad made a hefty donation (let's set aside the criminal activity which is truly heinous). I am very mindful that it is likely because of these rich kids that my kid is able to attend an ivy league on a full scholarship. We could not have afforded to take out a loan, and for state schools and many private ones without the crazy big endowments, both our kid and we parents would have had to take out loans we'd be paying back well into our retirement. It's an ugly system, but fix it by making state schools truly affordable, and then the rich can have Harvard and Yale to themselves. My son would have done just fine at a state school, but it's the cruel irony, that we couldn't afford one, so, thank God he got into an ivy.
2
What this article ignores is that so much of success in life is about money and cheating in some form. Do we really want to waste space in top schools on poor kids who don't even know how to twist the school system to their own advantage? How will those poor saps ever become politicians or business people or lawyers or movie producers?
Kids whose parents understand how to use money to take what they want have the family background that will give them the morality they need to only see what they need to see and then do what they gotta do. The high-minded and unconnected who worm their way into top education with mere intelligence will struggle when they get into the real world and will finally end up in low-paying, dead end jobs like teachers or emergency technicians. So what does it matter if they lose their top college positions to the bold and the rich who will actually put their prestigious degrees to use and may one day become a gun manufacturing CEO or Supreme Court Justice or even President of the United States of America?
@Nick Kristof and @FrankBruni please keep exposing the brutal truth: it's money that really matters in college admissions. And it goes far beyond this bribery scandal.
To elite colleges, you are what you can pay.
My child had test scores/grades in the top 1%, 12 AP courses, foreign language fluency, excellent musicianship, service and teacher recommendations but only a modest EFC of $21K. (The Expected Family Contribution is what you’re expected to pay yearly toward a college's full cost per the federal financial aid formula.) I watched as my kid’s wealthier friends with weak grades and test scores (25 ACT, or 79% nationally, after months of private tutoring) were accepted at the same private colleges that rejected my son. The difference? They were paying full price or close to it. If they were athletes (D3) some were offered "merit" scholarships that knocked the price down from 65K to a bargain 35K annually.
Elite colleges that meet "100% of Financial Need" are especially selective, taking a quota of high-need students (low EFC) and then moving on to a larger margin of "full pay" students with mediocre academic credentials. Among those who qualify for financial aid, an EFC of $30K a year beats a $20K contribution, even if that $20K comes with top grades or accolades.
To most "highly selective" schools, you're just a number. And it's not your GPA, high school rank, or your ACT/SAT score.
3
Rich people have ALWAYS been able to buy their children a slot in an elite college or university. So what's new? Plus, the kids have to somehow make the grades to stay in and graduate - right? None the less, the methods and fraud of these folks is extreme!
1
Many thoughts
I suspect the parents involved think buying into the right college is (or should be) no different than buying into the right neighborhood or club or right jet service.
Shouldn’t a private college have the right to prioritize one group of students (athletes or legacies) over another?
Donating to the school is tax deductible giving. Paying a school employee for a slot is theft and theft of services.
But it’s OK for these schools to literally generate millions of $ from athletics and pay the kids nothing!
The whole thing IS crazy!
Now I'm wondering who in my college class bought their way in.
As a Black American who went to one of the specialized High Schools...By Passing the Entrance Exam. And then went on to college, by meeting their Admission Standards and having my parents work three and half jobs to pay the tuition at an Ivy league College...
I have an ironic observaiton: Ain't it something, Folks? Meritocracy is GREAT...until it doesn't work for White People First.
Well, color me quite UN-surprised...
44
How could the children not know mom and dad was cooking the books? Taking staged pictures and having someone else that your SAT's and they want us to believe the kids didn't have a clue? All of the feigned outrage about the parents the media is still trying to protect the children of the wealthy. Someone please explain how you can tell people you got a perfect score on the SAT when you didn't take the test? Poor kids are expelled for less daily in America.
8
Elite colleges are devolving partly back into what they used to be: finishing schools for rich kids. Well into the 1960s, there were plenty of Ivy League students who were there to get a "gentleman's C" and have a good time growing the networks they had started to build at a handful of East Coast prep schools. That changed when the Ivies opened their doors to minority students and women. For a brief time, it seems that most college admissions were mostly merit-based. Then came the 1980s and the worship of wealth combined with cutbacks in government funding. Now these campuses have two faces: one is the modern research university where brilliant young adults hone their considerable gifts at the side of brilliant scholars; and the other is the playground for the children of the uber-rich. They now co-exist. At what point does the balance tip? Or has it tipped already?
5
I don't mean to defend the practice, but I can imagine if I were an elite university administrator I would seriously consider putting a thumb on the scale for an applicant who came with a $50 million-plus gift as in the best interest of the university's mission of excellence. The building or scholarships enabled by the gift, and perhaps subsequent gifts, will certainly benefit those admitted for the usual merit criteria, whom I presume to be the vast majority even at the elite schools. Of course, what we are reading about today is criminal and should be punished according to our laws.
There are TWO sets of data that explain this (and more fundamental) problems of our society:
One - The per student annual taxpayer contribution for different kinds of educational institutions in this country is shocking. For a typical community college in 2015, it was about $3,000 per student per year. For a typical state school, it was $10,000 per year. For Harvard, it was $48,000 per year. For Yale, it was $69,000 per student per year. And for Princeton, it was $105,000 per student per year of taxpayer subsidy." Basically, the taxpayers support each student or each credit hour of highly selective, elite universities (some even public) at a level 10-50X what they provide for community colleges (not to mention trade and technical schools). This is repugnant.
If we would include professional schools, like medical and law schools, engineering and graduate programs, etc. we would surely find taxpayers' commitments even greater. The annual budget of NIH was 37 billion last year. How much of this is used to train and advance professional careers of students of elite programs in the medical field?
Look's like I'll need more comment space...
2
Here's the reference for the above data.
http://nexusresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Rich_Schools_Poor_Students.pdf
Where did you get these figures?
1
It may seem hair splitting but I see large donations and bribery as two separate categories. These are private colleges who need to raise money and the obvious avenues are sports and donations. If someone is donating a 10m dollar building, (s)he deserves at least a seat, I am not going to lose my sleep over that. That could be considered as graciousness on the part of colleges. On the other hand if a college is selling seats for 10K then that is a different story. There is an order of difference in the amount of money involved and the number of seats thus affected. So let's not compare the two. Bribery is completely different, it is illegal, it affects more seats and corrupts the ecosystem. I am saying this as someone who is not a millionaire, who has not attended an Ivy League, just a realist.
At least when parents bribe the school with a huge donation, the school benefits. In this scandal, only individuals who accepted the bribes benefited.
3
As someone who got into — and graduated from — two of the top universities in the country (including one that was caught up in these crimes), and did so on her own merit, with no help on applications, test prep or by having “rich” parents...I am fit to bust with fury over this. Leave it to the Times to turn this onto a statement on elitism. It’s not. It’s just an ugly story about a bunch of crooked, greedy, cynical, selfish people who have no eithics. The sad part about it that these horrible parents involved their children in the deceit. I wonder whether those children are criminally liable if they are over 18.
29
@Passion for Peaches It seems like the biggest issue is the bribes weren't big enough to name a building and went to the wrong people.
Harvard turned down deserving kids based on their race so they could admit these kids.
Piling on, some forms of dissent is not allowed on campus and the ideal of presumption of innocence is no longer reason enough to defend Harvey W.
Don't be surprised if half the country starts to think your degree is no longer an impressive achievement but an indication of membership in a corrupt elite.
I hope you fight for your school's good name and end this nonsense.
2
You don't need to go to a prestige ivy league college to be successful, but you do need to go to an accredited college and the state university system adequately meets that requirement. What these wealthy parents want for their kids is the networking and connections they will make at a top-tier university. There are many good colleges that are not extremely selective that these children could have applied to if getting an education was their parents' concern.
2
My dad worked hard to save the money so, after I worked hard, I could get into college - and work hard. Later, I studied like crazy to take the GRE and, to my amazement did so well I got a 3 year fellowship to a very selective grad program.
But this cheating sickens me! It’s just one more rot in our society, where greed and misdeeds are sown like seeds - secretly, in hopes they will flourish as if honestly planted.
How do you explain to children that’s it wrong to cheat, but it’s OK to give a big donation in exchange for admission? How explain the lies criminality flowing from the White House? With no punishment attached, even if parents punish them?
This society has a great deal of soul-searching to do. We need to rethink a lot of things. And do better.
@TheraP
I love the name Thera...after Santorini in Greece. BTW, you don't have to explain to your children that cheating is wrong, you just set the example. Kids KNOW. The question is: Is it permissible? They get the answer at home, early and often.
False article. It has always been the case that families can donate a building and hope their kid gets accepted. The kid will not be accepted at face value - that is not mentioned here. If the kid is not academically prepared, they will not be accepted.
I agree with the prosecutors, this isn't about legacy admissions, it is about pure fraud and must be judicated from that perspective. Private colleges are just that, private. The government has no right to intervene in long standing policies. Period, end of story.
What the government does have a responsibility for is public education. Public universities must never use alumni payouts for new buildings or any other activity to determine who is accepted. Affirmative action is also something that must be deemed past it's time; it is utterly unfair to accept a less qualified student because of their gender, color, or ethnicity. It should also be against the rules of admissions to accept foreign students at a percentage any higher than minimal - that takes away from a US citizen getting into college in favor of 'diversity.'
Lastly, diversity is not any kind of an absolute plus or benefit. The only thing that should matter is academics at public colleges. As far as private and for profit colleges, the US government should never guarantee loans for these facilities. It fosters corruption and fraud, something this article really should be about.
2
Yes, merit can be hard to define. But it seems like colleges, as well as others, have no problem defining it anyway. Therefore we feel justified in saying that some "deserve" to go to elite schools while others do not "deserve" to go. This is nonsense, unless you come up with a working definition of merit and apply it equally in each case. But the application of that definition (whatever it is for the college) is extremely vulnerable to bribery, as this case shows. Might we not move away from merit-based thinking? As soon as I hear the word "deserved" and it's usual justification of hard work, I start to feel a little queasy. Hard work? Many if not most of the kids who get into these colleges on "merit" wouldn't know real hard work if it walked up and said hello. Our ideas of what hard work actually is seem to me to be highly distorted and delusional, lacking a proper definition of what work is. College is for expanding your mind, not honing your rowing skills, or scoring some high-paying job.
Isn't it?
I was a middle-class student with no connections who graduated from an Ivy League college. For many, many years I was an alumni interviewer of high school seniors who were applying to my school. Almost 100% of them would have done very well there and would have contributed to the university in a positive way but, sadly, because the competition was so stiff only a couple of the students I interviewed were ever accepted. it reached a point where this year, I decided to stop interviewing because it was too depressing to talk with so many great kids who had very little chance of getting in, regardless of how outstanding they were. Articles like this, where parents can just buy acceptance for the right amount of money, are infuriating.
3
I am not surprised that the wealthy will stop at nothing to get their offspring into an elite school. What concerns me is what happens when these chuckleheads "graduate"? How do I know if the Stanford-degree'd doctor, who is about to perform my heart surgery, earned his/her degree or paid for it?
I have the answer. Require Universities to print 2 different diplomas for each degree:
o Diploma 1 is the standard diploma and goes to anyone who arrived at university on their own merit, and graduated. Next to the degree is an asterisk and a note that says "I earned it"
o Diploma 2 is the color of money and is embossed with as much gold leaf as can be fit onto the paper. It is also much larger than Diploma 1 so that it looks *really* impressive when mounted on a wall. Next to the degree is an asterisk and a note that says "I bought it".
More seriously, why can't universities be sued for fraud on this? If I choose my money manager based on the prestigious degree on the wall, should I really be required to also perform a background check or ask for transcripts to ensure that the degree was earned based on it's merits? I think most would conclude that this is implied. And, these universities sell themselves this way. At the very least, they are guilty of enabling fraud.
If anyone believes these Elite Institutions were in the blind about this I have a Bridge I want to sell them.Worthy children of the less well off were denied admission while children of the wealthy were admitted? Any Elite School administration that claims they were not aware of what was going on should be fired. When the children of the less well heeled work their tales off to get to college and are not rewarded for their toil something is wrong with the system.
1
I will just quote the late George Carlin: "The game is rigged." We need a change in fundamental consciousness, an awareness that all our fates are tied together, that it isn't a zero-sum game in which my child's "wins" somehow take away from your child's.Until such a fundamental change in consciousness occurs, the entitled will continue to clutch their privileges like pearls beyond price until something or someone shows them how that ends - in a broken society like the Philippines (which we're already seeing).
According to U.S. attorney Andrew Lelling, "There can be no separate college admissions system for the wealthy". I beg to differ. First, this is the tip of the iceburg. There is rampant fraud and cheating when it comes to college admissions. Secondly, there is by definition a separate college admissions system for the weathy. The privileges that money buys the children of the wealthy, better schools, fully funded extra-curricular activities, test prep, connections resulting in recommendations and social opportunities, international travel such as working for a charity or education abroad, all have a positive effect in the admissions office when considering applications. At the other end of the spectrum, having to work to support your family, having to worry about health, housing, food, safety negatively influence how students do in school and thus their chances for college admission. If college admissions systems wanted to level the playing field, they would have a system to take these facts into consideration.
1
It’s all about diversity, you know. We’re all familiar with diversity of race, color, and creed and LGBTQ. What a wonderful potpourri, but we also have to have sports diversity as well. Women’s water polo and volleyball? Maybe two people show up to watch the games. It balances out the numbers so you can boost your number of female participants in your sports program. The regulators just love that. Men’s water polo and volleyball? Forget it. It doesn’t help the quotas. The all-male powerhouse teams, football, basketball, etc. drive the whole program. They’re the only sports the rich alums care about. The athletes don’t even have to attend regular classes and are given luxury dorm suites when they’re not on road. Yes, sports on campus are so diverse these days.
1
@Edward
Those you listed are sports for poor people though.
There's a difference between what the struggling middle call 'rich' and actually high status.
Let the hardest working and brightest get in, and our country will prosper in many ways. Let someone get in because their parents are legacy or their parents donated a building and we get... Trump.
5
"Merit is not easily defined."
'Merit' is a a branch of 'good'; its linguistic function can be explained--it primarily evaluates. But value words need standards which are like definitions--but valuer dependent.
All evaluation presumes classification. Nothing is good/bad, right/wrong except as this/that. Most items--people certainly-- can be classified in countless ways; their value/goodness/merit may vary with each. A as husband, B as athlete, C as neighbor, D as musician, F as dancer. The letter grades are also value words. A/excellent, B/worse-but good, C/mediocre, D/barely passing; F/failure--no credit/merit of any degree.
To have merit, is to to merit/deserve something valuable--like praise. Demerits/wrongs.vices deserve blame.
But evaluations may be themselves evaluated as knowledgeable, discerning, experienced, systematic, coherent, consistent. We defer to the standards of health professionals. And of academic performance, as judged by academics.
Usually passing grades get you promoted to the next. But the system allows reconsideration. A high school diploma is not enough for college/university admission. They have their own standards of merit/meriting admission--primarily based on past academic performance.
But non-academic factors may sneak in. Thus ungrammatical football players. Football pays. So do wealthy donors "paying" for a kids' admission--two forms of academic corruption.
Affirmative action needn't be--circumstances have academic implications.
So pay off or bribe the coach: BAD. Pay off or bribe the school: GOOD? The lunacy of this amazes me. What these people did was wrong and they should be prosecuted but that doesn’t mean those who fund buildings and activities to advance their children’s ability to attend these schools are any better. This who system disgusts me and it should disgust everyone.
Maybe papers like NYT should stop gushing about "Yale/Stanford/Harvard educated" in the awe-inspired reverence all the time that they do right now. Alumni-quota, dean's list, z-list, and now the cheaters. I'm willing to bet that this stig reveals just a tip of the iceberg and a lot more stuff like this goes on. It's time we all became just a little less impressed by an ivy league brand.
1
Wealthy , spoiled, high school grad? Need to spend 4 years partying and running at the Rich Donor Spa and Gym Building ? Many opportunities exist . Get the right fixer and your off to the University for Spoiled Children , where the barely paid faculty will be at your beck and call. You can also graduate as a financial whiz kid or a STEM genius is you have the smarts . College your way.
1
It seems like the application process needs to be held to full transparency; if you used a coach, you must indicate that, if you need more time , a third party test is required, if you are an athlete, it must be certified by a third party, and if your parents are rich and have donated tremendous sums, your degree comes with an *asterisk indicating so!
Recent Ivy League presidents with humble and wealthy beginnings: Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Donald Trump.
Any questions?
1
What nobody seems to want to mention is how much this exposes the fundamental lie of college - the idea that the value lies in the experience, rather than the badge.
If colleges were actually academically rigorous enough that they would weed out the unserious cheats, and if the added value they provided only accrued to people who put in the work, cheating wouldn't be such a big deal. But they aren't, and it isn't. Nobody really cares what you learned at Stanford; they care that you got in, and that you graduated. What happens in-between is irrelevant because we all instinctively know that college doesn't actually add much of anything significant to peoples' skills and capabilities, and nobody except maybe naive recent immigrants thinks that a degree from a top school is actually any sort of indicator of someone's intellectual ability.
2
Just a guess: A few, some, many, most of the members of the NYT editorial board were the recipients or their children are or will be the recipients of the legal side of college admissions grooming.
Pots and kettles.
This whole thing is extremely silly. While the SAT's don't measure ingenuity, imagination or creativity (skills that are in very high demand today), if one can't get a decent score on an SAT, it's highly unlikely that they'll do well in an elite school and even with grade inflation, they'll wind up either learning nothing or dropping out.
So what's the point of cheating to get your kid in, if they're not going to do well anyway, just to have Yale or Harvard on one's resume. That only works for your first job. After that, it's your work experience, what you know and what value one can bring to a company that counts. No one cares what school you went to after that. They care what you can do to increase "shareholder value".
Now these dumb, rich parents are going to hire big-time lawyers and they're going to wind up with a slap on the wrist. Their kids are the ones who will wind up being punished --- they'll have to change their names to get into a school and the "cheating" will follow them around for the rest of their lives.
W at Harvard?
Trump (pays to hide SAT's) at Penn?
nothing new here.
Jared Kushner’s felon father “pledged” $20 million to Harvard before Jared applied, so when Jared got accepted to Harvard, the pledge was kept and paid with the felon’s ill-gotten takings from real estate scams.
A bigger and more important issue is that while Harvard and Yale and Stanford are fine institutions, they are probably not appreciably better than most other fine institutions of higher learning.
With an Ivy League diploma one acquires status, cachet, and the privilege of rubbing elbows with a lot of rich people, but one does not necessarily acquire a better education.
Let's be honest, these parents are buying snobbery, bragging rights and the hope of making connections with other rich people, they are not buying a better education for their kids.
2
This bribing thing isn't restricted to colleges/universities. I have witnessed it personally at the nursery school level in NYC. This is obviously where it all begins for many folks.
2
Megabucks person A gives a million bucks to a college leading to their child being admitted to the college. The college is a non-profit, so A gets a million bucks charitable contribution to deduct on their tax return, which result in the feds collecting less taxes from A. And who pays taxes to the feds, through higher tax rates, to make up for the taxes not paid for by A? You, me, and the rest of US. And this is legal---really!!!
There is no meritocracy. There is no meritocracy. There is no meritocracy.
Scholarship students from blue collar and, even more impressive, downright poor backgrounds have many opportunities to learn this, if natural ability, hard work, and luck -- luck is always involved -- take them to elite universities. They see who holds enduring power, mainly by "virtue" of the birth lottery, and who does not. And if they continue to do well academically, they soon find themselves at decision points, such as law school/business school/med school vs. doing something they're really interested in. The system always stands ready to co-opt new blood.
Noble doctors and families, please don't quibble that med school shouldn't be lumped in with law school and business school. I remember my pre-med classmates well. They all claimed they wanted to do something that was good for others, which coincidentally would also cloak them in the mantle of a saint and make it possible to become exceedingly affluent.
The Times should take a further step on this issue, and examine the inequities in government funding of public and private institutions of higher learning, especially the tax code provisions that private institutions use to expand and protect their endowments.
1
The schools are making impossible distinctions between largely equally meritorious applicants. One solution is to pool all sufficiently qualified applicants and then pick by lottery from that pool. No individual can be considered outside the pool or not subject to lottery.
1
I attended UC Berkeley in the '60s and the policy was, as a public university, to accept as many students as possible and fail 30%. Every course, especially in the life sciences, was graded on the curve with the lower 30% failing. (This was during the 60s when failing often meant a draft notice.)
There was no grade inflation nor 'gentleman's C' that would allow the unqualified to survive.
This was meritocracy at its finest (or cruelest).
1
That worked when college was cheap. At thousands of dollars per class, the goal should be to actually educate students, not just arbitrarily cap the number of kids allowed to pass.
So...the "proper" way is to write a big check, buy a building, or establish a scholarship fund...the rest of us "normal" folks use our hard-earned money to save for tuition and teach our kids the value of hard work, hoping that's enough for them to be admitted. Surely the title of this article was peppered with sarcasm, but I'm afraid that it fails to adequately address the bigger problem.
1
There seem to be plenty of people willing to get their children into elite schools by any means necessary. There just aren't enough elite schools for the demand. Perhaps these elite schools should spin off some second tier campuses for the privileged. You could have Stanford and Stanford Lite or Yale and Not Quite Yale.
22
Criminal, non-criminal, it doesn't matter. The rich think they are better than everyone else period.
1
Didn't "Harpo" Kushner's father donate a couple of mil to Harvard so that he could attend?
2
How interesting that in this same year when the U.S. government, our renowned Constitution, our educational systems, our environmental and safety regulations, women's rights to control their bodies, children's rights to receive vaccinations, our rights to be free from gun-toting imbecile rich men who threaten to shoot people on 5th Avenue, .....
all of these Rights (and others) are under calamitous attack by an uneducated mentally unstable president who received admission to an elite Ivy League university through his brother's and father's direct manipulation....
that we also have a serious scandal at multiple elite universities who ignore merit to admit similar somewhat-rich children.
The consequence of many universities having "pliable" admissions standards unchecked by others -- is that our nation & world gets saddled with dictatorial nincompoops like trump.
1
The biggest surprise here is that anyone ever thought the US was a meritocracy.
Where in the world did anyone get that idea?
Since when was is a meritocracy? In what state was it ever a meritocracy?
At no time and in no place and in no way has the US ever been a meritocracy.
You can't even begin to talk about a meritocracy until all children are given equally nutritious food, healthcare, shelter, safety and care from infancy.
Let's get that fixed first. And then we can talk about college admissions.
3
What about the flip side? What happens to minority enrollment if we eliminate the advantage of athletic ability? The discussion so far is all about the privileged getting into elite colleges. And what about gender? How many of these student-athletes identify as men? Men are increasingly being under-represented in higher education - do we need new programs to ensure their participation if we don't use athletics?
@Len319
Odds are athletics is not balancing out a gender gap very much, because rules against discrimination apply to athletics - scholarships must be balanced.
Your larger point is a critical one - the more compelling problem is that poor kids get excluded, not that less-deserving rich kids get included too often.
This is why these admissions schemes are far worse than "giant donation leads to admission", because these scheme operate in a zero-sum world that has no pro-social argument - helping A means hurting B, and B is more deserving. A giant donation, on the other hand, might mean more classrooms, dorms or scholarships - and thus a larger student body. So giving A a chance also gives C, D and E a chance they may never had had.
(To comply with tax laws, donors also cannot engage in an explicit quid pro quo with a college. The well-rehearsed pas de deux of donations and admissions must be made to appear as a voluntary exchange of gifts, not a binding deal.)
Must be made to appear...American hypocrisy at his best under a thin coat of respectability veneer.
Manafort also appears to have receive fair trials.
1
"The important point here is that Stanford reserves some slots in each class for people who are good at sailing."
Really? Is that the important point, because people can understand that athletics is a pursuit, can't they? What deliberations did The Editorial Board take before they de-validated student athletes?
“We’re not talking about donating a building so that a school is more likely to take your son or daughter,” (Andrew Lelling, the United States attorney for the District of Massachusetts) said at the news conference. “We’re talking about deception and fraud.”
APPARENTLY, the collective "we" CAN ACCEPT that legitimacy.
But, somehow, "the University" as a nationally televised bastion of sports pride/fanaticism escapes The Editorial Board's view of reality. Hello? The NCAA edifice is IMMENSE! How dare "we" target student athletes (the real ones) as de-legitimate .. even as "we" gloss over buying entries with endowments.
1
“B is for the B in Brooklyn College.” I’m proud to have gone to a great free public school in the 1960s, before the madness of the last 50 years.
1
“We’re not talking about donating a building so that a school is more likely to take your son or daughter,” he said at the news conference. “We’re talking about deception and fraud.”
Thus we devolve. I feel gut punched!
1
In the late 1960s I was accepted at and attended the University of Michigan. In high school I worked hard and got good grades. I took the SAT test but only after the principal announced over the PA system one day that those who were interested in going to college would need to take this test. I had never heard of the SAT test. It was years later that I learned you could take the test more than once, and that "better" high schools prepared their students for the SAT starting in middle school. I came from a lower middle class family and community. I "enhanced" my application with an essay, which was not required. I knew, of course, that it was fiercely competitive and very difficult to get in to U of M. But I got in based on authentic academic records and SAT scores, and I graduated. These were some of the best years of my life and I remain very grateful for my education there and my experience.
Here's my question: how do these mediocre students perform once they arrive? I had to work very hard for my grades at U of M. During my entire time I only had essay tests that required a blue book. I never had a multiple choice or fill-in-the-blank test. It was hard, hard work and I was surrounded by exceedingly bright students and a healthy handful of genius types. How do these mediocre types get through? Do they have tutors? Do they cheat once they get in? How is their self esteem not badly affected knowing they don't measure up to their peers? ????
3
@pinksoda
As a recently retired professor I can only say that I knew it was time to "hang them up: when a student challenged her grade by saying to me that she "deserved an A because she had attended all the classes". The universities of this country have become diploma mills for pay...period.
2
Here's my list of suspects who won't, on this charge at least, be arrested:
- Jared Kushner - Harvard
- Ivanka Trump - Wharton
- Donald Trump, Jr. - Wharton
- Donald Trump - Wharton
Sadly, the subject Indictment is only a warning shot being fired across the bow of rich people, virtually all of whom will be slapped on the wrist, and all of whom will be able to afford to pay any underlying fine.
If you're even queasy about how much time one might get for these things, look only to Ivan Hugely (10 years for a single rock of crack cocaine; served every day - no prior record) and Paul Manafort (six to seven years for stealing millions and quite probably betraying his own government; gets credit for time incarcerated while awaiting trial after having egregiously violated his terms of release; will probably get a Presidential Pardon - and yes, that Parson might get checkmated by actions taken today by NY State prosecutors).
It's a fair and balanced system, right Fellow Foxes?
3
So the innocent students had no knowledge that their parents were behind the underhanded and illegal machinations to get them into Yale, Stanford, etc.? They has no inkling why the crew, soccer or other coach was contacting them when they never played that sport? They never found it unusual to fly to LA, take the ACT alone with special proctor? And applying and being accepted to a school other, far, far more qualified, classmates were rejected? Spare me. What will they grow up to be? President?
2
Admitting legacies is indeed a fundraising technique, and a necessary one given the way the current system of financing college education in America is set up; this is as much a systemic flaw as onerous student debt is.
I was a legacy at an elite New England college, one of the top five most desirable small liberal arts colleges to get into when I was applying. My grades and test scores were terrible. My parents hired a tutor to effectively write my personal essay; I believe I filled in the rest of the application, not sure — I know I signed. I knew I was admitted two months earlier than early decision, and had to keep it a secret from my classmates at my super-elite NYC prep school. I was the only one who had zero anxiety during the admissions process.
But I was also depressed: I wasn't even allowed to apply to other schools. My father was so tyrannical and abusive I couldn't bear to attend his alma mater. I lasted a year, riddled with guilt that I was taking up a slot that was meant for someone more deserving, someone unlike my sister, who was also admitted under the same process, who can barely write a coherent sentence to this day.
Dropping out was an epically stupid move; this particular college had the best program for my chosen career. But from the moment I dropped out to this day, I have always maintained that I did it mainly so that someone more deserving could take my place.
It definitely was an epically stupid move, but at least it was ethically stupid, too.
4
The primary advantage the Ivies provide is elbow-rubbing with the offspring of powerful people. After graduation one finds that "who you know" can be equally or more important that "what you know" when seeking employment in certain fields. I studied and worked at two highly regarded State universities, two Ivies, and another Elite Private university. The rigor of the classes was comparable at all five institutions. At one Ivy we had to deal with advanced forms of cheating and sabotage by the prep-school legacies who couldn't cut the mustard in difficult classes.
5
This bringing thing isn't restricted to college/university academics. I have witnessed it personally at the nursery school level in NYC. This is obviously where it all begins for many folks.
2
Another piece of this - many students choose based on which colleges give them more aid, and as a result end up going to schools that aren't as good as they would have gone to based on merit alone.
The broken tuition system where the price just keeps going up and up and up means that everyone except the rich gets totally cleaned out by colleges who just take all the money you have.
I'm honestly totally mystified by how a college can justify offering tuition for 70k. Room? That's maybe 8k, considering you're not getting a fully functional apartment. Board? If it costs $20 a day to feed a student, that's 7k. So that's 15k.
I take graduate classes at a good college and they cost around 2500 a piece to have a small class with a PHD professor, so a student taking a full load of 8 classes should pay about 20k for similar classes. That plus room and board is 35k, yet universities regularly charge 60, 70k. Where the heck does all the rest of the money go?
4
Shame on anyone today who needs those college "crutches"
to validate their education. The internet is now the largest
"university" mankind has known & any learning is accessible 24/7.
What is truly needed: a public, primary education system
that teaches analytical, critical thinking skills, and provides
the learning tools necessary for a lifetime autodidact "track."
As for accreditation through diplomas: offer a test to individuals who have been autodidacts. My degree-less father was such an autodidact & could hold a conversation with scholars. His primary public school classical education made that possible.
Want to make IvyLeague school more accessible to the have-nots? Here’s an idea for these schools: create liberal arts online courses available FREE to everyone. Then set up a system of accreditation that can be offered through testing, at a reasonable cost.
1
Thank you for making the point that the issue in this case isn't schools selling admission to wealthy people; it's third parties selling admission, cheating the schools of their cut.
Does it matter if the gift that opened the door for one fortunate student also funds financial aid for hundreds of other students who could never have paid their own way?
1
How do we know the “gift” is used to provide funds for students who cannot afford an elite school? Anyone can say that, but are there records to support this claim?
1
@Lisa Hansen We know because the Ivies (and some others) are need-blind and provide full financial aid to those whose parent's income qualifies - that money comes from donors, and so does the money for professors, special programs, facilities, etc.
1
@Brian
Hundreds? Assuming $2.5M endowment is the average greasing and divide by 250, that's $10,000 per student.
The total 2018-2019 cost of attending Harvard College without financial aid is $46,340 for tuition and $67,580 for tuition, room, board, and fees combined.
You did raise a glass to those who pay for others, so 4 yrs * $67,580 = $270,320.
Hmm, not hundreds, less than 10.
But, THE IDEA that buying-in one merit-based student is enough to justify one wealth-based student is all that is needed -- to solidify Harvard as -- "of the elitists, by the elitists, and for the elitists". Put that in Latin.
America's colossal educational inequality arises from a system of localized public school districts resulting in vastly differing education delivery (and property values) from one town to the next, and our devastatingly underfunded public university system. There will always be private universities allowed to set their own criteria for entry. If our public institutions provided a commensurate education, no one would be left out or under-educated because a wealthy parent gamed the system.
3
Many public universities do provide a commensurate education. They just don't have the same social prestige, which is mainly what these aggressive parents are after.
1
Just a devil's advocate comment:
So many commenters are conflating legacy admissions and fraudulent admissions. They are not the same. Many legacy students are as qualified as their parents. And why shouldn't a school cultivate ever larger future donations through family loyalty.
This will be very unpopular, but I think there is something to be said for PRIVATE schools having a little leeway in making admissions decisions. No one who doesn't have money doesn't like it when they can't afford something. But if I had enough money to donate a building, I would like to donate a building, and it would be nice if my kid could then go to class in the building.
Obviously, in contrast, PUBLIC institutions should provide every opportunity including funding, for any qualified students who want an education to get one.
I don't expect Barney's or Nordstrom's to give me expensive shoes that I can't afford; I get them elsewhere for a price I can afford. And I don't expect rich people not to wear expensive shoes that they can easily pay for - with money they legally earned or inherited - if they want them. That is part of the freedom we have in this country.
Of course, I don't expect rich people to steal the shoes.
4
This scandal totally debunks the myth that affirmative action is no longer needed to address social inequity. It isn't hard to imagine how unbalanced the student population would be at these schools if they hadn't been required to comply with such programs.
2
" ...it is still the case that merit alone is not deciding the issue."
Or even influencing the issue to any extent.
1
I don't quite agree. It has been common knowledge that donating a building, etc can get you into certain colleges. Around the world! Colleges need money to hand out money.
If Joe Shmoe can donate a few million to a fund that allows his kid to get in but then that money pays out scholarships to kids who deserve to get in but can't afford to attend - I for one get that.
The issue here is that we all assume that there are certain paths our kids need to take to get the college seats which are open to those not able to make those donations. Those are the seats these scams were targeting through falsifying test scores, athletic achievements etc. These Merit based admissions are the ones we are talking about - the ones we assume our kids have a shot at through hard work.
SAT scores, AP exams, athletics, academic clubs, competitions, etc which, honestly, are an insane drain on our kids, have been repeatedly touted as ways to improve acceptance rates. For these rich parents to game that is offensive to all of us whose children are working hard every day when life should be about so much more than a score on a piece of paper.
2
Any chance I can get the list of colleges that DO admit mostly based on merit? Or are there none?
3
The schools must know that accepting students based on their parents wealth instead of their scholastic merits diminishes the quality of the student body.
Was Yale's student body improved by accepting GW because his father was a legacy? Assuming of course that GW wouldn't have been accepted without his last name.
2
When an employee takes a bribe to influence his authority on the job, the bribe money and anything it's invested in legally belongs to the employer. It will be interesting to see whether any of these colleges have the chutzpah to sue the coaches who were getting paid to recruit fake athletes, on the ground that the money should belong to the school's development fund.
2
The son of Nicolas Kristof and the daughter of Lawrence O'Donnell were in my son's graduating class at Harvard. His class was filled with the children of elites, most of whom were average decent students, not genuses by any means. Many parents game the educational system to benefit their children, and the main difference is that these particular parents lacked the sophistication and savvy and were caught. The actress and designer parents of the two USC students did not even attend college, and they likely had no idea how that they could "legitimately" game the system like so many others.
4
Yes, this is a problem when people are not ethical, although nothing new at all and just a variation on the "normal" process for a very few wealthy families. However, in reality, truth is not so simple in regards to a lot of parents. I for one, and my wife, worked very hard and prioritized my son as top focus of our life. Paid dearly for private schools, legitimate tutors and honest help where he needed it because he and my wife are the two most important things in my life. They know it and I have no regrets. I did not cheat the system, but I make no apologies for being a hardworking college grad who did all legal and ethical things to help my son. The world is a challenge. Also, in school it was up to him to compete and succeed, from grades 1-12, running literally thousands of miles to be a top runner before he was 18, and then in academically in college, which he has. So maybe you should drive that 12 year old BMW like I did and send the kid to the best schools. Work hard, be honest, and do well, and your family is number one, that is the message I gave my son. So be careful when you make generalities about successful people who work hard.
3
One thing that has not been discussed is the privilege you get from attending certain high schools. Yes, elite private schools have long been described as feeder schools to the Ivies but high schools in wealthy neighborhoods are similar. Go to a privileged neighborhood and look at the college stickers on the cars. My child went to a very economically and racially diverse high school. It was also a bedroom community for an Ivy League university. Professors are not wealthy. I had an admission counselor from a top Big Ten school swoon over my daughter’s grades, accomplishments and test scores. But he remarked negatively about the percent of college bound students at the high school. I asked why would that matter? Some of the kids not attending college may have been the first in their family to graduate high school and what does that have to do with top students? She ended u on a wait list and attended an honors program at another Big Ten school. Here’s the difference. Wealthy communities have the resources to develop relationships with colleges and they know these students can pay full tuition. That year our high school had one student (low income, not top 10% of the class) admitted to that university while a wealthy community 30 miles closer to NYC had 23 admitted students. So as much as this discussion is about how unfair the system is to lower income students it is equally unfair to middle and even upper middle income students.
3
A few words in defense of legacy.
I went to one of those elite schools, where my older brother had attended so I guess I was some kind of legacy. But I had straight A's and SAT scores way above average, so I more or less made it on my own. My point, though, is that the college works hard to build alumni loyalty, and for a single reason. Even at tuition of $50,000, it only covers about half the cost per student. The rest is from endowment and alumni donations. And of course the endowment relies on alumni to keep donating into it.
So the college's ability to support students who can't come up with $50K depends a lot on alumni being happy with the school and wanting it to keep doing what it does.
I doubt there are many who are accepted who don't actually qualify. I can see that many would be accepted if they met the criteria and only differed from similar applicants in that one way. There are no set formulas. A friend from my time then rose to become a high officer in Admissions, and told me once "We have so many highly qualified applicants that we literally could form a freshman class in which every student was a valedictorian." But they try to build their classes on lots of different criteria.
It's in the college's interests to give some weight to family connections, that's all. By itself I don't find that disgusting.
6
These schools have some of the best academic minds on their faculty, but their professors have to waste their time “teaching” spoiled brats who don’t really want to learn. When these academics interview for their jobs they have to pretend how much they enjoy the idea of being baby sitters for the post-adolescent, but keep the money coming—the endowed chairs, the new buildings, etc. That’s what it’s all about.
2
@Edward
Wow, you seem angry. Where are you teaching? I have taught at two top ten universities, and this couldn't be further from my experience. I have been so impressed at the caliber of the students in general, and occasionally completely blown away at the extremely high quality of some of the work produced by these quite young adults. Many of these respectful students were working part time to help pay their bill.
2
What does this story share in common with the Robert Kraft story? Quite a bit. Neither are real news stories. Rich parents buying their kids into elite colleges is not news. It's has been happening forever, and everyone knows it. A 70 year old widower visiting an illicit massage parlor is not news. There are massage parlors doing this kind of business every day in plain daylight in every city in this country, and everyone knows it.
The real hook here is that the stories involve the airing of bad conduct by celebrities, and oh, how fun it is to pull these folks off their high horses and condemn them. Even better is when we get to pretend that we condemners are behaving righteously from our ivory towers of internet anonymity while we bash children and old men who we've never even met.
Let's leave this one to the courts. If laws were broken, as appears to be the case, the perpetrators will have to answer for it. But let's save the outrage. We don't live in fairy tale friends. As much as we can dig to find some principled reason why these stories involve the worst kind of conduct imaginable, the human race is capable of a great deal worse than what's alleged in these stories.
This is America. Merit, actual merit, has only one metric... money. Everything and everybody is for sale. It's all about the money. Always has been. Why the surprise?
1
I would be interested to know the educational breakdown of reporters at The NYTimes - what percentage are graduates of Ivy League and elite institutions that are overwhelmingly white and wealthy, versus state schools, smaller liberal arts colleges or even HBCUs? So therefore, how much does the elite institution of the NYTimes that is supposed to cover the concerns of the vast majority of Americans also participate in this inequity you've outlined in this editorial?
1
Yet again we see people angling for outward “success” instead of happiness and real satisfaction. “Success” never brings happiness if it’s built on lies to the world and yourself. It’s a useless foundation.
I wonder if these perps and their kids even know who they really are, or what greatness they could have achieved.
Play by the rules ended long ago - in education, Wall St., criminal justice sentencing, though it is a nice political fairy tale fed to the masses. Rigged.
1
File this one under W, as in World Ain't Fair. Never was, never will be.
For those expressing shock here; I'm shocked that you're shocked.
4
No Trump administration Republican appointee at any level truly supports meritocracy, including the US Attorneys appointed since Trump took office. While the criminal conduct under discussion here is truly awful and should be punished, we should not fool ourselves. The Trump administration seeks scandal in those entities--like universities--that tend to view him with scorn. The Trump administration hates higher education; it would not have found this criminal conspiracy if it had not been seeking for scandal in that realm. The idea that an administration run and staffed by plutocrats would do anything to support meritocracy is ludicrous.
Once upon a time, Ronald Reagan raged against the "welfare queen".
This imaginary creature dreamed up by the righties, lived in a fantasy land where they could drive up to the welfare office in their new Cadillac to pick up their box of commodity foods.
When food stamps came in they still drove up to the welfare office in their new Cadillac to pick up their packet.
Though I haven't heard this myth for quite some time, I'm sure that Cadillac now has been up-graded to a Lexus. Or a Tesla.
But I remember exactly when that myth fell out of favor.
It was during the reign of "W".
In that long ago time the war focused between "affirmative action" and "legacy babies".
"W" was a "legacy baby".
His father went to Yale... so he would go to Yale.
Since his dad was "Skull and Bones"... he would be "Skull and Bones".
His father had been President... so he would be President.
See how this works?
It works like Hindu Caste.
If you are "born Untouchable", then that's what you are and your children, too. Ditto for a (Boston) Brahman.
"W" was not made President due to anything he had ever done.
It was just his "legacy".
"Affirmative action" said, no - you must EARN it.
(Not like Trump's, "You must WORK for medical care!")
But it turned out that way too many DID qualify, endangering the "legacy babies" slots.
The myth died - but legacy lives on.
And now we have Trump - whose daddy got him into Wharton.
And into the White House.
Is Eric next or Don, Jr.?
Legacy babies, all.
1
What gets me is how boring these kids are. The expensive zip codes they come from should automatically be off-limits, but what were the admissions officers thinking? That this crop of spoiled middle class white kids would produce a new Madame Curie or the next Mother Teresa? It must be painful for professors to have to put up with this every year and pretend that in their midst are free thinking geniuses who are going to change the world. Why are the resources of the greatest schools on earth wasted on them? But it’s not just these kids and their parents and their paid advisers but the whole rotten academic system which caters to the rich.
1
I'm certain Trumps parents cheated his way into Wharton.
3
Improperly proper, so sad.
“We’re not talking about donating a building so that a school is more likely to take your son or daughter.... We’re talking about deception and fraud.”
Such a statement for the Trump Era! If you do the same act brazenly and openly you get away with it.
1
I have never been more proud that I attended CUNY and SUNY.
52
I'm disappointed -- the clearest example we've seen recently of a student simply having admission bought for him is Jared Kushner, and this piece doesn't explicitly raise it. But it should, because it shows that a mediocre student can always get in anywhere, so long as his parents have money.
2
The entire system - legacies, athletic scholarships, and affirmative action - is broken and needs to be torn down. The common factor in legacies and affirmative action is that each traffics in the currency others have earned. In other words, legacies traffic on the actions of their parents. Affirmative action recipients traffic on the perceived injustice experienced and overcome by those who happened to share a similar melanin concentration.
Admissions should be race blind, anonymous, and family connection blind. If someone has personally overcome say poverty and an incarcerated parent, that should be noted and weighed in their favor. However, at the end of the day students should make it on their own merits - period. Donations, skin color, and DNA relatives are not an accomplishment on the part of a prospective student.
3
The American obsession with sport is, perhaps not a central, but a very important factor in this "newly discovered" practice. Considering athletic prowess an academic credential is wrong. I have had in one of my classes - in a non-Ivy League University -a student who was dramatically unready to follow a class which every other student ended up passing, in several cases with an excellent grade.
2
The bigger crime is not the wealthy stealing admissions for their kids but rather the failure of our public schools to prepare the poor and minority kids for higher education. Kids whose parents didn't go to college are not taught how to be a college student because their parents don't know how and schools don't teach them. These kids are not only woefully short on basic knowledge such as writing and math but on study skills, emotional skills, how to navigate the system of higher ed., how to balance studying with having fun. Rich kids live their entire life knowing they will go to college and how to do it but poor kids it's unknown territory. And to make it even worse for the poor we very short shortsightedly keep raising the cost of college so the poor are doubly damned. How does a young person work 8 hours to pay for college and then study 8 hours for school each and every day? The vast majority of adults work 8 hours and go home and watch TV and we expect our kids to do what we cannot?
4
Why cant the rich just pay and get in like they do in the the magnet school touted and promoted by Trump Administration!
They can then do the bidding and cut the prices for our kids to go get a decent education without worrying about the dizzying student loans.
When these kids go in for their first post college job interview they will flop. Businesses needs producers to innovate, compete and thrive. It’s good they will have wealthy influential parents to support them for the rest of their lives.
1
Tip of the iceberg for corruption in the university system. The fact that no one has delved into why college debt has skyrocketed proves how protected that corruption is. Ballooning administrations, empire building, and rampant private sector nepotism are costing America dearly. Colleges are no longer just supported by administrators, they are run by protectionist administrators - often to the point of collapse; cutting back on classes and professors while administration continues to grow. Kind of backwards, isn't it?
3
Actually, the issue is this: why are states continuing to cut funding of state colleges and universities?
State universities were, once upon a time, the equals of the private ones. With a few exceptions, the state institutions are slipping to the point where their degrees are less valuable than a certificate from bulldozer operator school or the electricians union.
Private colleges are private, and their scandals are largely their scandals. Our scandal is the horrible quality of public education in this country, and our indifference to it. And our scandal is the obvious belief, by the people who run this country, that an education at a public university, or any public school for that matter, is worthless.
2
I partly blame the marketing of college admission services for much needless massive anxiety. One gets the idea that the only valid path to a good life is a spot at the prestige branded schools.
As some have mentioned, job applicants need to show they can do the work. Many other schools can help kids develop what they need in the real world.
Why not research schools for how much individual attention and opportunities are given to each student?
Maybe the student suicides would decrease if more students were matched realistically to colleges.
Smaller, lesser known colleges often excel in helping students develop leadership and creative thinking skills.
Our child went to such a college and met a faculty mentor, eventually faculty advisor for a dual major. The faculty member provided a foundation for my now adult child's tech career. That faculty member is still a mentor and friend. My child applied for a position for four candidates to be hired. 176 applied, 4 chosen. The work continues to expand horizons.
Note: this was not a direct hire after college, the path was through some jobs that developed management and creative problem solving skills.
The key was going to a college where each student's talents and interests can be developed. Class size never more than 25.
2
Americans have a problem with...education. Most of them don't even know what it is. Starting from local boards of eds which are so focused on test results that they forget that the curriculum is so pathetic, so scant and shallow that the children barely come out literate, which is woefully inadequate in the global market place. Another problem is that Americans are anti-intellectual. Pursuit of knowledge, intellectual curiosity, etc, is looked down upon in most social circles with media enforcing the stereotypes. It seems it is more important for parents that their children occupy their time with sports than with learning because, as this case proves, you can get into a really good school on a sports scholarship even if your grades were mediocre. Then of course there are colleges that create that admissions frenzy. They've created a brand for themselves and condescendingly work on "algorithms" of what type of student is best suited for their institution! Yet, undergraduate education is not something that these elite institutions focus on. Smart kids after four years of college co-mingling with other smart kids will remain smart kids, even if professors hardly teach, and students are left to their own devices to plow through material. May be parents should focus on education and not test scores and not getting into brand name schools. Once the child is in thralls of learning, things will fall into place and s/he will be a better adjusted person.
"To comply with tax laws, donors also cannot engage in an explicit quid pro quo with a college. The well-rehearsed pas de deux of donations and admissions must be made to appear as a voluntary exchange of gifts, not a binding deal."
So it's fine to bribe your way into a good school, as long as you make it appear like it's not a bribe. And the problem with the current scandal is apparently just that the bribes were going to individuals, not the institutions.
Two lessons to be learned:
(1) All you really have to do is make bribes *appear* legal and it's all OK. Truthiness prevails over truth, once again.
(2) Small scale crimes get punished, but the big grifters get a free pass.
Is this a great country or what?
3
I bet nobody goes to prison (at all or for very long), and the only punishment handed down are fines. Which would be ironic because it re-enforces the idea that money solves everything.
After all, these crimes - while shocking and audacious - are not violent. And the perpetrators have "lived an otherwise blameless" lives.
Watch.
1
private colleges and universities with enormous endowments should be stripped of their non-profit status. They are profiting massively (and without transparency), glad this is out in the open. Hope lawsuits follow.
2
Rid all universities of their athletic departments, since that is where most of the chicanery occurred. But the rich buying their kids college placement has been so well known for so long, ordinary people from ordinary state colleges laugh at the smugness of those announcing they attended an Ivy league school.
1
Dog eat dog. Race to the bottom.
Public education needs to to be fully funded. This need for college coaches means that our public high schools need more directed resources to serve every student.
The US is short changing its future.
5
Please... very few colleges can afford need blind admissions. So - like purchasing most items - education is based not on what you are but your ability to pay. To the degree community colleges address the issue, it is through lowering quality and not generally lowering price. Etc. Etc. The whole college system is classist -- like everything else in the USA.
1
This story also sheds light the the whole disability scam that is going on in this country. Too many people get social security disability, medical marijuana cards, disability license plates, emotional support animals, etc. Now we learn that people easily rig the system to get additional time for their college entrance exams. This all comes at the expense of people that are truly disabled and need help from society. This is the worst kind of theft and truly shameful but I’m not sure if shame means anything in this day and age.
2
Folks, we need to be clear about who is to blame for this stuff. At the Universities it appears that it is primarily via the Athletic Department and Programs. Now, as a former University professor, I--like just about every other faculty/staff member--know that those programs are almost always corrupt in one way or another, starting with the fact that they run multi-million dollar recreation programs tax free. The whole idea of big time University competitive athletics is corrupt to the core, and they profoundly corrupt the educational enterprise. Talk about special tutoring, or special, boutique dormitories for athletes, etc., etc.
4
The revenue from those athletic teams supports the entire campus including your own department. You accepted the money, didn’t you? So you can’t pretend you’re not part of the problem.
“But it seems safe to stipulate that being born to wealthy parents is not by itself meritorious.”
Objectively, data would suggest this is not a true statement. Socioeconomic status is a strong predictor of success, skill, competiveness, and achievement. If learning is more strongly influenced by the competitivess and skill of classmates than professors, for which there are also strong data, then this is just a false statement. One shouldn’t stipulate unless there is no possible dispute. Suggest correction.
We should do away with athletic scholarships and athletic facilities costing hundreds of millions of dollars.
As an econ professor often dealing w stressed out students facing high levels of debt and uncertain job prospects despite summers of underpaid work for corporations as interns, I view this debacle as part of our broader anxieties re labor markets, and the increasingly high cost of entry to them (w skyrocketing tuition costs). I also view this as part of the overall rise in inequality, w too little bargaining power for workers and too many abuses of power by corporations. I'm not saying what these people did is in any way excusable, but in context of the bigger issues we're dealing w I think we need to understand the roots of this issue...and work to address these...
As the mother of a heavily-recruited collegiate sailor, I can tell you that the real way most sailors are recruited is by merit. The young sailors mostly started racing when they were seven or eight, sailed for their high school or prep school and then sailed in a junior yacht club program. By the time these sailors got to college, they all knew each other. In addition, sailing is controlled by US Sailing (rather than the NCAA), meaning that no scholarships can be awarded to these athletes,
Therefore, if a recruited sailor had actually shown up out of "nowhere," the sham would have been up on day 1 of practice. Clearly, the pretend sailor knew she was not qualified and the Stanford coach, who sailed for Hobart and previously coached at the Naval Academy, knew that this recruit couldn't ever make his sailing team. Clearly, there are recruited athletes who go on to "not make the team" because there are better athletes trying out. Not the case here.
My daughter "made the team" fair and square, as did all others at her university - not a highly coveted school but one that gave her an excellent education. Looking back, I'm glad of the choice she made.
2
I don't think it is right to conflate the almost innate human desire to give your child advantages in life with the fraud in this situation. Every parent wants to give their children what they can -- a nice home, good schools, tutoring when necessary -- and there will always be some unfairness in that. My parents had no money at all for private school or tutoring but they had education so we benefitted from that. Is that an unfair advantage? Making huge donations to a school you graduated from to get your kid in is distasteful, but not illegal, and most people with the means would probably do so. Legacy admissions probably should go away. But then there is the outright cheating that is becoming more and more pervasive in a society that values outcomes more than process. To me, a kid who gets a bad grade and brings it up -- on their own -- is a better indicator than someone who gets straight As with tutoring help, but colleges just look at the GPAs in a desperate attempt to raise their ratings. With so many applications, the colleges simply don't have time to look. The system needs to be overhauled to rein in the cheating AND limits on applications so colleges focus more on applicants and we stop the ratings race. It's completely ridiculous (and kind of immoral) for schools with a 5% admit rate to try to encourage more applications so they can get to 4%.
« The well-rehearsed pas de deux of donations and admissions must be made to appear as a voluntary exchange of gifts, not a binding deal. »
Wow, the « Proper Way » to do it works a lot like our politics.
2
Wealthy children have lots of benefits from day one. Their parents do not necessarily teach them ethical behavior or morally upright attitudes. They learn to be entitled after their first breath.
If "having a new building constructed" is OK because it is and has always been allowed, but doing something similar behind closed doors is not OK because it is hidden, and a third party is raking in the dough, I don't think makes much difference to the students involved.
I remember well that I was denied any scholarship money back in 1967 because my father, a construction worker, had "too much money in the bank". He had saved $50,000, $20 each week for years, digging ditches, pouring tar on 100 degrees days, and plowing snowy driveways for 36 hours straight. We owned nothing, lived in a housing project for many years, and his savings was his only protection for any event. Our only insurance was medical from the union.
The tuition he paid in full was very expensive to him. They didn't care. The school didn't look at anything other than the dollars in his savings account (which, as someone who was very honest, he reported.) As it was, I got into the school on my own, with no help from anyone. Sadly, many others probably didn't and still don't have that opportunity.
The whole donors thing, to me, stinks. No wonder we end up with people like Trump as POTUS. He and his brothel-loving Mar-L-Lago cronies are great examples of what not to become.
What a dark time we are experiencing!
2
The bigger scandal is that academic merit is just about an afterthought when it comes to college admissions. Would you rather be an academically average star quarterback or a painfully brilliant historian whose parents can barely write a tuition check when it comes to applying to college? Question answers itself, doesn't it? Well, if you remove an institution's ability to get government backed student loans if they don't clean up their acts, classes would be filled with the truly academically gifted and not the legacies and the jocks. Until we stop treating these places like Country Club For Beginners on all levels, we don't have a system of higher education. We have a system of privilege transmission. This is a drop in the bucket instance where the wheels came off.
2
So many people are describing legacy students as undeserving of special treatment. My personal experience is different. I was a legacy at the seven-sister college that my mother attended. I decided that I wanted to go there when I was about 7 years old and worked hard in school to meet the required qualifications. I know that my "legacy status" may have put me in the right hat when the college of my dreams made its decision to accept me and not accept someone else with equal qualifications. I was also accepted at other seven-sister colleges where I was not a legacy. Once there, I proved that I deserved their decision. I majored in chemistry (unusual for a woman at the time) and graduated with high honors (magna cum laude).
35
@Margaret You still have not provided a reason why you were deserving of special treatment. You seem to be arguing that you deserved to get in, even if you had not received special treatment. Fine; you may very well have been a worthy candidate on your own. But please explain why you were more deserving because you were a legacy?
40
@Margaret Are you somehow more deserving than the same person who worked equally hard--or harder--but didn't get put in the "right hat" because they weren't a legacy?
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@Margaret
The issue isn't that you weren't "deserving" (i.e., capable of doing the work). The issue is that there were probably 5 times as many slots as deserving applicants, and that you were given a leg up because of who your parents were.
Most legacy admissions students are competent to do the work at the school; some of them would have got in without their legacy bump up, many would not. But suppose we had a rule that people whose names start with J get first dibs at all the best colleges as long as they're competent. Sound fair? It doesn't result in any "undeserving" people getting in!
15
If there were no other college options, I would be outraged as well. But really, why do you care? Yes, the meritocracy is a faux meritocracy. The more important issue is giving disadvantaged kids a chance at a good education. This issue is just the silliness of the rich!
1
Some of these kids did knowingly participate in this fraud. Perhaps they should be expelled.
At age 71 am I supposed to be shocked, SHOCKED!, that wealth and privilege and racism give some people a leg up? And I’m going to Casablanca for the waters too.
2
I had some advantages half a century ago when I applied to college.
I was White
My parents had gone to college
I had read lots and lots of books
On the other hand we had a lower middle class household income
I went to a tiny rural high school with 30 kids in the graduating class, no AP courses, no SAT prep courses, and small spread of sports.
I got into good schools based on some mix of these advantages and disadvantages, and only discovered, upon arriving at my Ivy college how many more advantages many kids had relied upon.
But I studied hard, took the most lucrative student jobs (which we the most undesirable) and wound up graduating 2nd in my class.
I have not spent my life regretting the advantages I did not have.
I just got on with life knowing that most things are not entirely fair, but it is not worth worrying too much about that reality.
2
On the bright side, it is guaranteed that these kids ,benefited by the bribes, will not become high ranking government officials
Bribes from the wealthy, undeserving, generally white privileged class of students, sure, no problem. Capitalism at its finest.
“Free” college for everyone, meaning the underprivileged, but deserving and willing to work hard class of students, an outrage! Socialism!
I was wondering how Trump got into Wharton. (:
1
I dunno. If you can buy a U.S. Senator, why can't you buy a place for your kid in Yale? If people keep objecting to this sort of business, what will the point be to getting fabulously rich?
Exactly right. There are affirmative actions in place that aid the wealthy. Affirmative action to suppory the disadvantaged...an affront to the American Way. Which turns out to mean...help the wealthy.
This is an additional slap in the face to deserving kids from disadvantaged backgrounds who do not benefit from affirmative action.
1
We can all be sure that Donald Trump was a "legacy admission" to Wharton. That is, one who was granted admission as a result of a significant gift by daddy Fred Trump to that school. Also, given his appalling ignorance of so many areas we can assume that Trump received a "legacy diploma"! Only the dumbest could believe that those who were admitted in exchange for a huge "donation" are left to flounder and fail. Instead, they are coaxed on getting "Gentleman C's" no matter how they perform on tests; think George W. Bush!!
And, isn't this the reason Trump threatens his alma maters with legal action if his test scores are revealed.
3
This article fails to distinguish between entrance decisions between public and private universities. Legacy admission is not available for public universities, at least not here in CA. I am not sure about giving large donations. Therefore, if one wanted to buy oneself a slot into UCLA, one would have to bribe someone. I personally believe that the private universities who offer legacy slots are going to lose their status over time. Many people today believe that anyone who attended a private, elite university was able to do so because of legacy or some other non-intelligence related reason. The assumption is that such a person is probably spoiled, entitled, lazy, and/or stupid. There are certainly a lot of real life examples in the news to reinforce this belief. Both of my very smart twins flatly rejected applying to all ivy league colleges because they did not want to go to school with spoiled, entitled, lazy, and/or stupid people and did not want to be labeled as such themselves.
1
Only the similarly situated elitist Editorial Board could make this a defense of property rights case. That's like saying JP Morgan had no responsibility to the Whale scandal. It wasn't the bank. It was its lone rogue trader. Terrible argument by the NYT's because these schools have an inherent responsibility, just as banks do, to audit their process. They know who these conduits are. Over ten years, did they never check a sampling of admitted students? Mr. Singer created a "Dark Pool". But the schools empowered him to trade their currency. That these schools have plausible deniability is not dispositive of their innocence. They can't disclaim ownership of the offense, while enjoying all the benefits of said steady stream of undeserving monied student clients who become the whales of their massive hedge fund invested endowments. These schools owe the non-admitted students an audited accounting and possible remediation. The major news not noted by the NYT's was for who was on the list of offenders as all are now potential cooperating witnesses in this and other potential cases. Who will they trade incriminating information for in exchange for their freedom? What/who is the real target of Boston's investigation? This is the Mueller's legacy, isn't it? Now, some desperate housewife can be the villain. Not the billionaire exploiting sex from Chinese laborers. Not the US attorney's handing out get of jail free cards to pedophiles. How Krafty…of the Boston field office.
The ugly-funny of it all is parents who get a tax receipt for their bribe.."hey I'll do anything for my kid so long as I can deduct the bribe from my taxes..." Sick and sad full circle.
1
The 'cheaters' are following the Trump model to a T. Fake it to you make it. And when you 'get over', delude yourself into thinking that 'this is your right' - your destiny.
In the decadent Trump era, all the rich have no clothes.
3
Uh, Melania, never mind that photo of Barron on the polo pony...
1
Sounds to me like an injection of Swedish Socialism or as they call it “Social Democracy” into the American system might be a good idea.
www.InquiryAbraham.com
1
Get admiited, drop out, make a billion.
1
In the beginning the Founding Fathers of America originally intended and believed in the merit and qualifications to do anything, anywhere and anytime while a white European Anglo-Saxon Protestant male who owned property.
Thus their enduring WASP focus on affirmative action for anyone who does not have their pedigree as inherently unworthy is meant as a bigoted malign affirmative distraction. Even as the kind of white men meant to benefit expanded to include Jews and Catholics followed by white women
No collusion. MAGA!
Money and greed. Yech. Keep shouting Bernie and AOC.
1
What these schools are doing to themselves by accepting donations, legacy students and outright bribes is diminishing their reputation. Harvard and a Yale degrees no longer seem so prestigious when it is commonly known anyone with the money can literally buy a degree for their kid.
A new comment like where’d you get your degree, Yale or a Cracker Jack box seems appropriate.
2
A major defrocking of the last Liberal Bastion- a college campus is up for sale to the very same same liberals who deride the GOP, Capitalism, Israel and Donald Trump.
We liberals love it when rich white people denounce racism and support #LGBTQ and #MeToo
But when rich white liberals are caught rigging the education system to benefit their own kids... Get ready for the excuses and more "What aboutisms" than anyone could ever imagine.
Head for your safe space and Hold on to your emotional support service dog-- Things are going to get rough.
This is why the Democrats will not be able to field a legitimate challenger to Trump.. Liberals are always too busy eating their own.
Privileged white kid affirmative action has been around for a very long time.
nyt: I sent a comment with unedited version at the bottom. The comment should be read as the following:
We are to blame, as a country, for this mess. We have totally corrupted education by overvaluing elite colleges as the road to success. We have placed titles above content, degrees above learning, and money above character. We are no longer interested in the value of a well-rounded education; but instead are obsessed with getting into the best schools which in turn will lead us to the best jobs. We have created this frenzied environment and our kids suffer the consequences.
How trumpian.
Dare we investigate the whole handicapped parking "industry"?
As if college athletics isn't already bad enough - absurdly overpaid coaching staffs, lavish athletic facilities, scholarships for playing lacrosse, football players forgiven for rape and now this. You don't even have to play a sport, just bribe some overpaid coach to say you do and you're admitted.
I couldn't help but notice how reflective of our current times this all is. "Small" bribes worth millions are bad but massive bribes with multiple millions is just fine. A true, INDEPENDENT prosecutor gets to go on a massive fishing expedition in Whitewater and, eventually, after millions in taxpayer dollars are wasted, hooks a horny intern = impeachment. However, absolute MASSIVE corruption, mob crimes, voter tampering and fraud--involving cooperation with the US' most dangerous foreign adversary--under our very eyeballs, every week, for YEARS and it's unimpeachable. Too big to "nail?"
Maybe the mere millionaires should consider rebelling against the Absolute Power of billionaires.
On tv tonight one of these rich kids they only wanted to go to school for the parties. These kids are already set for life on mommy and daddy’s money.
This explains why there are many people with advanced degrees that are just plain stupid. That degree was bought and paid for.
Don’t get me started on the actress that played “Blossom” who has a advanced biology degree and is a anti-vaxxer. Amazing how she managed a advanced degree while working as a actress full time.
life ain't fair.
In our society, we don’t focus on the need to provide adequate educational opportunities to all.
That is a sign of our inhumane attitude towards each other.
And it degrades our society and our nation.
And the current occupant of the White House apparently wants to deemphasize education further.
As Pogo said, “we have met the enemy and it is U(.)S(.)
Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin support #BLM, #LGBTQ and #MeToo .. why can't we just call this an unfortunate misunderstanding and move on?
Worst of all is the fate of the students who’ve been groomed from childhood to cheat and bribe their way through life. When you’re brainwashed as a child to believe this is the path to success, you grow up to be a psychopath. Parents who inflict this amorality on children are guilty of abuse. As adults, these students will live a life of inner shame and inadequacy, never knowing their own true (non-financial) worth. Sort of like Donald and Jared.
1
One of the Editorial Board's finest moments...NY Times readers likely disproportionately benefit from systems like the ones the Board decries here.
Hear hear for "traitors to your class" editorials!
1
This is exactly how we now have this pathetic imposter of a citizen as our president. His inability to understand and live up to acting as our president escapes his comprehension of being nothing more and a low live gangster who respects only his fellow mobsters.
We have become a corrupt valueless land in this plague of materialism. This is no longer America the beautiful. I worry how our future generation can be redeeming in this atmosphere.
I only read the first three paragraphs, but Yup! Yup! Yup!
So how did Trump get in?
The Bush boys?
Why did they use a Malcolm X quote about Black liberation as the art for a story about rich white people buying their way into colleges?
It is just plain and simple DISGUSTING! (if real)
New York Times - this editorial is ridiculous. These people are cheating and lying, pure and simple. To compare it with getting tutoring for your kids is ridiculous and undermines the shame and scandal that should be associated with cheating and lying. Shame on you.
““There can be no separate college admissions system for the wealthy,”
But there can be a separate one for African Americans and Latinos that is racist on its face - affirmative action.
Can’t wait till Trump’s Supreme Court picks overturn AA. Asian and white kids are really hurting from it based solely on the color of their skin.
1
Affirmative Action
Not the Best and the Brightest, not the highly qualified or bonafide, but some who is black. Hidden illegal Quotas on Jews, Asian profiling, ad nauseum. But " Affirmative Action" is
nothing more than the swindle of letting non qualified "students" in while keeping real students blocked.
Newspeak and Orwellian language to justify: Black- first, racially offensive leap-frogging, Jew-baiting, and all the vicious things that go with it. I hope the Asians win their case.
If you are not qualified, you can't push others aside because you have a higher melanin count...
1
Our editorial writers are correct; despite the statements of the prosecutors themselves, the legal issues here have to do with racketeering, not privilege. Privilege isn't illegal, and buying it isn't illegal. And as the authors point out, even buying your kid's way into a college isn't illegal, only the way these parents did it.
Also note that kids of alumni and athletes get special consideration and always have, and unfortunately that's not illegal either.
OK, all that said, I predict that this story will have what journalists call "legs." Especially with our wild modern news cycle, you're going to be seeing this on the news for weeks.
The reason is that despite these interesting arguments, anyone who has had their own kids or kids of family members or friends bust their rear ends to get into and through as-best a college as they could will be outraged by this. And they will want to see the abusers of fairness and their sense of the way it's supposed-to-be be brought to some kind of justice.
But I am sure this Editorial Board supports race based quotas in admissions. Is that a meritocracy?
Academia is the bulwark of the liberal establishment.
It just took a big hit.
This editorial is an attempt to rationalize the indefensible.
NYT comes up with the "everybody does it" and "everyone knew" defense.
to paraphrase Billy Joel: "legacy! is such a lonely word. everyone is so untrue...."
in all seriousness, we see the negative effects on our nation of the "approved" system of getting your damaged offspring into the ivy covered halls..... I give you George W. Bush, Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh.
Brilliant editorial
How ironic and stupid is it for these affluent parents to bribe coaches and pay money sub rosa so that their kids could get high scores. They are setting up their children for failure as well as inculcating the wrong values.
I find it pretty amusing that these C- and D-list people were getting their kids into Yale and Stanford for a small fraction of what the really fancy people have to "contribute".
Meanwhile, the distribution of higher education resources in the US spirals ever deeper into insanity.
Go on Google Maps and take a look at the size of Stanford's campus. Unless they've done something really nutty since I was last there in 2015, that acreage is home to 7500 undergrads and an equal number of graduate and professional students.
Then, look at the physical footprint of the San Francisco State University campus. San Francisco State serves about 40,000 students, including 20,000 full-time undergraduates.
Notice anything weird?
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with Stanford. I went there myself: Class of 1992.
But when you compare the two campuses, and take into account that the *average* Stanford undergrad is unlikely to contribute more than, say, 5x as much to society as the average SFSU undergrad, a reasonable person could only conclude that Stanford should serve... 500K undergrads? No, you do the arithmetic.
Meanwhile, NYT et al. dither over one spot here or there.
For each existing spot at Stanford, there could equally be 5. Kids would be fine. Parents could go nuts paying for buildings. (We need 7 new swimming pools OMG! Call Mr. Arcienega!) It'd still be a great school.
And on Stanford's spare change, SFSU could replace the entire campus just for starters.
Writing form the Netherlands : I don't understand this article. In a capitalistic system pur sang, you cannot just pay for a good education, if you meet the minimum requirement for entry? That cannot be true ! That sounds like a functionally flawed system.
In the socialistic hell-hole I live, we pay around 2000 euro per year tuition for a (mostly, just being honest) quality education (college to University).
I realize that this might not have any bearing on the overall issue but I am curious as to how well the children of these philanderers did in their college careers? Was the crime worth the effort? Or did they spend x-semesters drinking beer and doing blow?
Time to have an investigation into how Jared got into Harvard. And Trump into Wharton. Let's see their HS transcripts.
What an awful feeling these young students must be living with because their parents made poor decisions.
For an examination of the issues regarding testing, test prep, college admissions, gatekeeping, and all the rest, I highly recommend the film "The Test and The Art of Thinking", a documentary from Abramorama Films.
Full disclosure--I appear in it, as one of the delightful "Tutoratti" round table, but so do many others, including psychologist Howard Gardner, former College Board President David Coleman, numerous college admissions directors, and a rather diverse bunch of students and parents.
It's a great look into all these issues and the pressures underlying them:
The trailer can be seen at:
https://www.abramorama.com/film/2018/2/10/the-test-and-the-art-of-thinking
1
Does this mean my favorite desperate housewife, the long suffering Lynette Scavo, will be sent up the river? She was always the most grounded of the ditsy wives. And now I find she is so ambitious for her real life kids that she will engage in criminal activity to get them into a prestigious college. You really can't make this stuff up!
Biggest problem with Harvard and some of the schools is that there is no sorting once the richlings are in. Jared Kushner's spot at Harvard was paid for, but that shouldn't include graduation. Looks like there is an instalment plan once the richling is in.
Admitting sub par students because of money gave us Bush and Trump.
This is mostly a scandal because of the fiction -- invented to defeat affirmative action programs -- that college admissions are, or ever have been, based on academic merit. There were always s-o-o-o many ways to get into an elite school if your parents were rich -- or if you had a skill that would bring in big alumni donations (read: winning football teams, for the most part).
Bakke, DeFunis, and other cases made it an issue if a couple of brown or black kids got in with higher SAT's and grades than the legacy admits and jocks whose presence at those schools was never questioned.
And George W.Bush was a "C"student throughout his academic time, yet he was appointed President of the United States by a Supreme Court that had no business interfering in elections.
What does that tell you?
1
College Rat Race! Alan Krueger of Princeton University wrote a paper some years ago studying students who went to "elite" colleges compared to a matched set who went to lower tier colleges. He followed the two sets and compared them ten years after graduation. BOTH sets have equal success.
1
The fact that this indictment came out of Boston should give all readers pause. It seems to me there are some universities who receive huge "gifts" who are not listed. I agree with the writer: there is merely a protection racket for "legal" donor admissions.
And they thought Whitey Bulger was crooked!
If the FBI concentrated upon every 'educational cheater', tax cheat, medical service cheat, intellectual fraud, incompetent, phony baloney American citizen who purports to possess superior education, based upon business acumen or some other silliness, i.e., television cred, somewhere in the neighborhood of 95% of the wealthy would be behind bars. Moral to this story. . . just tax these folks appropriately, educate our children, base convictions on evidence, remove sugary foods from our diets, Medicare for all and stop believing bankruptcies are a good thing. Elect folks who actually earned their spot on the educational ladder, provide quality real education, and eliminate stupid conspiracy theories. If all of those ideas are implemented, will it eliminate this type of corruption? Perhaps in 20 generations.
The problem here is not only the cost of college--up 10 to 15 times what it cost thirty-five years ago--but the actual purpose.
The purpose of school should not be to get you a better job so you can make more money.
The purpose should be to make you a better and more well-rounded human being.
1
What these parents did is obviously far more than merely unethical but the Editorial Board seems to be making a bigger point about privilege when it writes, " it seems safe to stipulate that being born to wealthy parents is not by itself meritorious" or, "Charges against parents accused of gaming the admissions process are a defense of the institutions’ property, not of meritocracy."
But conversely It is also safe to stipulate that being born poor or a minority is not by itself meritorious.
Yet, in this broad article about those who legally game the system there is no mention about this kind of non-wealth based gaming. This includes Elizabeth Warren-like claims to be Native American, or instances when the uber-privileged children of biracial parents, often with suitably hyphenated last names, claim membership of the more "advantageous" race.
In other words to expand on your logic, diversity is also (just) part of an institution's property but its misuse (even when overt) is never challenged on moral grounds.
Transparently defined merit alone should be the criterion. Everything else is open (wealth, birth, culture) is open to challenge.
1
This affair has certainly struck a nerve in the world in which the NYT lives. The only things missing amidst all this outrage are attempts to blame it all on Trump or Global Warming . There is hope however . Perhaps later on we will find out that all these people voted for Trump .
1
Seems like every aspect of the USA is “smoke and mirrors”.
Is there any system that isn't broken in this country?
@DD
Unfortunately every system everywhere is broken in some way. Its called being human. Americans just took longer to realize it and still don't seem to realize that their broken system is less broken than most.
1
Daniel Golden's 2006 book, “The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates,” was intended as a work of investigative journalism.
One example that it describes (at pages 44-48) is the admission to Harvard of a couple of kids who were not thought to be Harvard material by the college admissions counselors at their private high school. They got in after their father gave Harvard University a donation of (drumroll) ... $2.5 million. Daddy is Charles Kushner, and the two less than stellar students are Jared Kushner and Jason Kushner. Yeah, THAT Jared Kushner.
That form of bribery seems to be legal, as long as there is no agreed quid pro quo.
Paying people to cheat for you on exams, pay off athletic coaches, and otherwise "bend the rules" is a bribe. Claiming the bribe on your tax return as a "donation" gets you crosswise to the IRS.
Maybe a few of these people should spend some time in orange jumpsuits in a form of public housing.
Maybe the kids who were admitted under improper conditions should get dumped by the universities.
Ya think??
As for the Stanford sailing team coach. $110,000 is considerable when most of the universities sports budget goes to the football & basketball organizations. Not saying it’s right but I’m sure that amount was eagerly wanted/needed for the team. Just my opinion.
It's not just bribing someone to give you answers on a test or paying millions of dollars so your son/daughter will be admitted to a good school. It is also the knowledge that many college educated people have about what it takes to get into school.
There are tutors to make sure the student has good grades in school and does well on the SAT/ACT. This does not assure you entry into a good school.
Parents know that the student must have after school clubs (French Club; Honor Society) and other experiences that help. My son was admitted to a six year medical school program. He worked as a volunteer for a year at a hospital and was the volunteer of the year. That assured him, I think, entry into the program.
If you aren't a legacy student or your parents did not donate to the school, you have to stand out. More educated parents know how to make their child stand out.
Who knew how truly desperate a housewife Felicity Huffman would turn out to be . . . .
People just throw up their hands when they hear about this kind of thing, but when they hear about affirmative action they loudly renounce it. Why? Universities are better off diversifying their classes than accepting bribes, at least in my book.
Hmm. When I first heard about this story, I really did wonder what was actually criminal about this very bad behavior. After all, families have been gaming the system forever to get their kids into the top U.S. News schools. How is bribing a coach all that different from writing your child's essay? It's just a heavier thumb on the scale.
As to why schools value great athletes so much they will compromise their standards (30 points!) to admit them, that's really easy to figure out. If you have a successful sports team, you get lots of media attention. That increases applications and TV revenues. Perhaps even more importantly, your alumni get really happy and give you more money. (If you have a great orchestra, who cares? Sigh.) Good, bad, or indifferent, if you were a typical college president, you'd be insane to ignore this.
The practice is more dangerous than we realize. Would George W. Bush have gotten into Yale and Harvard Business School if he wasn't his father's son? Without that, and all the other coddling he received, would he have become POTUS? Perhaps the Iraq War would never have happened, and thus the rise of ISIS stunted, maybe even erased; those things aren't one for one sure results, but the Iraq War definitely helped shape where things are today in the Middle East. Likely for the worse, not the better.
Would we be saddled with DJT as POTUS now without similar privilege of wealth? Certainly we see that it is impossible that he could have deserved a place in the selective schools he attended; he obviously hasn't learned much since he was ten years old, and keeps wanting to take America back to the way it was when he was that age. Not that different to get out of serving in Viet Nam through fake bone spurs than to get into Fordham and Wharton because your dad is Fred Trump. But that wasn't enough for Trump; he had to lie and say he was first in his class at Wharton, though he never made the honor roll.
See, there's the problem of kids who miss a shot at an elite school because it was stolen from them for the undeserving. And then there's the problem of undeserving kids that grow up to be the faux-deserving that get to make the rules for the rest of us, and sometimes get us into stupid wars, or foment hate and divisiveness.
Or deny global warming science, which could end us all.
From the long list of outrages in this affair, the one that completely stunned me was that the purpose of the fake charity parents "donated" to was to provide assistance to disadvantaged kids. I wonder if Mr. Singer and his cronies had a chuckle over how clever they were as they counted up their bribe money.
1
I can't help but wonder what your president will say about this. It is pretty clear that his father did this sort of thing for him and he did and does for his children as well. Otherwise why would his fixer have threatened the schools about releasing his transcripts? Never mind the tax returns, let's see the scholastic record. The wealthy can cheat or bribe to get their way, they are counting on the greed of others to spin the wheels for them.....and it works.
"The key distinction here is not just the amount of money, but the recipient. A donation is made to a college, while a bribe is paid to an employee who, in effect, is stealing an admissions slot, hawking it and pocketing the proceeds." - Same thing. One is legal, the other isn't. But let's do keep kidding each other.
What is the real value of these Ivy League parchments?
Since we can safely assume none of these kids is capable of the level of work necessary to get in they surely won't be passing the classes they will be getting credit for by their own efforts. Won't this show up on the job after graduation?
What is the actual intellectual proof of the promise of that parchment?
I know a Harvard grad. He's a manipulative crooked man driven by avarice. And aside from the knowledge he has from exposure to the upper classes all of his life he showed me no special intellectual abilities and rather often showed me he was more prone to impulsivity than considered action. Everything about how he did things was to create an appearance of, when there was almost no substance to back it up.
I have to ask what is the value of a college education? If obtaining that knowledge is as useless as the HS dropouts who always rhetorically ask "when are we going to use this in life?" heavily implying never. What is the point?
Do you think this failure to use the knowledge we should be using in daily life has helped lead us to this low point in our history where science is mocked in Congress and faith is given equal status with Knowledge?
As we know, wealthy parents have always had an advantage of getting their offspring into the college of their choice. But now it has moved from phony altruism to outright bribery. The children of the very wealthy in America have boundless legal opportunities that most children will never have. For the wealthy to also game the system to make the odds of acquiring a degree from a prestigious college even more in their favor, is reprehensible. It is extraordinary that these parents would pay instructors to take tests for their child and even couch the child to play "stupid" in order to facilitate cheating on the tests. There must be some kind of accountability taken against these parents, coaches & others who engaged in this fraud.
While this investigation must proceed wherever it leads, someone should also look into the longstanding practice of cheating so some college athletes could continue in school
despite their inability to complete their course work. This intellectual corruption has gone on for decades and continues to this day.
1
Of course this whole situation stinks.
But....
As heretical as it sounds, I am not sure why we should have meritocracy either. College should be for almost all; even these supposedly best schools should be available for a bigger pool than currently.
I went to university in England where nearly all universities are public institutions. Applicants complete a common application form and places are offered conditionally depending on performance in essentially public mandated and scored extensive written exams executed in a controlled environment. In my case 48 hours worth over several days!
Money or ability to pay is largely irrelevant. Proficiency in sport is irrelevant. Moreover, very few graduates go on to play professionally.
The costs associated with admissions are also nugatory as compared to those in the US.
Of course, the US would never adopt such a system. Not only not NIH but also it would eliminate many "rice bowls".
So many of these parents are Liberals from Liberal areas of Liberal states. They argue for a level playing field for everyone, but not before they take care of their own. Companies that recruit Ivy Leaguers now apply intelligence tests to weed out the fakers. When I hear a student is going Ivy League, I often ask which scheme the parents used: donation, legacy, nepotism, log rolling and now bribery.
Whether admission by donation or bribe, here is the boiled down message for the kids:
"Honey, you are not talented enough to make the team. You are not smart enough to attend the college my ego needs you to attend. You are not assertive enough to compete on your own..and you are not moral enough to say 'no'."
-
What a lesson for the kids. I wonder how many actually learn anything from it?
That someone would attempt to manipulate the admissions process in this way does not surprise me. That it was, apparently, so easily accomplished at an 'industrial' scale does invite a raised eyebrow. My impression of the supposed rigor of college admissions at elite schools would lead me to think that this kind of bamboozling would be virtually impossible--that the precious prize--admission--would be guarded with incredible care. I get that the universities are not being charged. And, I understand the argument that the right of admission is, at least for now, the universities' property to allocate as they wish. But, this seems sloppy and negligent.
And Mayor Diblasio wants to get rid of objective testing for the NYC standardized schools e.g. Stuyvesant and Bronx Science just because most of the accepted students with highest scores happen to be 1st generation hard working poor Chinese and Indian children living in Flushing Queens?
I am sorry many NYT readers don't want to read this but thank you Donald Trump for allowing the case against Harvard for their discrimination against Asians go to trial ...there needs to be more than lip service against discrimination, not only when it meets political needs.
LOL. This article is spot on. If I donate a building, it's legit because the college gets the money. If I pay the nebulous non-profit that is scheming, I am paying a criminal. Just like buying concert tickets. One pays the artist/venue, the other pays the scalper. Same outcome, different profiteers. But make no mistake, this fake outrage is not about ensuring fairness or equal rights to a good education - because rich people have countless advantages to get their kids into college. We should be discussing how to make college accessible for all, instead of worrying about how rich people spend their money.
It goes to show that money can't buy you everything and no matter how much money you have, you are not above the law.
Isn’t that just capitalism?
@South Of Albany
NO.
Where is the list of names of the other "pillars of society" who were part of this fraud? That's the list that needs to start every article and commentary on this cheating! Name names.
Legal affirmative action for wealthy white Ameticans in college admissions has always existed in the USA. This case demonstrates that members of
the "one percent" are willing to violate the "legitimate" principles of affirmative action for the wealth based American meritocracy.
1
The rich had been buying positions for their kids in prestigious schools with bribes disguised as "Donations" for ages.
Unless the donors remain anonymous and there is the possibility of a quid pro quo it must be treated as a bribe.
The chance of educational institutions refusing "Donations" are nil.
Direct bribes as has been described in the article must be prosecuted.
2
Another part of the puzzle is the fiction that private colleges are "not for profit". They may not have shareholders, as for-profit collges do, but they are run to make money. Without a steady inflow of funds, the managers and professors could not enjoy their comfortable lifetsyle.
So, what's the big deal of getting into one of these schools? It's all about name tags. Here's a story. Years ago I was at a large wedding reception at the Harvard Club in Boston, seated with others who were around my age. The group of roughly twelve people introduced themselves - "Brad from Yale, '72" "Susan. I attended Stanford '71." "Hi, I'm Biff graduated from Harvard in '69." It went around the table like that with little giggles and smiles until it got to me. "Hello, I'm Michael. I went to Northern Michigan University. Graduated in '72. How you doing?" And then there was silence. Smiles turned cold. Eyes drifted quickly to the next person. Thus, I was excluded from conversations at the table for the rest of the evening. Clearly, I didn't fit in. Somehow I'd found my way into this hallowed dinner table without proper credentials. And that's the whole point of cheating get into one of these schools. It's all about dinner conversation. It's all about la de da. As for me, I didn't really care. On my way out that night I saw some Harvard Club stationary on a small side table. As a small gesture of fitting in with the gang, a way of having some sort of bragging rights, as way to show I'd "been there" I stole the stationary, and I ain't been back since.
1
Thomas Piketty argued that patrimonial capitalism is a societally detrimental force that works (as I understand) through inheritance. This college admissions situation demonstrates the intuitive truth that, beyond financial resources, there's a wealth- and power-promoting "space" that's beneficial to be in and that patrimonial capitalists are usurping for their offspring.
Admissions in top colleagues is not fair, err, "Life is not fair."
And this is not going to change for the kids of the masses of middle class and poor. Forgive "my optimism."
This is why these parents cheat -god forbid their little darlings fall behind and fall into the ranks poor working class and of the people of color.
Let us not forget that all these affluent kids getting in by their parents schemes, underwrite the ability of colleges everywhere to offer scholarships and financial assistance to “worthy, deserving students” like I was to attend a much better college than I ever could afford. Those kids who don’t get in by merit have to contend with students like me rolling their eyes at these kids and thinking “must be paying full price”.
It’s the ugly side of college budgets and the admissions game.
I find the smug press outrage about the failure of higher education institutions to make admissions decisions largely on merit to be a little disingenuous. It is not exclusively limited to admissions decisions, Selective colleges use the same biases to hire faculty and other administrators in an attempt to keep their "strain" pure and their culture unadulterated. They want to be sure that new hires have come from the same privilege they expect to bestow on their own alumni. If you aren't from the particular "culture" you ought to seek employment elsewhere.
3
Not only rich kids sail. Also, with wealth does come advantages. This is not inherently unfair. Bribes are unfair. Hiring a tutor, not so much. Music lessons, not so much. Being a donor to a school community and having a lineage of students at a school? Sure. If Dad was a good student wouldn't it be a safe bet that daughter would as well? I could go either way on the last one, but as long as the most deserving go I'm OK with it.
Let's do more to raise all boats and give all students the advantages they need, but let's not make this a referendum on people who use their hard earned resources to help their kids. Of course, fairness in admissions is paramount and there are issues, but spending a little extra for a saxophone lesson is not the same as gaming the system.
"The widespread practice of preferentially admitting the children of alumni is a fund-raising technique."
This is known as legacy admissions. Why not use the common term?
1
“Please, sir, I want to join the Few.”
“I’m sorry, there are far too many.”
Beyond the Fringe
1
Can it be a coincidence that this case is being brought in Massachusetts; the home of Harvard, Tufts, MIT, U Mass, BU, Brandeis, Boston College, Northeast U, and Worcester PolyTech? I think not. The Times has got it exactly right. The crimes being charged in this case are analogous to a corrupt police force in the pocket of the Mob, arresting small time criminals trying to muscle in on a piece of the Family's rackets.
3
"American colleges have long valued athletic ability, a quality rarely considered in college admissions elsewhere in the developed world. "
I'm curious if they consider athletic ability when hiring the professors that do the research and teach the students.
4
“There can be no separate college admissions process for the wealthy.” So spoke the prosecutor in announcing the indictments yesterday, and so the NYT quoted in this article. This editorial leaves out the better (and, frankly, laugh-out-loud) quote that the prosecutor followed up with...”and there cannot be a separate criminal justice system either.” I challenge the NYT to focus on this issue as closely as their breathless coverage of the college admissions scandal press conference. You think college admissions is unfair? Well, if these folks have, and are willing to spend, millions of dollars simply to get their kid into a particular school, what do you think that they are going to spend to avoid the legitimate consequences of their crimes? The early betting line is that the total time served COMBINED by all the parents charged will be less than the 36 months proposed by the New York prosecutor recently for the defendant who stole 100 quarters from a vending machine. Not two separate criminal justice systems? What a joke.
9
This shouldn't come as any kind of surprise, the college admissions process is not and never has been a meritocracy, in large part because it is really hard to define merit, and how to define it where it can't be gamed. The problem is that colleges sell it as a meritocracy and a whole industry has become centered around college admissions (which the schools love), so they proclaim that their kids all got >2200 on the SAT, had 8 AP tests, X EC's (magic numbers), and pretend that indicates merit. Problem is, test scores and GPA like that often indicate someone good at playing the system, rather than having real merit. Outside of fraud, those kind of numbers can be game, intensive test prep, doing 'Golden" ecs (in music, prob 60% of the kids who go to programs like high level pre college prep programs do so because elite schools love kids with high level music training); there is a whole cottage industry of 'college coaches' who tell you which EC's to do.....and most of these are most readily available to those well off enough to afford them. The well off will tell you their kids 'achieved' as if their wealth didn't matter, as if all a working class/poor/rural kid has to do is work hard, like their progeny.....the irony is they complain about kids getting in who didn't deserve to, while defending legacy set asides or the kids of donors as being "fair"
1
What disappoints most is the refusal of these parents to be satisfied with the enormous advantages that already accrue to their children as a function of their wealth and connections. Rather than having the grace to exploit those advantages legally, these parents embraced a blatantly illegal plan that undermined their own children and further corrupted an already problematic college admissions process.
2
The WASP elites at least sent their kids to wars and knew the value of noblesse oblige.
I'm finding the "grab what you can" Trump-type uncultivated elite rule increasingly hard to endure.
It's tempting to pack up and leave as one of the lucky ones with a EU passport. Let's see if the progressives can get the country back on track.
6
@Liz: The WASP elites stopped sending their kids to war during the Vietnam era. John Kerry, Yale Class of 1966, enlisted and served, coming home with a Silver Star, Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts. George W. Bush, another Yale graduate in the Class of 1968, used his dad's connections to join the Air National Guard and avoid combat. By most accounts, he also dodged most of his duties to the Air National Guard without any consequences.
And which one did this country elect President -- twice? GWB benefited from a rigged Yale, a rigged draft system, and a rigged Supreme Court decision in the 2000 election. When will we acknowledge that our ruling class has been demonstrating its corruption at least since the late 60s?
1
The most distressing thing I learned early in my college days was how fortunate I was to have a Harvard alumnus as a father. I was told - surreptitiously, of course, but with absolute clarity - that if I ever, *ever* applied to Harvard, my chances of being accepted were very, very good.
Even with a GPA at the time of less than 3.0 and with old test scores that did not come with four digits, I could get into Harvard? As a word in my favorite movie said, inconceivable. But true.
I never applied.
5
There are hundreds of good colleges and universities across the country that have less competitive admissions standards than these so-called top elite colleges and tens of thousands of graduates of these schools who are highly successful. As a parent of three adult children, two graduates of and one in college, I know that each child matures, gains wisdom, and finds their own interests and passions at their own unique pace. In fact, some of us don’t find our calling until much later in life. We return to college as middle aged and elderly students. It’s not uncommon.
This pressure to send one’s child to one of these name-brand institutions as a sign of good parenting and a symbol of a family’s social standing is madness. I believe this is a major culprit in our widening economic stratum and our race to complete cultural degradation.
1
So, only the super-wealthy are still able to game the system, by donating a building or other extremely valuable gift. That isn't right either - but these folks are beyond prosecution. I suspect that if anyone who donated so substantially to a college had to restrict their related children from attending that college there would be very few donations of that kind. In one case, a grandson of a wealthy donor, who donated a building to Yale, was admitted and permitted to slide through - with a gentleman's C - as admitted to by George Bush Jr.
2
While I condemn bribery and committing crimes to secure a college acceptance in an elite college, I feel there is a general misunderstanding of how college admissions have always worked.
Good colleges will give preferential treatment to alum and potentially wealth donors. Some see this as affirmative action for the rich and connected. This may be true, but what is not realized is that in many schools 5% of the graduating class will make up 90% of the donations. These are the same donations that allow poor but meritorious students to go on full scholarships. For example at my 25th reunion, one alum donated $100 million dollars (same one who bought $238 million penthouse in NYC). $100 million dollars perpetually generating 7% returns will forever allow dozens of poor but qualified students to get full scholarship. I have no idea how qualified his children are, but I would understand that they be held at a different admission standard than my own kids.
The public needs to understand that not every spot is given out on basis of pure merit. Years ago, my college took a person who was dumb as an ox, but he was the only person they could find who was willing to play the tuba at football games.
4
Guess what? Rich parents also "buy" their kids paid jobs at universities. We call these "do hires." This is while we cut other positions on campus.
1
In the movie Wall Street, Gordon Gecko famously declared 'greed is good!' And we believed him. For him greed meant taking everything you can simply because you can.
His world of greed created a Darwinian result. Those at the top are there because they deserve to be there. And those at the bottom are not only unworthy, it's actually a waste of time and resources to try and help them.
So the parents in this scheme believed that their kids 'deserved' to be at the top. They were entitled to this place in society and so there was nothing wrong with doing a little extra to insure that this status was passed on to them.
While we can condemn them for breaking the law, at some level they are simply playing by the social norms that we have created.
Despite all the mythology about merit, reality is often quite different. CEO's don't make 400 times the salary of the average worker because of merit.
Apple didn't get a 120 billion dollar windfall from the Trump tax bill because they deserved it. They lobbied and rigged the system.
There are countless examples of how we have preached merit and equality, but practiced power and privilege.
There will be the usual internal investigations and tearful mia culpa's from the defendants. But until we address the staggering inequality that we have built into out society this won't be considered 'gaming the system. This will be the system.
1
Wall Street hires lots of Ivy Leaguers, people whose parents made a big donation to the college and later agreed to park a significant sum with the hiring firm. Explains why there are so many cheats and fools on Wall Street.
The idea that elite colleges and universities are necessary for success in life is simply untrue. My 4 kids all went to public school K-12 and public universities. They now include a PhD linguist who works at Google, and ER doctor, a nursing student and a 2ndLT in the Marine Corp, who will be an aviator. Their K-12 education was tuition free and the Universities they went to were reasonably priced. My youngest paid no tuition at the US Naval Academy.
These wealthy parents were victims of the elite university scam: charge outrageous tuition and convince parents it's the cost of doing business.
2
And that, precisely, is why these indictments wreak of hypocrisy. All forms of buying one's way into any institution -- whether college, a job, an internship, business opportunities (see, e.g., Ivanka Trump) -- are unfair, unacceptable and abhorrent. However, to indict parents, lowly coaches, test proctors, etc., while continuing to allow these institutions of higher learning -- all of which are tax exempt, collect, grow and maintain their endowments on a tax exempt basis, and collect money from wealthy donors who then deduct these "contributions" from their taxable incomes -- to do, effectively, the same thing, with the money simply funneled to a different coffer, is equally unfair, unacceptable and abhorrent. And to consider these "private institutions" that wish to decide for themselves whose "private donations" they will accept in exchange for admission ignores the fact that these are institutions whose wealth, and whose very existence, are subsidized by the taxpayers -- at the federal, state AND local levels. How private is that? About as private as the privatizing of profits on Wall Street, and the publicizing of risk (see, e.g., bailouts of various industries, including financial services). In some ways, it is offensive to prosecute these people without, at a minimum, demanding change from these "private" institutions.
In order to keep tuition even vaguely within the reach of most families, colleges need donations. If they can continue to receive them, they can afford scholarships, professors, and classes. If admitting one student from a rich family results in a donation that allows them to grant affordable college education to 10 others, that seems like a reasonable trade off to me.
This case is not about merit based admissions but about outright fraud; faking admission testing, lying about athletic participation, etc.
2
One of the issues being missed is not that parents paid bribes or helped students cheat on the SAT, but that we continue to subsidize these institutions through tax breaks. Why do we subsidize institutions with endowments worth billions? Also, why is so much emphasis given to tests that scores are directly correlated to income?
1
I share my perspective as a Stanford graduate and find the sailing aspect particularly intriguing. Sailing by itself is a sport reserved for a small wealthy part of the population. As an undergraduate, I took a sailing class (fun) at Lake Lagunita one spring. In many drought years, there is no water in the lake. It baffles me that the university actually gives sailing scholarships in the first place. This gives the appearance of yet another back door for the wealthy.
Tim Peterson '75
2
Private schools can value whatever criteria they choose including Alumni support. Public schools should be more regulated.
1
As someone who has in the past worked for an Ivy League admissions office, I am frustrated by the casual misinterpretations and misunderstandings that are usually evident in these articles. For very selective schools, the admissions process is extremely subjective and complicated. It is obviously not perfect or an ideal meritocracy, but at the same time, the idea that Stanford has spots “reserved” for sailing team members is absurd.
5
The point of these schools for most is the contacts with the children of the rich, who will be able to employ you latter. But these contacts are best made in the elite high schools.
The rest of his have to rise or fall on merit.
1
Because my degree is in art and English literature, I never had any illusions about college being a path to wealth. But I learned a few things.
I taught Freshman English as a grad student during the Reagan era. I had several male students who felt they were entitled to better grades and tried to bully me into changing them. I learned that a higher GPA often meant a larger salary upon graduation. But consider their role models: the new college president was given a $1.2 million salary at our Big Ten University. Where athletics are big business.
Later, I was accepted to a grad program at an Ivy League University but didn't have enough years left in my life to ever pay off the loans I would need. At the last minute, I decided to apply to one of the University of Texas branches closer to home. The department chair scanned my application and portfolio then asked to see my letter of acceptance from the Ivy. I was in. He was more interested in a letter of recommendation from a friend I'd worked with in Hollywood than my great GRE scores (which I'd worked hard to achieve). The program itself was dismal. They accepted anyone with the funds to enroll and deceived us all about our job prospects upon graduation in order to get our money. For too many students, higher education has become a scam.
1
Most of these NYT Picks comments are way too negative and cynical. Our colleges and universities are the envy of the world, and the people running them must know something, including in the exceptionally rare instances when a rich family with a not so bright or hardworking kid makes an enormous donation (buildings are many 10s of millions of dollars - this doesn't happen often). As for athletic admissions, some things athletic accomplishment can signal are the ability to work well in a team, including inspiring one's teammates, and extreme self-discipline in a different setting than sitting at a desk. People with these abilities are also worth having around in a community - not everyone, but part of the mix.
2
What do you think those parents - and many others - want for grades? and for course content? And what do you think they get from these "innocent" administrators? How do you think that effects American higher education; and, eventually, all of American education?
When I taught at an elite school, Wash. U. in St. Louis, the answers to those questions became clear to me. Just read the letter from a student and his parents that were sent to the deans.
Those letters (with identifying details omitted, of course) are posted on my blog, inside-higher-ed.com . You can find the whole story there. It's titled "A Tale Out of School".
In that story you can read emails from deans and the math chair, expressing their concern that this course, mainly for engineers, not be too hard. As one dean wrote, "retention" is important. Education? Read the story and see.
1
Good editorial! I'd been seeing the issue as the unfairness of kids 'jumping the line' because their families have money. But the Times is correct, this is more a question of saying that, if people are jumping the line, then they should be paying the UNIVERSITY for the privilege. SO many problems with this. To me, the biggest is that the fee paid by parents to get their kids in (a new library, for example) should NOT be tax deductible. Money given to private universities should NOT be tax exempt, nor should money given to churches, or museums, etc. I understand that this might lead to less giving. I'm fine with that. I would give anything not to have to listen to the Cars for Kids jingle. The void should be filled with taxation, and the money directed for the public good, like Public Colleges and government funded medical research. I don't want tax exemptions supporting the lifestyle of rich evangelists.
8
I hope that class action lawsuits will be filed on behalf of students who paid application fees to these schools but weren't given a fair shot because of this cheating.
If 47,050 people applied to Stanford and only 2,750 got accepted, there were 44,750 individuals who paid an application fee for a fraudulent admissions process. Application fees are @$80 at top schools. I'm thinking that's a $3.5 million class action suit for that one year at Stanford. And this fraud went on for years at numerous colleges.
The schools may say they didn't know, but due diligence demands that they should have known. And they should pay.
8
Like everything else in our system of "values," money trumps merit every time.
3
The reason elite academic institutions value athletics or artistic talents is that they demonstrate perseverance and commitment. Better still if such student excels. These are noble qualities and it is remarkable that you find this an unworthy consideration. Ask any employer what characteristics they seek in an employee and high on that list will be these skills. By comparison you seem to suggest, falsely by academic studies and real world anecdotes, that diversity somehow is a relevant metric for merit. Time and again it has been proven that mismatching “diversity” candidates works against the students. They perform at lower end of classes and have higher drop out rates. Simply look at Penn Law for a recent case study on this.
1
@Dady the problem here is not a matter of diversity over merit.
I really don't understand the uniquely American emphasis on athletics. I think being active is wonderful and I do appreciate truly high-level athletic skill -- but long before college, the emphasis on sports is misplaced. In my town, they actually publicize in the local newspaper that XYZ student is going to play football (or field hockey, baseball, etc.) at the state college. SO? Highly unlikely that student will go pro in that sport. So - if they're not headed to the pros, why celebrate it? I don't think the non-academic "merit" should be significantly considered in college applications unless the student is aiming to go professional - or already is -- in that area. It could be acting, dance, visual arts or sailing - unless they are truly notable-on-a-national-level talented, it shouldn't be celebrated.
They never have "signing" days, where an academically-talented student commits to go to Harvard, Yale, MIT...A talented dancer going to a prestigious performing arts college doesn't have a public signing ceremony. Why do it for baseball players that are unlikely to ever even play in the Minors?
This starts very young. In my town, hundreds of kids (and parents) turn out for money-making youth soccer camps...yet a competing event at the local library is lucky if it gets more than 20 kids to show up.
This athletic distraction can only hurt America. Think of all the academically-talented people whose spots and "scholarships" went to athletes.
3
If using somebody else's test scores to get a kid into college is an example of parental thinking, then we have to wonder how the parents managed their own academic careers.
After all, the point here is not getting into college. It's getting out again, degree in hand, 4 years later. Are the parents planning to purchase passing grades in each and every course as well?
2
The real farce is that colleges are completely preferential to “student athletes” in this country. Great students who don’t have a sport are declined in favor of ones with lower grades who can fill a slot on the girls basketball team, even at small liberal arts schools in division three. These kids will never play sports as graduates of those colleges but some real academics who might be star intellectuals or scientists are disadvantaged.
2
My guidance counselor in high school told me as much. So I went to a state school for undergrad, and went to an Ivy for business school, on my own nickel, on my own merit. And now when I interview young people for jobs I look at where they went to undergrad and think, "that's where their parents wanted them to go." Now I simply want to know who paid for their degree, and yes, I'm biased against those who paid for it themselves.
1
???
Why are you biased against those who paid for it themselves?
Did you mean to write, “biased in favor of”?
The NYT's take on this: "In an era when most Americans are struggling to succeed economically, many of those who have prospered are terrified that their children will not get every opportunity to replicate that success." Nope. That is too charitable. Many of the affluent are fully aware of the massive concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, and they want to put their kids into contact with the offspring of those same elite. They want their kids to make friends with the obscenely rich, maybe even marry them, enter their lifelong networks and enjoy the patronage of their future friends' .01% parents.
The families who do this are not just sincerely seeking safety for their kids' futures. They want them to get a piece of that action.
4
"But it seems safe to stipulate that being born to wealthy parents is not by itself meritorious."
Ridiculous statement - kids who don't apply for financial aid are much more valuable applicants.
Rocky, you've misunderstood what “merit” means!
Being born to wealthy parents does not, ipso facto, make you more academically talented, a better student, or one who merits admission because of their scholarly abilities.
Colleges should set minimum entrance standards, place applicants who meet them into a pool of eligibles, and conduct a lottery to see who gets admitted,
1
Once again, it's time for Americans to wake up and clearly see the world as it is. Does anyone honestly believe that we live in a completely meritocratic country? If so, I have three words for you: George W. Bush. If success in life was based solely on talent, that particular individual would have been a not terribly good assistant manager of a 7-11 with a substance abuse problem, not a former president of the United States. The dirty little secret that merit is not strictly determinative goes for any profession or industry where you can ride the coattails of your family name or family connections.
5
Just a very sad thing. There is sleaze everywhere. Always some cutting corners and those that make it happen
1
I wonder what the young adults whose college education was facilitated by this behavior are thinking right now. Embarrassed? Entitled?
1
Anger at the perks of wealth is understandable, but implying there’s no real difference between the bribery and fraud exposed here and the “normal” if maddening admissikns practices of private universities is outrageous. (And if the Times doesn’t think that’s what they’ve done they need only read post afrer post from readers who got the message loud and clear.) However maddening and unfair the process of granting special status to children of large donors may be, those donations make possiible the scholarships and facilities available to dozens of deserving students for every one who got special treatment. The slimey practices exposed here made no difference to anyone but the child admitted and the employee who got paid - one kid in, another kid out. Period. Sure it would be great if college admissions were strictly a meritocracy, but this case has absolutely nothing to do with that. The Times had no justification for implying it did.
1
Why should scholarly merit be the only criterion for college admission? We already have preferences for ethnic and racial minorities and gender, we have preferences for athletic skills and other non-academic skills, why not money? What makes that criterion inherently evil? Anti-capitalism? If you don't like capitalism, there are plenty of communist and socialist countries out there.
Dr., re-read the article and many others. The issue is that the wealthy already have vast privileges, including massive advantages and being favored by huge margins in admissions.
At a minimum, let's redress the imbalance, which helps reproduce inequalities.
Cannot believe that anyone thinks that college admissions should go to whoever has the most money!
2
This is not a victimless crime. When the likes of Jared Kushner and Donald Trump are given a pass to be masters of the universe without earning it, billions of people suffer.
8
This doesn't shock me. For years, the University of Illinois was known as Chicago Machine University for all the crooks who bribed their kids' way in, to the point that an Illinois degree was instantly devalued compared to one from another Big Ten school. It has only become more difficult to hide it in the decades since the Machine's heyday.
I think we need more elite schools.
The indicted parents seem rather naive. Why pay $500,000 to a middle man to get your kid into a top school when truly rich and powerful know you can buy your kid a spot the legal way?
2
Meanwhile community colleges, an actual path to the middle class for millions, struggle. Want to know what makes people socialists? Rigged capitalism and all its guarded doors.
4
I have been interviewing and hiring folks for 30 plus years in all sorts of positions...where you went to school never comes up unless we were conference rivals. The facts are that this story only points out the gross inequality we are already facing. If you are the child of a very wealthy person you don’t actually need to have gone to Harvard or Yale! You will already be traveling in an orbit that most of us can only imagine. That these parents felt the need to add an INSURANCE policy if you will is astounding. I don’t understand what these parents were trying to accomplish. In reality it almost sounds as if they were duped into believing that the payments weren’t bribes but were the same donations that other very wealthy folks making to accomplish the same ends. Either way I reiterate...IT IS ALL A WASTE OF TIME! If you’re rich enough to pay this vig you don’t need to!!
1
For every student admitted through diversity / affirmative action, a more talented student was rejected.
2
Have some irony with your morning coffee.
The system is filled with legal bribery as the editorial suggests. Just do it properly to sustain the illusion of hard work/merit.
Still...... money can't buy everything: dignity and honor matter. Some still want to look in the mirror without disgust.
3
@David Henry I like to say that justice in the USA is colorblind; it only sees green. Marketplace values have seeped into every crevice of our culture but you can't buy the self-esteem that comes with achievement.
Ah, yes, Bush II (Yale) and Trump (Wharton).
No doubt, they would have only been able to attend the local community college had their Dad's not dropped the dime on those schools.
Just imagine if Yale and Wharton did NOT allow rich parents to buy a spot. Those guys would probably never have been President.
Is Ivy responsible for the destruction of the middle east and the rise of white supremacy in the US? Good question.
At least Bush II, by his own honest admission, says he graduated from the bottom of his class starting in kindergarten.
That other guy is a genius though. Ask him.
5
That makes American colleges bogus and it becomes clear that academic credentials do not guarantee the necessary qualification. All these so called elites colleges are overrated and should be downgraded.
That in America money equates to access, if not success, in too many endeavors is no surprise. Even the Catholic Church is well known of exchanging annulments for cash. It was the voracious immoral audacity and criminal complexity of this particular scheme, to gain college admission no less, that has attracted the public’s attention and utter disgust. Once again, our country’s “exceptionalism” is on full display in yet another depressing chapter of the ethical impoverishment existing in this time.
2
I'm 100% okay with rich people donating large sums of money in exchange for their child's admission. People pooh-poohing this practice as unfair and unethical are out of touch.
That money buys valuable resources for the thousands of other students who got to college on their own merits. I will happily trade better facilities for a handful of mediocre rich kids getting a diploma.
In my salad days I was opposed to affirmative action as it seemed to go against a merit system which should be the only appropriate way to gain admission to a good university. But then I came to understand that the system is totally rigged to begin with. In the Ivies not only do legatees, regardless of their aptitude, get a leg up over ordinary mortals, but even new money can brazenly buy its way in for the right sum. Yet this barely scratches the surface. What truly galls is the manner in which middle class kids can gild their pathetic lilies by way of private tutoring for the SATS, talentless participation in myriad extracurricular activities to which they are chauffeured in luxury SUVs by their helicopter moms, and 'volunteer' programs that require a $15,000 payment of parental money in order to spend two weeks working on thatched roofs in a manicured jungle. Hence, clearly, anything goes in the rigged race for admissions, and what these Hollywood actors did is hardly against the grain. Seems to me a part time job flipping burgers at the local MAcDonalds should speak far more favorably for an applicant that all the baloney being flung the Lexus class.
2
Anyone still think we live in a meritocracy? Exhibit A is, of course, our President. And the same doctors who can be persuaded that Junior has ADD - and therefore requires extra time to complete his SATs - probably also have a sideline expertise in bone spurs.
4
The real loser in all this is the kids. The children of these wealthy parents, who have learned from Mom and Dad that cheating is the way to "win" in life, have been failed by their parents, and lost something precious - their self-respect. And the children of poorer parents, who may have earned the place in these 'elite' schools that was instead sold off to the wealthy parent's child. Those children can at least be sure that they got into their school on their own merit, by their own work and achievement. The wealthy children have lost more - because their entire life, people will wonder if what they have, and what they achieve is due to honest work and skill, or if it is another cheat. Even if those children end up being presidents or Senior White House Advisors, people will always see that they have their positions, their wealth, the "wins" and the "success" because of fraud and cheating. Sad.
105
@Jim Brokaw In a Hallmark movie--the kind Lori Loughlin makes, this would all be true. I wish it were true.
Unfortunately, the wealthy kids whose parents have bought them a place do win in life. They certainly have not lost more. A degree from the right school brings a life of comfort and privilege.
34
@Jim Brokaw
I seriously doubt that many children of the wealthy lose their self-respect through this egregious process. Unfortunately, most probably have their sense of entitlement enhanced and feel encouraged to pass it on to their children--a truly insidious legacy.
42
@Jim Brokaw
This also affects the children who were unaware of their parents' chicanery and who supposed they got into a top school on their own merit. They were in way over their heads, and their college experiences leave them with a lifetime of feeling inadequate and insecure.
39
These elite colleges are also very generous in their grading system not because they have the brightest students but because their tuition and fees are expensive. When mediocre students with a rich family background are admitted, future employers can never know whether they are genuinely good. Right, they just need the elite school degree to gain access to networks.
Exactly when was it ever fair?
1
Here's something all this news has stirred up in my mind: might it be better to have the children of weathy receive extra help to go to the best schools, since the wealthy end up in charge regardless?
We know the system is rigged so that they will hold the reigns of power anyways, so the world is better off having them better-educated.
For example, I suppose I am objectively better off with Jared Kushner having gone to Harvard than had he attended a lower-tier school. Perhaps Jared, who was going to be in charge of so much no matter what due to his wealth, will be more a force for good for having attended a good school? Maybe this is a perverse kind of charity, making sure those destined for power receive a good education no matter how dumb they are? For the good of the world? Until such a time that we don't give the world over to to rich?
Wait... on the other hand, perhaps that entitlement is what allowed Jared to brazenly receive his undeserved security clearance? That, I don't abide.
Why, would parents spend millions to get their mediocre kid into a prestigious institution?
Because, the mere fact having a good name for an alma mater will open doors of the "rigged" social circle of the business world, which is mostly run by alumni of said prestigious institutions...
The game has been rigged for longer than people care to admit it !
How many people knew about this scam? How long did it go on? Did no one in this community of wealth and privilege think to alert the universities or law enforcement? Are they all so willing to turn a blind eye? This is how corruption thrives.
This is apart of a larger college problem. Namely what we use education for. It’s all about access. You either need the brains or money or, usually, both.
Gone are the lofty days of when education was meant to make us a better citizens. Now it’s simply another gate for a young person (who barely knows how to balance a checkbook or what debt really means) that must pass through for the chance of not being as income unequal as their rest of their peers.
We’ve turned college into a machine that’s all about pedigree and no substance. As a millennial, I have seen what a fool I was for multiple degrees that got me nowhere except debt. I’m not the only one. College is just another institution that’s in it for them. Big surprise considering what we value in this country.
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@Anne
Well said!
But this not only happens at the college level but, believe it or not, K-12.
My daughter attends a private high school since we live in an urban environment where the local schools just aren't safe.
Her private school is run like a college . . . meaning they look at what the kids can bring to the school in terms of boasting the schools status, with athletics being the schools main focus.
And given the school last year had 2000 applicants for 500 freshmen class slots you can see how things play out: good athlete, scholar, musician, actor, etc. and you're in. Don't fill those slots, well are you willing to give a donation? But I highly doubt there is fraud given this is a Christian school. ;)
@Anne: And what are your degrees in? Liberal Arts? Where if you don’t study for & receive a teaching certificate, you are left with a loft education & NO marketable skills. If you are the child of a multimillionaire it doesn’t matter. You will never have to truly find a job. Your parents will either hire you for the family business or hire the child of a wealthy family friend, while that family hires YOU.
I think that anyone going to college with ANY type of scholarship should have to study majors that ready them for a paying job. If they don’t get good grades any loans they get should become immediately repayable, or the interest quadruples & the bank can get a court order so that every cent you earn goes to them until (never, not possible) the loan is totally paid off.
Also all exams, essays, etc for entry should have to be written in a large room with NO proctors, just security cameras on each prospective student & streams directly to the internet. Each student proclaiming ON CAMERA, who they are & that they are not in any way cheating. So if it is found they did (& there will be plenty of people studying those videos to prove it) any grades, awards, & diplomas received will be revolked.We can’t stop the rich from stealing diplomas (not educations) from these schools, look who’s president. It is easy to believe all his diplomas were bought, from kindergarten onwards.
2
@White Wolf
You can't seriously be arguing there is no benefit to a liberal arts education, can you?
You know, it used to be that employers properly took it upon themselves to job train the people they hired.
It is not up to schools to job train for corporations.
4
So life isn't fair after all and the wealthy have it better than the poor do. This really is breaking news.
The aura of being a Stanford alumni is a golden halo to write your own ticket. It’s less about a fair and accurate assessment and more about the means to trump the needs of getting in the door.
As a parent of a now 30 something I remember high school days and nights when my daughter worked so hard on academics and her extr-curricular activities, not with the end goal of a coveted Ivy League spot, but because her value system and enjoyment of life came from learning and participating.
At SAT time her scores and those of the group she took the test with were somehow lost or messed up. I remember both of our frustrations when she was notified that her re-take date was a day we had planned an out-of-town five day trip to visit schools in the Chicago area over her Spring Break. It cost my family money to re-work the trip and my daughter frustration. Who knows if her score was any different than what the original
score would have been?
The end result was her admission to several prestigious schools including Ivy League schools.
The lesson for us was that life happens and you deal with it by rolling with the punches, balancing the ups and downs and working hard.
These students are being done a disservice by their parents and being taught horrid values.
Students who work hard and can handle the academic load at the schools are being deprived of coveted admissions spots by these parents so their children can have an elite university as part of their pedigree?
That's all very interesting, but the story today is OUTRIGHT FRAUD. You should pitch this argument some other day. That you're choosing to downplay some very significant crimes with a false relativism is a sure sign of your decline. Hats off to the prosecutors.
2
So how do you think DJT got into college?
Merit? Yeah right.
That's why he threatens his high school, the College Board and his colleges about releasing his grades and test scores.
2
It is good to know that Ohio State and UNC and Kentucky and other schools don't do these same things with regard to student-athletes, with the full blessing of admissions officers.
Ahem.
I am grateful that I came to the realization in mid-life, that it doesn't matter AT ALL where you go to college. When I was hiring, I didn't look, and I didn't care. This would all go away if people understood that the people who REALLY REALLY care that you went to Harvard undergrad, are people that you really really don't need in your life. I would be happy if my child went to a local state school, a large university not too far away, a trade school, the college I graduated from or the college where my husband matriculated. I don't care. As long as she is happy. The only reason these schools can continue to benefit from this cycle of corrupt craziness, is because we as parents give them that power. That's the sad story.
1
What's new, anyway? The wealthy have been gaming the system since time immemorial.
There is nothing shocking about this.
Meritocracy is a lie.
1
I simply can't believe that these are the only parents guilty of cheating and bribing their kids' way to college. I have a feeling we're only seeing the tip of an iceberg -- that this has been going on for a long time and that there are many other Mr. Singers out there.
2
This is the way we undermine all of society. Allowing the wealthy to buy their way into higher is a social crime. We truly need the best and the brightest.
How did Trump get into Wharton? How did George W Bush get into Yale and Harvard?
We are left with mediocre leaders who do great damage.
253
Moonwood is right. Trump and George W. Bush perfect examples of what is wrong with college admissions, especially when the well off can buy (bribe) their child's way into colleges such as Wake Forest and Yale to name a few. Bad for the government, science, medicine, technology and engineering. Bad for us all.
28
@Moonwood It's true, so sadly true. How can someone who reads (only when forced) in such a faltering manner have gotten into Wharton? It's so disconcerting to watch - he has trouble reading simple sentences and likely could not compose a coherent essay if his life depended upon it... and yet here he is, POTUS. And this began decades ago, when his Father made sure his boy would get into a prestigious school, to the exclusion of someone who may have truly, 'made this country great'...
20
@Moonwood
Or take a look at Trump's kids, who don't have enough brains to grease a gimlet but went to dear old Dad's U of P....and then we have Tiffany Trump getting into Georgetown law, when she seems to have majored in partying and being on social media.
15
Just another outrageous example of what American style predator-prey capitalism begets. A world fully dictated by the concept of a war of all against all is the direction we seem to be headed.
2
Unfortunately, there continues to be an alternate admissions system for the wealthy, one that is perfectly legal. One acquaintance of ours who had a son with a mediocre high school record simply wrote a $100k check to their school of choice and Bam! Accepted to Wesleyan. Lesson to the rich: be a donor. Don't risk jail and embarrassment by trying to scam the system when there is already an admissions system made just for you!
2
This whole story takes the cake. It's really hard to see falling further than this.
1
Silly me - and here I thought if the parents could afford the tuition with the help of student loans and/or grants, their kid was a shoe in. Apparently, being able to afford the tuition alone is either irrelevant or not enough.
1
“We’re not talking about donating a building so that a school is more likely to take your son or daughter,” he said at the news conference. “We’re talking about deception and fraud.”
If that's not the ultimate hypocrisy, I don't know what is!
1
Wow. How embarrassing for their kids. Now they have to go through the final semester of their senior year - what the rest of us remember as probably being one of the happiest times in our entire life - with the whole class (students, teachers and coaches) looking at them in the hallway and thinking, “Your parents age going to jail because they didn’t have enough faith in you that you could make it on your own.” Ugh!
81
For violation of the honor code any student aware of this crime should be kicked out or have their diploma revoked. Did not know, ok. Did know, good bye.
3
@Rick
True. For the rest of their lives, they will be know as the dummies who's parents had to buy their way into college.
5
Actually, I think this is probably all about the parents. They couldn't be comfortable with their kid going to a "lesser" college (in their eyes). The parents lost sight of the fact that the growth found in the college experience is really not predicated on whether the place is elite or not. For the most part, it doesn't matter where you go to college if you are motivated and want to succeed in your chosen field. So many parents see where their kid goes to college as a reflection of themselves and obsess about it. These ones sure did, to the detriment of their kids - even if the kids were stressing about wanting to go to the elite ones, it's up to the parents to set them straight.
2
What does athletic prowess have to do with the ability to be up to par for academic studies? Just because someone is a great athlete does not mean he is also capabable of becoming an academic and vice versa. What are these athletes actually doing at the colleges besides raising money? This systen is just totally corrupt while debasing serious academia.
1
so tell us readers, what deal did singer get to cooperate? how few years in prison? how much money does he get to keep? it does no good to air wrongs when you reward the worst of the lot for his/her input. bribery is bribery, it is illegal and should be punished with commenserate sentencing.
1
Prior to the World Wars, admittance to Ivy League colleges were determined by examination only. As more Jews gained entry to Ivy and other elite colleges (threatening WASP student body dominance), other applicant variables began to be considered in order to curtail Jewish admittance by exam -- athletic prowess, leadership, legacy, etc. The non-academic variables eventually grew to include factors like "geographic diversity" (e.g., a rare (white) applicant from Montana would have a leg up on a common (Asian) applicant from Manhattan). The introduction of these creative non-academic variables had a distinctive impact -- to diminish growing number of Jewish (and more recently Asian American) matriculants. Bottom line -- pure meritocracy (defined as academic scores) in the elite college admissions arena has been absent for over 70 years. Today's elite colleges admit applicants based on an esoteric and mystifying algorithm of academic scores (e.g., SATs, GPA), non-academic achievements (e.g., varsity athlete, award winning musician, class president), and non-achievement attributes (legacy, geographic diversity...and now, apparently, parents who bribe).
Is this country going to go down the route of Trump and Kushner buying their way through life. It still blows my mind how Clinton and Obama made it to the White House given their lack of family wealth and connections. When American institutions turn their back on the kids who are smart, hardworking, and have ethics - we will rot. Given the global economy, the US can’t afford to let talent be wasted on corruption.
1
If you're poor and qualified in the (dis)United States, you can take on crushing debt and go to some appropriately mediocre university. Or, you can join the military, get deployed to one of our forever corrupt wars which fill the pockets of investors but do anything but keep us safe, then come home dead, maimed physically or mentally, and most certainly without decent job prospects. After all that, you can take out a loan and go to a mediocre college. Can there be anything more infuriating than being poor in America, playing by the rules, and enduring a top to bottom system of corruption, cronyism, and breathtaking hypocrisy ensuring you stay put. We need a new vocabulary to describe the social and political norms we now endure.
234
@Jaden Cy "We need a new vocabulary to describe the social and political norms we now endure."
We have the vocabulary. It's called plutocracy. Every form of government eventually becomes a plutocracy, if great pains are not taken to cripple the power of the wealthy; an extremely difficult task. Oh, you can find exceptions here and there throughout history, but they only last if the population involved is small and relatively primitive.
It's the primary reason why fully socialist governments don't work; sooner or later, plutocrats end up in power, even if governing is nominally overlaid with other -isms, and a plutocratic socialist society either tears itself apart or becomes a dictatorship that mocks the goals socialism is supposed to strive for. And, of course, plutocracy comes fastest and easiest with capitalism.
Lol, our Constitution was designed to protect the perquisites of the plutocracy at the time of its creation, though at least it gives the non-elite a better shot at the heights than what came before, and tries to mitigate the worst of the ills that come with unrestrained plutocracy.
I know we don't want to think of ourselves this way. But that's part of the unwitting indoctrination we all get from birth in the US. It's why we have to fight so hard, every day, to uphold the Constitution. Flawed as it is in favor of plutocracy, it's still not plutocratic enough for human nature. Overall, it's a pretty good document, but much of it's unnatural to our ape brains.
13
@Jaden Cy
I would like to point out all of the excellent state schools that exist at a much lower cost.
11
@sjs good luck getting a job at a top firm with one of those. One of their first steps in reducing the big pile of resumes is separating them by classes of college, elite and not. That will not change in spite of this expose.
9
Why is this so surprising? It comes down to a very old, very basic, law doesn't it?
"Whomever has the gold, makes the rules."
And then makes sure their kids are secure. It's a law as old as the hills, and is especially true when it comes to parenting. Prime example? Trump's father. You see how the son turned out with all his help, eh? (You knew I'd go there, didn't you?)
In fact, recognizing how that rule can harm those it is meant to help SHOULD be an abject lesson to parents. They may support their kids, but not to the point where their accomplishments are not based on true merit.
Doing so all but guarantees that child becomes a very insecure adult. One who acts out and plays at jobs and such that are well beyond him/her. Speaking of which....
John~
American Net'Zen
This is like an episode of the tv show shameless but for the wealthy.
1
Private university. That means not public.
1
The speaker at my high school graduation stated that it’s not what you know But who you know seems to be true!
I hope people are aware that though these arrests relate to the rich willing to bribe and pay 3rd to facilitate their dirty work, many well-off families, though not as rich, also cheat on a massive scale when it comes to college admissions. They lie throughout their applications, they're paying others to do their homework, to write their admissions essays, doctoring credentials, etc. This craziness is not going to be deterred until the schools do better at weeding out the frauds. And they can, but they won't!
66
Merit, ha! Money yes.
I was fortunate to get into a specialized university program that took 16 from 4 thousand. I was the only low income student.
I am one of 2 still practicing. The other 14 spots were taken by high income students, some deserving of the opportunity. None followed through wasting an expensive education that someone would have appreciated.
Very nice people, friends for life but...was I the only one who took it seriously?
Money absolves you of responsibility.
2
Being an adjunct, two things are being missed. One, bribery as was done here is not common. I hope your readers are understanding that just because these cases have come to light does not mean that all students somehow have "gamed" the system and have been admitted to any school, whether their parents went there or donated to the school. Second, just because a student is admitted does not automatically guarantee life success. A graduate...if they make it that far...has to, you know, perform at their job? Job recruiters look at resumes with the names of colleges and say, "oh...that's nice. What have you done?"
52
@Ken Hanig
I would also point out that just because you were admitted to college does not mean you will get the degree. How many of these kids will be dropping out because they can't do the work? A fair number I would guess.
4
@Ken Hanig I agree - yes, it looks like an accomplishment to get into a competitive school, but that absolutely does not guarantee you are going to skate by and pass all your classes, nor does it guarantee you a great or satisfying job. As shocking and gross as this story is, there is a lot of reductive discussion going on.
3
@Ken Hanig, Look at Loughlon's daughter. She got into a prestigious school on her mother's money and lack of character, and she's already using the status of being at that school to enrich herself.
9
The Atlanta teachers were under received 20-year sentences for their alleged roles in cheating on standardized tests. They boosted scores at least in part to save their schools from impossible educational benchmarks. Free the Atlanta teachers. Let's watch as the rich and white are tried now. No doubt very different outcomes.
1
These bribing parents also have saddled their children with a shame that will follow them for the rest of their lives. Can't bode well for future familial relations either, as most of these transactions were apparently made without the consent of the students.
1
Good luck to rich kids from elite colleges finding good jobs and employers now!
1
College sports! What an oxymoron.
In our hearts we all know it doesn’t belong in a college’s mission statement, don’t we?
This practice, as well as allowing the wealthy to buy a place for their kids through donations, makes the elite universities and their offered degrees a joke.
And people wonder why voters are fed up with the system enough to elect Trump. And wonder no more why elite is a dirty word. A rigged system. It always has been, but now people are getting that because its in your face everywhere.
...but then the great “joke” is that Trump was elected as reaction to the Elite, and he is about as privileged elite as it possibly gets.
The man literally has a gold-leafed penthouse on 5th ave.
@David Jacobson
So the response to a perceived system of unfairness in letting the wealthy buy a place for their kids is to elect perhaps the poster child for someone who is sliding through life using his money as a weapon and inflicting his unqualified family and friends on the rest of us?!?
A decade ago I asked my member of congress to introduce a simple 18 word bill:
‘Schools that give preference in admission to relatives of alumni shall not be eligible to receive federal funds’.
It would have kept George W. Bush out of the White House, but of course we now know that there can be far worse occupants of the Oval Office.
Dan Kravitz
1
Again, can we stop pretending that the "best and brightest" go to the Ivy League when we have abundant evidence that that claim is not true? The Ivy League for the Economically Gifted is more like it -- the true talent lies in the state colleges.
2
There is no magic to a successful academic career - it’s hard work! Language skills, writing skills, analytical skills, and yes intelligence. Partying, luxury holidays, and the spa life are detrimental. If students need someone to lie and cheat they are doomed to failure. The average student is most likely to succeed! They had to work to get there. So quite drubbing the middle class - they are the success story. Immigrants prove this!
The truth is that there shouldn't be anyone receiving a slot in a college that doesn't have the skills necessary to do the work, which unfortunately, in Minnesota, for over 4 decades, if you could barely pass high school, and if you were a good athlete, they would give you a free four year scholarship, when unless you were at the top of the class, you wouldn't receive. That is absolutely despicable. In that athletes, had people that took tests for them, went to class, etc. which was, and is total fraud. I think what this scandal shows, is that not everyone, is college material in terms of academic ability, and shouldn't be going to college, especially in this day and age, when you have many talented, and academically minded people who want to be doctors, teachers, researchers, etc. who are highly needed in this country, not students who have little academic ability, who are just taking up space. They will have to find other avenues to make both a life, and a living. The idea that just because you go to college, unless you are outstanding in the fields of math, and science, etc., it is doubtful that you are all that smart, it is just that money, and alumni status of one's ancestors made a spot in a particular college. It seems to be that a number of our Presidents are just such people.
29
Indeed, in his letter to the Yale community yesterday President Salovey characterised Yale as a “victim” of this crime — when plainly the actual victims are high attaining kids who lack the family means to get an edge in the admissions process. Without a parent to make a donation to the university or, as they do in New York’s suburbs, pay for a squash coach or music tutor, ordinary Americans are at a disadvantage, rightly embittered that those more privileged than they can, thanks to the admissions and development practices of institutions such as Yale, mask their luck behind the claim of “meritocracy”.
Since it is now indisputable that places at Yale are available for purchase, perhaps it is time that the admissions market become more efficient. Yale should discard the fiction that all places are awarded on “merit”, stop the backroom conversations with alumni about donations for the good of the university with the double of effect of improved admissions chances for progeny, and put a handful of spots up for sale. An auction should achieve a premium over the c $1 mm price per seat that the Yale development office, hampered by an disinclination to advertise, and crooked brokers, constrained by the risk of imprisonment, have been achieving. Assume 20 places in an auction each brought $2.5 million: enough for Yale to waive tuition fees, thereby opening its doors to the best applicants regardless of financial means. Cynical, sure - but more so than current practice?
I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the list of names referred to by the prosecutors could be called a catalogue of the wealthy, privileged and anti trump parents!
The article and the prosecutors make it clear that bribes are ok as long as they are of a certain kind and at the millions of dollars!
1
I'm puzzled as to why so many people are outraged and surprised. Why all the pearl-clutching?
This sort of nonsense has been going on for at least 100 years here in the United States, and much longer in other places. Our selection process is fundamentally flawed, to boot. Of course, nobody wants to talk about those things and actually do anything about it until something like this happens, and only then are we horrified.
Let's do something about these pay-to-play rackets for a change.
1
Charges are not for “gaming”, but for actual crimes. These weren’t tax loopholes but outright lies and complex deceptions including bribery among other equally and disturbing crimes. More disturbing is the complex network of complicit lackeys including medical professionals, university faculty, proctors and others professionals in positions of trust. The word gaming seems delightfully misleading.
72
@jg
And there's no way the kids did not know. They too are complicit.
2
@Lynn
The reputations of major U.S. educational institutions will survive this exposure
of criminal behavior by a small number of
individuals in their admissions departments.
The thousands of honest dedicated scholars, who are responsible for and create the educational quality and reputations of their U.S. colleges and universities will not allow the corrupt actions of a few individuals in their admissions offices to destroy the finest colleges and universities in the world.
No, sorry, you still have not quite hit the mark. You do acknowledge that "merit is not easily defined" so as to embrace an athlete, an artist, a prodigy, a poor kid, a dreamer, or the oppressed, but not the child of a celebrity -- who brings some notoriety and excitement to the college. They all belong to the composition of the entering class (it is a composition after all and not a statistical exercise) -- minus the illegal and shameless bribery -- Ms Huffman's child would have been welcome at so many prestigious colleges, truly! As for profitable mechanisms to exploit anxiety in order to cultivate advantage, this is the tip of the iceberg, and it is not restricted to the super wealthy.
So this is really all about the 5%, not the 1%.
1
We would not even be talking about this if we held ourselves to a higher standard in all aspects of our society. It is morality that is flawed, not our so-called system of meritocracy. For centuries, America has merely "legalized" bribery and rationalized the process by distinguishing ourselves from nations where it is even worse. It starts in politics and movers to the corporate world, educational hierarchy, to your unjust justice system. Our national motto has become: America, the cleanest dirty shirt in the closet.
2
Go after the Colleges and Universities for their academic extortion.
They strong arm parents and untenured faculty into making large donations to the school. The schools are the real criminals.
Take a look at the number of unqualified international students taking up space in colleges because of large donations from governments like Saudi Arabia.
2
I think this whole thing is a bit unfair. Those who can help pay for a new building on campus automatically get their offsprings admitted without any fuss. But those poor folks who can part with only a few million or less have to go through shady brokers. Talk about an uneven playing field! I think fixing this problem should be Trump's next project, after he finishes his wall. After all, college should be for decent white folks only.
Merit alone has never been the deciding issue, ever, with anything. It's a hard and necessary lesson to learn.
In times past there were apprenticeships, vocational training and just plain on the job experience that were all enough to enter most professions. Yes, there were often guilds and other restrictive ways of letting some in - mostly connected friends and family - and keeping many others out.
Now, thanks to the GI Bill and the explosive growth of the educational-industrial complex since the end of WW II, the 'meritocracy' has created new barriers, mostly around higher education and related - and often excessive - licensing requirements.
We now have a legally sanctioned yet dysfunctional educational-industrial complex comprised of state protected teachers unions and the 'guild' of colleges. These pawns of the elite are bleeding the vast majority of Americans dry through student loan while delivering worse results than pre-WW II. Such a class biased and elitist system is antithetical to our republic. If not fixed, it will sink us as a nation.
It bothers me that the guy who created the scam, recruited the employees from elite institutions and recruited the parents gets a deal and then proceeds to ramp his scam to new heights while recording every conversation and email for the DOJ. These people willingly participated but it is Singer who is at the top. So why does he get the deal?
1
I am glad that this latest scandal is being aired. One thing I'm curious about is how did these students fare at these prestigious colleges once they got in. Their high school grades and board scores were nowhere near the average of those who were properly admitted. Did these "entitled" students do the work necessary? Were they able to cut it? Are all students who get into the highest ranking colleges in the country guaranteed a degree? Many years ago went to a competitive college. I had to work very hard to succeed during my first two years. I saw a number of students asked not to return as their grades were too low. During my last two years I excelled, but the work load was extremely challenging.
1
@David If the cheaters succeed in their coursework, that says something [negative] about the efficacy of the supposedly selective admissions standards.
These students don't need a stellar GPA to do fine later in life due to family money and connections, and there are plenty of ways that a student can buy a grade (private tutoring, homework answer websites, paper mills, etc.).
I suspect that a lot of students do not apply themselves in high school (and earlier) or even in college but not for a lack of (potential) talent. The American system prioritizes who you know over what you know (a message reinforced by many parents) particularly in many facets of business (sales, marketing, operations, C-suite executives), for example. If you do bother to apply yourself it's amazing what just about anyone can accomplish. My two best friends from high school went to Ivy League colleges. One was black, the other was white. I took the SATs in sophomore and junior year of high school and scored 769, 770, and 791 in math, biology, and chemistry without a bit of coaching or prior study and went on to a six-year B.A.-M.D. program. I also played sports, studied piano, edited the school paper, and was on the student council. I'm not unique, however, as just about anyone could have comparable results in many other areas such as the arts, music, computers, business, fashion, and so on by actually applying themselves with support from their parents for actually doing something.
The guy that pays millions to get his kid into school provides the money so that 20 students from underprivileged backgrounds can attend at no cost. It’s the same thing as saying l’ll pay for 20 kids to go to school tuition free if you let my kid in. That seems like a good thing.
These crimes are serious and seriously disheartening. As my kid awaits admissions decisions in the next couple weeks, this story reinforces the cloud of inevitable disappointment, the feeling that the system is rigged against any kid who is truly intrinsically motivated. The common app is designed for clubby, volunteer, leadership high school kids, teenage versions of their parents -- kids motivated by accumulating external rewards: grades, awards, honors, titles, rank, published research -- all of which corrosively affect intrinsic motivation. This application process in hand with the college consultant industry bears much blame for exacerbating students and parents packaging of students.
But colleges are truly responsible because they choose the students. Admissions depts. have the brains and insight to identify kids who will bloom into adults who truly make a difference. Instead, admissions officers prefer to choose hot house flowers who've been forced to bloom artificially early through machinations of parents and the college industry.
This year Carnegie Mellon explicitly stated that demonstrated interest was no longer a factor. About time. It's an excellent step toward acknowledging factors that should have no bearing on identifying students who are a good fit. The colleges must change their criteria for admission to sideline gaming the system. Employer/grad schools are suspicious of 4.0s for not thinking outside the box. Colleges should be too.
1
You can superimpose this same argument and observation for military schools, the military draft, political donations, and everything else money greases the wheel for when all other fair measurements and efforts don't get the desired get results. This is a very old story which is getting, and rightly so, more attention in our countries newest version of a political and economic aristocracy.
1
What about those students whose parents are not wealthy, per se, but are influential in the media, academia, or the arts? Besides money, elite colleges also want the cachet of having the children from the artistic and intellectual elites. Should the influence of this kind of currency on college admissions also be eliminated? Perhaps a blind policy here as well?
1
In 1971 I graduated from George Washington University, the first in my family with a college degree. Unable to get into a US medical school I packed my diploma and transcript and flew to France, ultimately matriculating at the University of Brussels in medicine.
The threshold foe admission was a college degree. Annual cost was an $800 student activity fee. The first year class was over 1300 students crammed into huge lecture halls. Only half of us made it into year two and ultimately 350 graduated with an MD after 7 years, graded on a relentless bell curve. Most exams were one on one, in french, before a professor to whom we had never spoken previously.
The University of Brussels was indeed free of religious and class influence, and we succeeded on merit alone.
6
Perhaps if schools were more transparent about who they admit and why the problem would be resolved on its own. Federal tax breaks and federal funding mean Congress could easily pass a law requiring the top 100 schools to list each person admitted (give that person a number for privacy concerns) and that person's gpa and sat/act scores. The school could note if that person was a legacy, if that person's family made a significant donation to the school in the last five years (say $25,000 or more) and if that student was committed to playing a sport at school. Separate student numbers by sport to show the schools requirements for athletes.
If #321 is listed with a 3.0 gpa and a 25 on the ACT but has a legacy who donated $500,000, folks will know that the school can be bought. If the entire football team at a school has a 2.5 gpa in a school where every other student has a 3.7, we can assume that those players are not going to perform well in the classroom without assistance of some kind -- which leads to whole set of additional questions. Not a good reputation for any school, especially an Ivy.
If your kid is good enough to be in the top ten nationally in any sport the kid can get into a selective school. That is a legal way to game the admissions system. Sport success does show drive, organizational skills on the part of kid and parents, and dedication to one sport.
Selective schools are looking for stand out kids and being skilled is one way to stand out.
1
Spare me. College admissions has always been a game and students who aren't from wealthy families have to figure out how to "get in" with the few remaining spots not promised to legacy kids or athletes or some other special designation. Heck what school would turn down an applicant who comes with at $2.5 million "pledge"? Let's all be brutally honest: a poor kid of color with no family money and who requires a ton of financial aid just to make the tuition at a competitive school costs the school MONEY. That's an INVESTMENT into a person who most likely looks nothing like most of the admissions officers or coaches or other influencers caught in this federal sting. If you want to diversity the game, diversify the gatekeepers. There will always be shortcuts for the privileged but getting highly competitive schools to think about the VALUE in INVESTING in a qualified candidate who isn't from a wealthy white family might be a good start. This is like the NIMBY phenomenon- diversity as a concept is great, unless my kid can't get in because they're not a minority. Honestly, if your parents can pay half a mil to get you into a school so you can post pretty Instagram pictures then maybe college isn't really the best place to put your time or money.
One change that would improve the entire process would be to limit the number of school that applicants are permitted to apply to. There is no reason to apply to more than 5-6 schools. When students apply to 20+ schools (inherently favoring affluent students) it clogs the system and creates an artificially high pool of candidates. This a would allow the Universities more band width to review applications, as well
1
The upper middle class version of the admissions advantage are need sensitive and demonstrated interest. Most colleges (except for those at the very top of the food chain) consider financial need in admissions This means parents who can fork over 70K per year give their kids a big advantage. They also consider demonstrated interest, which means that parents who can afford to go on expensive college tours with their kids to visit the campuses also get an advantage for their kids in admissions,
When my children attended college in the early 2000s, I was struck by how parent-oriented college had become. For instance, in the 70s, freshmen got dropped off on campus and that was that. Thirty years later, there were fancy orientations for parents with receptions and special programs. That had to have inflated tuition.
More and more, it's about the parents, not the students.
What about the scandal of students openly taking Vyvance and Adderall as they wait to go into standardized testing facilities? My kids have told me this type of unfair performance enhancement, ie cheating, is rife, particularly by the rich who can afford access to the pills and know the benefit. Our colleges will have enabled a cohort of leaders who increasingly need to reach for a pill every time a major stress arrives.
It's certainly true that elite American universities have developed many ways of cashing in on their role as gatekeepers of the most sought after, highly paid and empowering positions in the US and international economy. That's an argument for reform, not for for shrugging our shoulders or for feeling misplaced empathy for elite colleges or rich parents who knowingly cheated in gaining admission for their kid at the expense of another more talented but less affluent child. If a professor is shown to have acted contrary to academic integrity he/ she is let go. Here the academic integrity of every college involved in this mess has been trampled into the mud and the administration of each needs to be terminated for lack of integrity. Meritocracy is partly truth and partly fiction. We could turn away and say, effectively, "well, that's just the way the world works", but instead let's try to make admissions fairer, more tied to intellectual promise, and more truly meritocratic. Let's also stop fantasizing that economic inequality is OK after all since the disparities are merit based. The disparities aren't merit based, or best only weakly so.
As restitution, all of the families charged should be required to establish a multimillion dollar fund to help middle-class kids attend selective admissions universities. In fact, if selective universities truly believe in leveling the playing field, they should require weathy donors to contribute 10 - 20 percent of every endowment/donation towards a middle-class kid tuition fund.
1
This scandal is only one of many pieces of bitter fruit falling from the quickly growing tree of wealth and income inequality. As the top 0.1% accumulate more and more wealth we return to a feudal society.
3
Following the Orwellian playbook, a "good school" in reality is a school with a high percentage of rich stoned slackers who occasionally show up for class. A "good school" is code for an affluent school... sort of like a "good neighborhood."
I hear the words, "good school," often. I most frequently hear it from people who went to a "good school." They will ask if X College or University of Y is a "good school."
At this point in my life and career I am a proud graduate of a bad school. To be honest, I couldn't get into a good school. I was rejected multiple times. The main advantage that a good school would have given me would have been less student debt, but I'll be saddled with that until I retire. I went to a bad school and worked while I studied and took out loans and got by. I have an advanced degree from a bad school. When conversations turn to this "good school" or that one, I usually go silent... seethe a little bit... and then privately have a little pride that I'm doing ok even though I went to a bad school. I did it honestly. I want to brag about it, but I don't because I'd be implying that some of my peers didn't do it honestly. So I just stay silent and watch the Ivy Leaguers revel in their own self-importance, knowing that my bad school was real.
3
The list of practices that people engaged in to assure that their children were admitted to their dream college included much more than lying about athletic ability and funding college athletic personnel (did said personnel report those monies as income to the IRS?). They involved paying for others to take or alter test answers on the college entrance exams (SAT and ACT) and getting medical certification that their children needed extended time for taking said tests when they had no such medical condition that would warrant that extension.
If one were to look closely at private elementary and secondary school's in this country, one would see that such manipulations of the system occur as well. Not at all, just as not at all colleges, but at a goodly number.
There are also non monetary ways in which parents try to game the college admission system or encourage deception on the part of their children. Writing or paying someone else to write/edit the college essay one of the most widely utilized means. Another is claiming activities that one either did not do or did minimally (five minute breeze through). Despite attempts by many to ascribe such practices exclusively to those of one political persuasion or another, they are not. What this sadly demonstrates is that there are those who will do anything, even engage in illegal activities, to give their children what they perceive as vital to their offsprings' future well being or what their chidren desire.
Admissions officers have always had their preferences based upon their own biases and an interest in helping a "friend" get a child through the gate. Recent stories about subcultures within the Ivies have indicated that. It is about replicating privilege in all its forms, and every group is about its tribe: wealthy parents; privileged admissions officers bent upon maintaining in-group supremacy, etc.
Rich people will do what they want with their money, and often that means using it to help their kids. People with less money would likely do the same if they had the money. Whether they would bribe people to take tests for their kids, or bribe coaches to falsely support them—well, that is a whole other issue.
Putting aside the illegal bribery, the question is, as a matter of public policy, whether inter-generational wealth transfer is a bad thing. There was a time when we thought it was because it led to laziness and lack of work ethic, which was the philosophical justification for the estate tax many decades ago. We also, even today, have a gift tax so one cannot simply hand their wealth to others during their lifetimes. But at this point, anybody who pays these taxes probably failed to do adequate estate or tax planning.
The other big question is why these parents just didn’t go direct, without this Singer guy. Everybody knows you can (legally) buy your way into Harvard and Yale with a big donation. For rich people they showed a staggering lack of awareness of their own privilege.
1
@Jack Sonville: Singer himself explained that what he was offering these parents was a "guarantee". You could make that donation to the college, and it would definitely increase your kid's chances, but you'd still be in competition with a large number of donors' kids being considered by the admissions staff. What I didn't know was just how ironclad the coaches' recruitment lists seem to be, so much so that getting a spot on those lists could be sold as a sure thing for admission. That's a big part of the scandal right there, and also perfectly legal when not arranged through bribery and fake test scores.
1
As deals go the college admissions scandal is hardly in the league of really big ones like lobby money buying the destruction of environmental safeguards or presidential donors bent on destroying the public school system. A handful of recently rich people, not aware of the rules which once accompanied money, did what they do to get what they wanted. Big whup.
Still, it is a metaphor for the widening road of thoughtless, grabbing action of the unprincipled tribes of shiftless haves which is sending us all careening towards American class warfare. Their problem, it seems though, is not that they are of the mind to buy themselves anything the less monied have to earn, but that they came up cheapskates. Funding a wing or new chair of mystical physics would have set them back millions, not a couple of hundred thousand.
College baseball just doesn't have the same level of scandal because players coming out of high school have the option of turning pro and going straight into the minor leagues.
All other sports should offer a similar option. The monied influence of big-time college sports is what helps to fuel the madness.
Corruption in higher eduction extends to research. Companies that sponsor research projects expect favorable results and academics are often glad to comply by giving their version of "Things go better with Coke." It seems that every American institution has been corrupted to some degree, and it's only a matter of time until the latest one is exposed.
If the college is private and the parents want to donate money in exchange for getting their kid to college, they why not? if you could wouldn't you do that for your kid? What would be interesting to investigate is how many kids, who's parents donated money got into college. Then it's probably not a donation and the "donation" should be taxed.
Maybe it's just me, but I was in college and grad school through the 1980's and it was often a daily slog to pull B's consistently, never mind the occasional A. Very few fellow students graduated with honors. Every kid I see graduating now does so with "distinction" or "honors". Hmmm.
2
Almost alone the U.S. bases its admissions on some vague notion of the "whole" person. Most other countries treat higher education as education narrowly construed, and base admission on what you know. This makes it harder to fudge, and despite certain disadvantages, is easier to measure.
2
Is anything, in any society, based even largely on merit? It would be nice if that were the case. It is not so in respect of almost anything in life, so why expect it in respect of college admissions? Don't get me wrong. I applaud every effort made to make reward merit based but, for the most part, success in life its not about what you know but who you know. And money readily buys you the right contacts.
Slightly over a decade ago, my daughter was wait-listed at Harvard and got admission to another Ivy league, purely based on her academic and extracurricular activities. She was not an athlete.
Some six years later, a friend's son, who had better academic record than my daughter, and was an Eagle Scout, got rejected by all the Ivy league schools. He told his father not to waste his money on any second-tier private colleges and went to a state school on a scholarship, did really well, and got admitted to an MD program. Perhaps he didn't get into an Ivy because of some shenanigans by wealthy parents, but he's having the last laugh.
2
Are you kidding? You actually answered your own admissions riddle, The schools wanted nothing to do with an Eagle Scout.
I remember when my daughter was applying to Brown. The admissions rep came to our high school and basically said that only 1 student would be admitted and that a legacy had already been promised the spot. He was surprisingly open about it.
BTW, Candice Bergen's daughter was accepted to Brown that year. Now I am not sure she was the most qualified candidate.
1
"Merit is not easily defined."
Yes. Yes it is. In the United States, merit is most definitely easily defined. Merit = money. More money = more merit.
These charges are a nice start but does anyone believe there will be any significant punishment handed out in the end? Of course not, this is the United States, where we not only do not prosecute white collar crime (which is what this is), we celebrate it.
There's no way to make this happen but the punishment I wish for these people, especially the parents, would be to sentence them to live out the rest of their lives as average working Americans. That would probably hurt them even more than sending them to prison.
3
When I was in college, I took an economics course where the instructor said he had a husband and wife duo in one of his other classes. Since they were married, they copied a lot of material from the writing assignments off of each other. The instructor gave them both “F” grades for cheating. I mention this, because we are being too easy on the students here. They are legal adults. If their admissions to these colleges were based on lies that they perpetuated, then they should be held accountable for those lies. They shouldn’t be let off the hook just because a parent was an accomplice in their scheme.
6
"But this case is not a defense of meritocracy in college admissions. What the government actually is defending is private property — the right of the colleges to make their own decisions about admissions, and collect the payments."
The Board certainly makes a most salient point here, now that everyone is professes horror that rich folks have been paying huge sums to a school admissions cheat to ensure their kids' acceptance at top schools.
The point of the FBI sting is that the school itself should benefit from the largess of rich folks or alumni to increase the chances of their kids' admission.
So, some bribery is "better" than others?
The bottom line is that wealth has always greased the admission process, in one way or another. The reason why this operation enrages is because the payments guaranteed--not just facilitated--acceptance. The parents knew they were using a con man to lie about their kids qualifications
What the Board says about meritocracy is also on point--like pornography, it's whatever the Admissions Department says it is.
Bottom line: wealth will always facilitate college acceptance, but Singer's brazen scheme to bribe corrupt coaches and admissions officers was too much even for law enforcement.
3
It's worth noting that need-blind admissions aren't really need-blind for the super-wealthy. College development offices (where donations go) explicitly talk to the admissions office about candidates during admissions. So even need-blind colleges divide students into two groups: the super-rich and everyone else.
5
Whole your point about large donors “pay”ving a pathway for their children is a good one: you do not do enough to explicitly differentiate blatant lying, shearing on exams and fraud. Both processes may be unfair and ethically problematic but: There is a clear difference and the lack of emphasis on that in this editorial is sad at best and dangerous if not emphasized.
To be clear: neither path is good but fraudulent testing and bribes are way over the line. In theory, even donors children need to meet certain standards (I sure hope so anyway, even if this is not the case, there is still a stark difference)
2
This is primarily a case about fraud, as the agent said, and not an act of muckraking the slippery games around college admissions and tangentially the huge money machine of college sports. You can still use the back door and buy a tax deductible sports arena, but you can't pay a bribe that won't show up on a tax form.
Cynically, I ask if these parents have so much discretionary money they can pay a $1.2 million bribe, why are the kids going to college to get a "good job"? Can't they just skip the stress of working hard in college and enter the family business?
This is in no way my experience with Stanford and my son.
He applied to MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley
and UCSD. He was admitted to all six. We did not go see
the campuses, made no donations, and the only interaction
between my son (or me) with these colleges, was sending
his application and his essay. He chose Stanford and it
was the best experience and education!
3
@MB
By the way, my son plays no sports.
Sure. You should audition for SNL.
People are too hard on these parents. Any good parent wants the best for their kids, and if they can buy that with money or influence, as seems to sometimes be the case with college admissions in general, then so be it.
I have a daughter in Columbia. She got there with no tutors, special courses or hardly any money from her eternally struggling dad (me) - but she has talent, a good heart and a powerful will to succeed. She's exceptional. If I had been in these Hollywood parents' place, I might have been tempted to do the same thing myself.
5
Wrong.
". . . and if they can buy that with money or influence, then so [NOT] be it".
1
@bronx refugee
right. and you still would have been wrong and immoral.
Clearly deciding to make your son or daughter study was out of question for these families. This predicament is not happening just to the rich and famous, but to millions of parents whose siblings refuse to go to college because they do not see any advantage in doing it, because another bigger problem is occurring the mechanisms for selecting candidates are also rigged.
You talk about a distinction between a donation to a university and a bribe to an employee—
But if the donation is made with the explicit expectation that one's children will be admitted, it certainly could be considered a bribe.
3
"Charges against parents accused of gaming the admissions process are a defense of the institutions’ property, not of meritocracy."
But *of course* the charges are — among other things — a defense of meritocracy. It is simply silly to deny this.
The editors are right; the process is unfair. But their editorial is predictable and muddled. For starters, the Constitution protects the property of universities. Neither these prosecutors nor the case they have brought is needed to defend that property. Universities are properly chartered entities and their rights to their property are well established and central to our laws. As a corollary, prosecutors can only prosecute criminal acts not injustices per se. The system, as the editors point out is inherently unfair overall ... if not always. But we can’t do away with the advantages of wealth without doing away with wealth. And we can’t do away with the prerogative institutions feel they can claim for themselves without doing away with their private status. I don’t think either of those will come to pass soon. And this is where I think the argument goes astray. The problem is not meritocracy but opportunity. No American ever Imaagined this country to be a perfect meritocracy. They were willingr, rather, to accept a greater disparity of outcomes in return for more equal access to opportunity. Today, unprecedented concentration of wealth increasingly monopolizes opportunity. Our challenge is to redress that. Progressive fiscal, health, and education policies can make a difference, as can vastly more genoerous tuition and public university support. The noble chagrin of Ivy heavy power centers, like the Times newsroo however, feels good but helps no one.
3
Let's not mix up large donations VS the likes of SAT-prep courses. Although money does help the child prep better, it's the child who must utilize that prep course to ultimately score high on the test. On the other hand, donations are parents-only, no child performance whatsoever.
2
This is why I have always had more respect for public universities over private ones. Private universities never pretended to be purely merit-based. They have always claimed the freedom to admit rich kids based on legacies and donations. Ivy League schools have always been country clubs that admit smart middle class kids in order to give themselves a veneer of academic respectability.
1
Higher education should be free to all comers, as it is in many EU countries. There, universities don't have sports teams, "campuses", or snazzy buildings or facilities. But serious learning takes place. Isn't that what tertiary education is supposed to be about?
5
The whole ridiculous and stressful process of college application could be made so much easier, fairer and less costly: install a blind lottery before the application for let‘s say 4 x the number of applicants per spot available. Only those who get drawn apply. This is kept track of in a database shared by all schools. Once a student has been drawn to four schools he drops from the lottery. Each student applies to four schools who rank the applications. Each student gets into one.
Perhaps one solution would be a two or more part system:
1) Provide no-tuition entry to all who qualify on the basis of merit. This would be to make American colleges somewhat Swedish.
2) Provide entry to a specified percentage of the non-qualified whose parents or caretakers will pay, as some already do, by making major donations - buildings, faculty chairs, tuition fund.
Qualifiers. I know perfectly well how difficult it is to rank according to merit. Unfortunately, I also know that Harvard Admissions and probably others believe that there are races and that members of each "race" have certain characteristics that give them or take from them a few points for the merit ranking. At Harvard this was revealed as concerned students seen as "Hispanic".
Would the not-on-merit yes-on-dollars individuals wear a dollar sign badge to help their professors see to it that none of them failed a course.?
A recent court case here in Sweden reveals at least at the high-school level that some parents are quite ready to threaten and even attack teachers who did not give the child of said parents a sufficiently high grade. This being Sweden, the accused parent was not judged guilty!
And in closing, an n = 1 anecdote from the dual nationality family. Our daughter has two degrees from Swedish universities and one from the University of Vermont. Her mother was professor in both countries, The best UVM courses were better than the Swedish.
Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
People are blaming the lack of meritocracy, which is fair, but no one is blaming the schools for creating an atmosphere where money is the primary driver. I know someone who used to work in admissions at an elite school. I once asked him what the secret ingredient was for admissions. His response? "We look at grades and test scores, then we Google the parents and see who they are and how much money they make."
There you go.
5
When I first watched the news yesterday and listened to the prosecutor talk about what the point of this exercise was I thought, Am I living in bizarro world? As the editorial makes clear, the prosecutors are not really leveling the playing field, they are just ensuring the colleges themselves continue to benefit economically. And when the prosecutors and the TV pundits began to rant about the fact the people ensnared in the dragnet should receive severe sentences for their crimes I laughed out loud. If Manafort only got 47 months for his well documented crimes because he had otherwise lived a “blameless life,” these people, especially the parents, most likely will not even get a tiny slap on the wrist but will be lionized as concerned parents who did everything they could to benefit their kids.
5
What if, as nicely described by Young, the problem were "meritocracy" itself?
1
Let's add another factor that advantages wealthy parents, and that is the extra coaching given by schools attended by the children of wealthy parents. Private schools offer a whole range of SAT coaching, college interview coaching and help to obtain a learning disability label for dubious candidates. Behind all of this is the competitiveness of the winner take all attitude of American capitalism as it is now. Many wealthy parents are desperate that their children be amongst the "winners". This is understandable if they teach their children that merit and work will achieve that. Increasingly, they do not. Most sickening of all is that these parents and children defend their wealth as being the result of merit.
2
One thing struck me about this scandal: these affluent, successful people tried to rig the system, presumably so their children would have the best shot in life to be successful as well. But they themselves did not attend prestigious schools, nor did most of them have wealthy parents, as far as I can tell. To what do they owe their success? Presumably they had enough talent, drive and hard work to make it in their careers, all of which are very, very competitive. Acting, fashion, running a winery, being partner in a law firm - you can't fake your way through those careers. So why didn't they impart the skills, ethics and drive that drove them to success to their children, and have faith that the children could succeed on their own merit, as they did?
6
@Paris
Regression toward the mean is the popular expression that comes to mind to at least partially answer your question.
That good old American egalitarianism is not what it is cracked up to be.
Only the most gullible could really believe that Ivy League institutions can justify their extortionate tuition rates which are nothing but convenient filters useful for maintaining these places as social clubs for the wealthy. Their sole purpose is to perpetuate the forging of dynasties often through practical-minded marriages to consolidate greater amounts of wealth and influence.
2
Wait, when was it those schools were for some other purpose? Or may I bow to your truly impressive sarcasm?
Do you also pay sticker price plus for your cars? Don't be foolish. For the seriously moneyed, tuition counts in the tens of millions (minimum). For those whose family income is anywhere near the national average, it's zero. That $52K is just an accounting convenience. Unless, I guess, your mom is a D-list actress, or other member of the top five or ten percent.
Here in Germany, there are some private high schools and universities where money gets you in, but they are also recognized as being less competitive. Everyone knows it was money that paid for the child's entrance. The state Gymnasiums (academic-track high schools) and universities can only be entered by merit. I have witnessed, for example, refugees from Kosovo, where the mother worked as a house-cleaner, and the father as a carpenter, and their children graduated from Gymnasium (academic-track high school) based on their merit, and can now study at university. And because university costs little or nothing, the children have had a good chance to study what they wanted and have had the same opportunities as most everyone. Some might call it socialism, but it makes society more merit-based and equal, and in the long run, this is good for the whole country.
18
@Nancy S.
In some places in Germany free Highschool goes back to the 17th century. They always believed in educating on merit ~ although I believe (until the 1970s)also in strict teachers.
3
This is the way it should be. Note, however, that German universities improved a great deal when they began to charge a nominal tuition. (Equal to around $300 a year, according to my anecdata.)
If secondary school is free, and a university or vocational degree is required for today's job market, then... ?
Oh wait. This is America. Home of the free, the brave, and the totally irrational...
3
@CitizenTM the younger teachers are more relaxed, but the requirements are still very demanding for Gymnasium. An older German (my husband, for example) would say that Gymnasium is easier than it used to be. But our kids just went through, and in Baden-Wuerttemberg, were required to take all the high levels of math, and all the natural sciences, and a choice between 5 years of Latin or 2 foreign languges. There is no easier track to choose. And everyone has to pass the exams at the end. Our son has that in the next two months - I've got my fingers crossed.
1
This
is
a wonderful
opportunity to STOP
and consider the whole college admissions mess
AND consider whether we should be allowing "elite" colleges to decide who is on the road to success, maybe even president of the U.S., and who gets shunted aside.
It is no accident that the vast majority of students at the big deal colleges wind up coming from affluent or even massively wealthy families. Having a stable family situation (surprise!) is itself a great boost and parents who value education a big plus.
THE GOAL IS NOT EDUCATION. The goal is to attach the big name college, the prestige, to your kid. The colleges with golden names, once decades ago the all but exclusive realm of the wealthy, mark your student as SPECIAL. It can be carried through life. It provides a leg up, a guarantee of, at least, consideration for opportunity. PLUS, your kid will meet other eager strivers and form associations, some lifelong, too.
As for "playing by the rules", if you have a daughter get her into sports. Because of Title IV, schools believe they have to give as many scholarships to girls as boys and playing an unusual sport, like lacrosse, can turn the trick.
"Cheating" that is considered fair cheating is okay. We won't touch that! All are equal but some are more equal, at birth, than others. Take it to heart.
3
Noticeably, though, about half of US Senators and Representatives went to "State University of Somewhere, Town-You-Can't-Quite Place Campus." Well, okay, a lot went to state flagships. But I'm not exaggerating that much. Not sure if this is good or bad...
It is very distasteful to think that the children of some crassy rich Americans get a spot in the best colleges not because of their academic achievements, but because of their parents' net worth. That said, this is one of the ways these colleges get funding which can help them enroll children from less privileged background.
1
We'll see what "Institutional" changes actually occur. One thing's for sure, It will be broadcast all over the news as a "See We cleaned house moment". I came away from this article with the feeling that Universities will fire who they need to in order to keep the money train flowing and more on.
2
I don’t see much difference between a parent making a $1 million contribution to a university endowment where admission is not “guaranteed” and another parent paying off the coach of some second tier sport to get their kid into a preferential admissions list. Sure, in the case of the coach she is pocketing the money instead of the school. Does this change the reality that the rich get a big leg up in even those cases where egalitarianism is “supposed” to prevail? No. The rich and the super rich are both using their wealth to perpetuate an oligarchic ruling class. Instead of prosecuting parents desperate to help their kids cling to the .01% or 1% tier, let’s tax this wealth so it no longer has the power to perpetuate itself, and develop a truer form of meritocracy.
4
In fact, straight ahead bribery is much more accessible.
This is a scandal that the American public, not just universities, has brought upon itself through weak regulation of secondary and higher education, the lack of a rigorous national system of high school standards, and no common admissions system.
Merit in theories of egalitarian justice is generally defined as "talent plus effort" (although Young originally satirically defined it simply as standardised test scores); however, basing college admissions on this simple definition of merit is heavily criticised on the grounds that it ignores differences in student backgrounds and the importance of the outcomes, advantaging the economically privileged.
It is arguably fair to include extramural measures of talent + effort in admissions such as athletic ability, musical talent, and leadership in student activities, ceteribus paribus, in the interests of creating a "well-rounded" student body (unless the institution admits strictly on academic merit measured on legitimised tests, which is rare).
Alumni preference might be acceptable if those students meet the same standards as other students are not a covert way of minimising diversity.
Donations within five years of student admissions or during their presence on the course, however, should be banned.
Here’s another irony. These places, the Yales and thr Harvards, really are just brand names, and horribly expensive ones at that. The glut of qualified PhDs in the past thirty years means that faculty at state schools all have been trained at top programs nationally. Florida State, to name one example, has one of the best philosophy departments in the country. And the students in these places take classes from actual faculty, not from first and second year graduate students. In other words, these privileged actors are cheating so that their kids can get into the wrong places so that, I suppose, they can boast to their friends at parties.
7
While this corrupt practice doesn't seem to touch the usually politcized people administering these universities, the trend definitely does not provide any moderating influence on rising tuition.
Tuition rises faster than any manufactured items in our economy, and that is what causes the huge amount of student debt. This debt is so high that even doctors now worry that they may never work all of their medical school costs off.
When socialists clamor to make doctors employees of the central state, this has to chase away droves of students who thought they had a decent chance under the current system to pay off this debt.
How are legacy admissions and admissions to relatives of donors not already stealing slots from worthy students? Then again, many prestigious universities aren't admitting as many students as they have room for.
The real hurt is on those falsely admitted under athletics. Those slots really are one-wins-one-loses. That said, I'm not a fan of athletic scholarships. Those students can get by in school where other students wouldn't, and they are often given breaks (sometimes unethically) to ensure they do. Basically the entire academic system is a hot mess.
2
Bribes are a natural outcome from not using the free market system. As everyone knows in a free, capitalistic society products and services should be "auctioned" through open markets with supply and demand determining the equilibrium price. This ensures resources are allocated efficiently - and that is the prime goal of society - the efficient allocation of resources.
Each person gets to spend his or her hard-earned cash on whatever they choose. Those that have worked harder and earned more can bid the price up on whatever they choose, thus commanding use of the services.
In such a system there is no reason for bribery as one can instead use the money to overbid others, usually at a lower cost than paying bribery. Instead the price of the services, in this case a university education, can go up, providing more money to the university thus improving its educational resources and capability.
It's also very egalitarian. Instead of only the smartest getting in, anyone with money can get in, providing more equality.
Thus bribery can be eliminated, and more equality and efficiency secured, by using free markets and letting university tuition rise to market rates that equate supply and demand. Just basic economics.
In other words it’s not ok for the wealthy to buy a spot for their kids in an elite school. That privilege is reserved for the VERY wealthy.
5
One area of institutionalized admission corruption in all universities is athletics, an area that is certainly not part of higher education's core function. Universities should have nothing higher than intramural sports.
10
It's a big money maker for everyone involved except the students. Their benefit is being able to get by with a lot of help and lower standards.
2
Kickoffs and cause injuries and don't add much to football. They should be abolished. But do we expect football coaches who want the rules changed to voluntarily refrain from participating in kickoffs, on pain of being called hypocritical? We don't, because what we all want is a rules change, not a movement of voluntarily refraining from participation in kickoffs or tackling. However, if holding were against the rules we would rightly want a player to be punished if he did holding in a way the referee couldn't see. "Everybody does it" would not be a defense. There's only one set of rules. And the rules say money is an advantage but you have to use it in certain ways. And you can be cool while using you advantages as long as you are simultaneously screaming loudly, "I shouldn't be able to do this!"
1
End the legacy admittance. If you donate, your children are automatically DISQUALIFIED.
Well that would be fair but it would also be the end of the college system as we know it.
Maybe not a bad thing.
2
If you’re a reader of the New York Times, you have enough free time to read and write comments, and you have a child who has been though the college admissions process, my bet is that you did something for your child that is, in the cold light of day, the exercise of privilege. I know I did, and I am just beginning to understand the dimensions of it.
3
I didn’t.
Besides, even merit is often based on where your starting line is. If you start with wealth and privilege, you enter the marathon at the twenty-five mile mark because of good schools, good tutors, good everything, and no basic needs like food and housing. If you start poor, you are lucky to start at the start line for a normal marathon, let alone ten miles back.
12
Private Colleges can do as they wish
but it would be equitable if Public Colleges
admitted via a Blind Process.
No one knows the name/gender/socio-economic status
only the quality of the schools they went to and how the
Standardised Test results demonstrate that they achieved
beyond all expectations.
5
On the one hand, there's nothing new about buying your way into a school, however it may be disguised.
Apparently, it was cheaper to bribe some employees.
For most of us, the game can be played without huge amounts of money, although some helps. The key issue is to get good guidance. This may not require expensive tutors and counselors. It does require a savvy parent.
Exam prep courses may be helpful. But, it's not expensive to get books of practice tests. The student takes the tests and reads the explanations. Do a bunch and you're probably as prepared as the student with a private tutor, or, at least, close.
There are great guides available at your library for every aspect of college admissions. High schools have counselors who can edit an essay. You have to ask if you want extra help. Testing for LD is available, at least in my state, for free from the school district. But, you have to know to ask for it.
There's a good deal of what might be termed strategy. Best started in 8th grade, so the student understands what needs to be accomplished in high school. That runs all the way through the application process, including essays, early action, early decision, etc. It's all in the guides.
Of course, money talks. Of course. But winning the college game is aided by a kind of savvy that not every parent has. It's partly acculturation. And sure, it's probably easier if you already have money.
3
Maybe this scandal will help up better see that "ivies" as the portaly to success and all thing wonderful is a myth.
i was first generation college, went to a state university then, a few years later, put myself through a decent law school (not an ivy).
In my office, I hold a higher position, have more perks, and earn more money than my colleagues who attended ivies.
I received promotions because I could do the work well, not because of where I went to school.
At the end of the day, these parent who bought their kids into elite schools really just bought bragging rights for themselves.
Like a fancy car, or a summer house.
Sad.
3
The piece lumps three practices followed by some affluent families: 1) elite private schools, tutors to enhance academic (and athletic/music/dancing) performance; (b) generous "charitable" donations (ala Kuschner) rewarded by junior's admission and (c) under the counter bribery and cheating on tests. But, the three are very different moraly an economically.
As the article rightly points out the last involves the diversion of money to an employee or third party and deprives the school of the revenue (crass but true). It is theft from the school and yes from worthy honest acting applicants who might loose the benefits of the elite school.
But b is an additional source of revenue for the school in the form of the "donation." It brings in additional revenue in the form of the "donation" and in the form of full tuition -- a tuition that almost no one else pays. This full tuition for the wealthy is in effect a wealth tax transferring money from the wealthy to those getting student aid by reducing the revenue needed from them.
The first is in my mind benign and part of the duties of a good parent. As the late Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago commented, "What father doesn't want to help his sons." Preparing one's children to compete and thrive in adulthood is the hallmark of parenting.
2
I wonder what fraction of the Editorial Board went to those much maligned Ivies or almost Ivies.
I wonder if they would even consider looking at the CV of someone who went to a state /party / football school like say, Kansas State.
Not holding this against them, just pointing out the inevitable hypocrisy of the elite fighting against the oppression of the lower classes.
1
Yes, but we miss the point, too, by simply shrugging cynically and saying "well we always knew merit had nothing to do with admissions, look at how wealthy parents can donate to colleges and get their children in." At least with a donation to the school, all students benefit, as do professors and hopefully society as a whole. This longterm scheme to bribe college officials, and to falsify records, accomplishments and even standardized testing scores, is stomach-churning because it involves the rankest, most brazen dishonesty intended to benefit only the wrongdoers. Reading the 204-page Affidavit in Support of the Complaint, it is clear that these are parents who are incredibly high achievers, who already have everything, and whose children already have all of the advantages that wealth, excellent education and connections can possibly provide. These are the super-elite, and their children are even more so, because they were born into it. The parents didn't need to do any of this, but they could, and it was cheaper than donating to a university, and it was secret. They even got a fraudulent tax break. It's repellent, precisely because it's selfish and craven.
7
Colleges fund their annual operating budget through several revenue streams:
-tuition
-government grants
-alumni donations
-yield on capital assets (ie endowment)
Frequently, these are not enough to keep the lights on. Either the U.S. government steps up and supports American universities to a much greater degree, or schools will continue to be "creative" in how they raise the necessary funds.
3
@Father of One
Selling seats is not being creative. It is being corrupt and immoral.
Prospective faculty and students with morals should boycott these corrupt and greedy colleges.
Priority should be given to USA citizens first and the government needs to make university more accessible to USA students from poor and middle class families otherwise you're going to end up with global universities where only the 1% worldwide can afford to go and the world grinds to a halt because there's no new inventions on the planet to grow economies. If you get rich only meeting rich then they end up with all the power in the world and USA will end up like communist China.
I'd say it's more a class problem where the rich kids don't want to park their cars next to the kids with old bombs. If the universities that have been paid for from the general populations taxes, are only used by the wealthy then all those hard working parents whose ancestors paid lots of taxes are being short changed. USA universities for USA legal citizens only. End of.
2
Yes! Even if you would have to lower your academic standards.
@CK The US is already far too insular.
Even within its own borders too many people don't associate outside of their own SES and cultural and racial backgrounds. We are pathetically out of touch with the rest of the world. Insular, intolerant, ignorant.
PS - In re: to insularity: Not all countries put wealthy over the good of the country...
1
Maybe USA citizens should be asking the question, why don't they want to go to other universities - is it because it lowers their chances of getting a good job because of globalism and automation taking away jobs. I don't know, it's a symptom of something wrong with the USA university education system. Maybe you're taking too many foreign students and educating them at the expense of your own nations children, so gifted children from poor and middle class families are getting left behind, just like the USA is, with Research and Development and Technology as Chinese seem to be taking over the world with their 5G.
Instead of governments putting billions into educating intellectually handicapped people, maybe they should be putting more money into nurturing poor gifted children who end up working at McDonalds because they couldn't afford to develop their giftedness.
2
Wouldn't it be simpler (and more transparent) to simply establish one or more universities whose sole mission is to provide college degrees to children of much affluence, but whose academic potential or motivation fails to meet the standards of U.S. News' elite universities? These schools would accept no federal grant money, award no financial aid and charge exorbitant tuition, essentially operating as private country clubs. Since most of these kids grew up in gated neighborhoods, they would be right at home in a gated university. And what could be more elite than that?
3
@Bob Hanle
Something like Trump University, but offering many more subjects, not just real estate? Good idea.
4
@Fran @Bob Hanle
You may be on to something! And to offset the high tuition, it's book-free!
On its surface to me this a relatively small bribery and deception story, but it sure has hit a nerve. Compared to the sexual abuse stories from the Catholic and Baptist churches, Putin’s attack on the West’s democratic process, Trump’s attacks on immigrants, this is a small story. Certainly the victims have suffered far less harm (likely having to settle for state school) than the victims of these other stories. I think most of us are so disgusted by this bribery and deception story as it exposes the deeper rot in our culture of a subset of escalating wealth who inhabit a completely different world and nothing is immune to their wealth except death. The best way to achieve this rarified stratum more and more in the early 21st century appears to be birth. Perhaps we should resurrect the Nobility and discard the farce of the meritocracy.
2
@David Sharkis
It is wealth combined with identity politics plus an absurd, extreme obsession with virtue signaling.
Nothing better defines our political class - both of our sadsack, incompetent political parties - than the above combination.
1
if you are so concerned about merit in college admissions (which I agree is distorted by "legacy" preferences), why don't you also call for an immediate and total ban to all race-based quotas?
3
@Sofiaboy
Probably for the same reason that with the advent of blind auditions, orchestras have suddenly and strikingly gone from almost entirely white male to much more diverse. Our local orchestra has more women than men, a striking number of women first chairs, and a noticeable increase in Asians.
Cynical suggestion when it's clear that the playing field is still deliberately and strongly tilted towards white men.
All these prestigious schools, however, are private, aren't they. Is the corruption as prevalent in state universities?
3
@Fran
UCLA is listed as one of the Scam Schools.
Btw, UCLA's adcoms are notorious for cooking the books, tilting the process to illegally favor racial minorities.
See former UCLA Prof. Tim Groseclose's shocking tell-all, "Cheating," for the details. Groseclose also put the actual detailed admissions parameters out on the web, with individual identities masked appropriately to preserve their privacy.
https://www.amazon.com/Cheating-Insiders-Report-Race-Admissions/dp/1457528290
Our educational system is our investment in the future quality of America. Whenever a student is given a spot on the basis of bribery or donation instead of academic merit, it lowers the quality of the educational institution in question.
It's no different than Amazon and other companies demanding tax breaks in exchange for jobs. Both are extortion for personal gain.
2
The American universities are corrupted by these althletic scholarships. As any academic will tell you, the least prepared students in their classes are the recruited athletes. If regularly admitted students want to play a sport, they are perfectly welcome to play it, but we should not be offering fellowships to the semi professional players that are being recruited at the elite schools. If universities want to maintain these expensive and wasteful sports programs, they should just pay athletes to play for them. If these athletes want to study, fine. But they should not take the place of academically prepared students.
13
@Herbert klein
Harvard and Yale and other Ivies could field a football team with every player having 1600 board scores and all As in high school and each player would be over 300 pounds and run a sub 5 second 40. Just saying.
1
We do not live in a meritocracy. Humanity has never produced a perfect meritocracy. And besides, there are many ways to measure merit. Oh well, get over it, and realize that overall progress is still real even if we are not at perfection yet.
2
My husband and I have a combind-40-yrs in fundraising for Stanford. Sometimes we experienced rich donors who wanted to buy their way in. The vast majority got turned down. Admissions Dept is separate and strict about who gets in. I remember a fight between the Dir of Admissions and the Dir of Advancement which the President had to rule on: the Admissions Dir won.
Apparently, a Sailing Coach took some money from a parent to try to buy their kid into Stanford. That lasted a v short time before the coach was fired (and vanished) from Stanford.
Taking a bribe at Stanford is such a huge violation that no one lasts long if this happens.
3
The operative word here is “vast majority”. We already know what private colleges are - rich folks are just negotiating. That a college already so rich like Stanford even continues to actively raise money aggressively is suspect.
6
I don’t believe large donors have zero influence on Stanford admissions. It might be done in a “classy” way but I am 99% sure it happens.
3
@Jim you have no idea what you're talking about. Do you know Stanford gives a full free ride (room and board plus tuition) to any undergrads who family makes less than $125k? Free tuition to those whose family makes 100k? All grad students, except those from overseas gets a *nice* deal too.
And who gets admitted the most? Not rich kids, but first generation kids who have a passion to give back to the common good. My old boss was married to a former Admission Director. I know what I'm talking about.
1
I'm sure there are admissions officers who are telling themselves that had the parent approached the school directly an understanding could have been reached. That certainly must be the case for one student, who supposedly had his or her way greased with a $6 million payment. As the editorial notes, Singer and his clients were tapping a source of wealth that belonged to the elite colleges.
1
My problem with this opinion is it equates what is clearly illegal and immoral behavior (bribing the soccer coach at Yale) with parent using honest earned resources for the betterment of their kids. I worked hard for to attain my economic status and I choose to spend a great deal of it on my kids and the expense of doing stuff for myself (summer camp, tutors, after school activities and eventually I am sure SAT tutors and collage counselors). I don’t do it or care if they get into Harvard but I want them to be happy and have every opportunity to achieve what they want in life (including having choices when it come time to go to a collage they are excited about and maybe just to be good at math because that is important). I don’t think this is a conflict with my liberal values. I did not have the same resources that all my classmates/co-workers had growing up but I worked hard to overcome those disadvantages. The real world is never going to be a completely even playing field. Regardless of illegal behavior like this case uncovered American more than anywhere else rewards talent and hard work.
4
@M.Berg
The correct spelling is "college."
It has always boggled my mind that someone who can sail a boat or throw a lacrosse ball takes the spot of the Math or English star.
18
@Allright
All of the lacrosse players (of either gender) here who are good enough to get a lacrosse scholarship at one of the few varsity programs are able to get into their preferred schools based on their grades. All lacrosse does is give their application a bit more sparkle. The same is true of men's gymnastics.
(Friends are lacrosse coaches in several area high schools so I go to most all of their games (Brr!) and hear when someone is good enough to apply for a athletic scholarship)
Of course, we're not on "Iroquois Confederacy" homeland or in one of the states where they first lived so that might make a difference.
@Allright Really? It boggles my mind that you don't understand that the US spends hundreds of millions on professional athletes that come from colleges that make huge money off those players. It's basic economics and the US loves it. It's part of our culture and always will be. We have a President who doesn't read, can barely speak and lies about his own college admission and your shocked? Wow.
END LEGACY ADMISSIONS ... NOW!
It is so obviously wrong, that in 20 years, no one will admit to having supported the practice of legacy preferences.
10
@BayArea Realist
Yep - and end nonacademic admits as well.
No more preferences for legacies.
No more preferences for recruited athletes.
No more preferences for under-represented minorities.
Just academic merit, the way Cambridge and CalTech do it. Bring the very best students - the 50,000 National Merit Semifinalists - to the Top 15-20 schools to be interviewed by those schools' professors. (You can limit each student to no more than 2 choices from among the top 15-20 schools, and assign the interview spots by lottery).
And then let the professors choose the best.
Merit Now. Indeed.
7
@T-Bone
Presuming those test are the measures of merit. What about the dyslexic who turn out to be geniuses because they had to figure out another way to learn and thus learned to think on multiple levels at multiple scales? Your national testing program would deny these folks even a college education. Try a bit harder than a simplistic answer.
1
Rich kids can always find a college that will take them. Their families' connections guarantee them jobs, their wealth means they don't need to work. It seems like the bribery and cheating schemes to get them into high-status schools is about parental bragging rights.
8
My oh my, just finding out that the playing field ain't level. This has been the way of the wealthy since there were colleges and universities. Whatever the motivation of the parents, this is really small potatoes; a few crooked "academic coaches," a few crooked test administrators, a few crooked athletic coaches. The total number of places fraudulently taken really won't make much difference there is elasticity in college admissions. What I want to see is that those parents who knowingly paid a fake charity then took a tax deduction, get criminally prosecuted as well as the usual fines and interest to the IRS. And that William Singer, the architect of the mess, gets the full IRS treatment and federal prosecution for his fake charity. The parents committed tax fraud, but I'm betting that not one goes anywhere but home when the plea bargains and trials are settled. Singer committed tax fraud, he should see some serious jail time if convicted.
2
Loving parents do not buy false "success" for their children, who must then live with the knowledge that they were thought to be too inept to survive and thrive under their own steam. The dimensions of the insult behind the cheating are incalculable.
To my adult daughter who worked her way through college, both financially and academically: I love you and am proud of you.
7
I guess it is not only Politicians you can buy off with bribes. And to think that these kids are learning this by their parents. I guess the only way to stay rich is to bribe, cheat or lie.
I wonder if they are Trump supporters. It sounds as if they travel in the same circles.
3
The real problem is the hold elite institutions have on the imagination of segments of our population as paths to outsize success. There is some reality there, but success is certainly possible and happiness may be found at lots of "second and third tier" institutions as well. Publications like the Times help perpetuate the reputation of elite institutions by providing disproportionate coverage to these places. How about seeking out worthy stories from the hinterland? How about hiring more staff who did not attend elite institutions.? Perhaps elite institutions deserve more coverage, and perhaps it is simply laziness on the part of the reporters who return to the same well over and over.
6
From the real world:
Four seniors went to a specific top ten east coast school last year from our local high school.
One who's father ran a hedge fund and was a trustee.
One who is on the crew team.
One claimed they were Native American,
One due to grades and test scores.
All but the last had worse credentials then my child.
How about banning all legacies, athletes, children of donors and all students, or like the UK, under a certain level (32 ACT and 4.3gpa) if the school receives federal money-which all but a very few do
5
A glaring omission in the written opinion is whether colleges in question receive Federal or State funding.
College education, at various times, has represented a tool, an opportunity, an ornament, or an escape.
Public funding presumes an obligation to meet societal needs that demand merit and demonstrate an ability to solve significant problems. Education is a tool.
Privilege is the reward of results. The NY Regency Board determines standards and tests for competency. The NY library system puts education within reach of anyone. Meritocracy gives people who are closest to social problems access to the tools they need to address problems. Education is an opportunity.
An expensive education at a private university may claim to rise above the norms, but to be credible their students must meet the same standards as anyone else.
Otherwise, education is only an ornament wrapped in prestige.
Sons of wealthy men may rise in their father’s companies and perhaps prove themselves there by their achievement.
During the Vietnam era, the imposition of fanciful policies created national dissent for no benefit except to fuel a wartime economy. The price was paid by young men who were killed because they were vulnerable or idealistic, like the grandson of our only 6-star general (Pershing) and like the son of the Navy’s CNO.
The pointless deaths of thousands of young men led to more colleges that met a demand for more deferments enabled by sympathetic professors.
Education is an escape.
If you're not rich or an athlete, and your parents can't help, and a mountain of debt is not your thing, you can always loan your life to the military for a few years in exchange for an education.
3
Many of the universities mentioned are private; only a few are public institutions. Never mind, if they wish to receive federal support for students and the research of their faculty, they need to clean up their admission processes, undergraduate and graduate, or go it financially alone, just like a few religion-based have chosen to do. Real meritocracy, with specializations for artists, the unusually talented, and those who have strived mightily to achieve the status for consideration, would go a long way to solving this problem. Legacy admissions need to be gone, and replaced by future winners who will make their own charitable contributions.
3
We are to blame, as a country, for this mess. We have totally corrupted education by overvaluing elite colleges as the road to success. We have placed titles above content, degrees above learning, and money above character. We are no longer interested in the value of a well-rounded education; but instead are obsessed with getting into the best schools which in turn will lead us to the best jobs. We have created this frenzied environment and our kids suffer the consequences.
17
We are to blame, as a country, for this mess. We have totally corrupted education by overvaluing elite colleges as the road to success. We have placed titles above content, degrees above learning, and money above character. We are no longer interested in the value of a well-rounded education; but instead are obsessed with getting into the best schools which in turn will lead us to the best jobs. We have created this frenzied environment and our kids suffer the consequences.
put too much emphasis on eeducation as the road to success and now we have a country of frenzied parents trying to get their kids in those few spots available. And this is not because we want our kids to experience the joys of higher learning and a well-rounded education. It is because this is the
1
The indictment talks about slots given to these kids. But it does not indicate whether the admitted kids took the slots of others or whether they were added to the class. If they were added to the class, there are no specific victims, this is a big to do about not much.
Funny that Jared is the perfect example of his parents buying his way into a school, and Donald Trump has threatened to sue his high school if they release his grades. Unfortunately, this problem of buying your way into elite schools goes right to our president and son-in-law-law. But of course, this won’t dare be mentioned by the media.
6
@BC Yeah because the media has been so kind and gentle with Trump!
Corruption in the admission process? Overlooking academic standards to have a winning (insert sport here) team? Paying people to take your tests? Money under the table? Falsifying records? Lying about it all? In the Trump era this is the norm for doing business. After all, it still works for him, right?
5
An abject case of the wealthy and privileged handicapping their children by sending them the message that foul play is fine and if you cannot earn something, buy it. This is the tip of the iceberg of students occupying seats in college fraudulently and while Singer and his cohorts will pay a dear price, there will always be Singers and parents who use their monetary power to scoff at fair play.
3
Too simple a take on the process. While we certainly ought to shoot for equality in the system––and similarly must defend against the subversion of meritocracy––what happens when a donation from a wealthy family lets ten less privileged kids attend? With the cost of college admissions shooting through the roof (upwards of $65k at most selective schools), maybe the calculus isn't so black and white.
The wealthy people involved will hire expensive attorneys to help them deflect the charges or obtain preferential treatment in sentencing. I’d like to suggest to the judge in the case that as part of the sentencing, all of those who cheated should be made to set up scholarships (equal to or greater than the amount they paid in bribes) specifically for the recruitment and funding of low-income qualified candidates at the schools they conned. This is such a display of arrogance and entitlement, and demonstrates a complete lack of moral conscience. It’s disgraceful.
4
Although conservatives condemn the Ivy League for its liberalism and general wickedness, they nevertheless clamor to send their own kids to those schools. And the reason is that these school give their kids the keys to the kingdom-- posh mansions on the main line, exemption from the hard life, and boundless political influence and social opportunities.
But as this incident shows, these schools rather than being centers of excellence are cesspools of mediocrity. At Harvard, for example, Daniel Golden estimates in How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite College-- and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates that as many as 60 percent of the freshman slots are reserved for legacy and investment admissions. This would make a good SAT question: If the average SAT of the 40 percent who get in on their intellectual bandwidth is 1500 and the average SAT of the remaining legacy kids is 900, what is the average SAT at Harvard University? The answer: probably less than the students at most trade schools. According to Golden, investment admissions seats are reserved for those who have parents who buy their way into the school, and the going price at Harvard is currently about $2.5 million dollars.
Are you shocked? I’m not.
3
The difference between parents bribing a college and making a donation to get their kid admitted is whether there’s a quid pro quo. Both make a mockery of the democratic meritocracy. When the American rat race threatens millionaire kids, what chance is there for kids at state and technical schools no matter how hard they work? The global information age economy benefits the top 15% of Americans; the rest of us work paycheck to paycheck, mired in debt, maybe attend night school. Time to redistribute wealth to democratize education, work, respect, and standard of living.
2
The urge to maintain the status quo is indeed great!
Not to mention that kids in poor or even moderate-income neighborhoods never get the opportunity to learn or practice sailing or crew. These are the sports of rich people.
2
Joshua Harmon’s brilliant play “Admissions” is a must-read for those who consider themselves progressive and yet chafe at the idea of not using everything at their disposal to get their progeny into the best colleges possible.
Thank you editorial board for the update. I read this story and I thought what are they talking about -- rich people get into schools all the time without merit. Male athletes especially over female etc.
“The real victims in this case are the hardworking students” who were displaced in the admissions process by “far less qualified students and their families who simply bought their way in,” Mr. Lelling said.
Is it a good bust yes but please do not sound like you are actually protecting us -- the 98%.
It would be nice if they focused as much on identity fraud, credit card fraud, medical bill overcharges, banking fraud... as they do protecting commercial brands and now private colleges.
1
Private education has no place in a democratic society and should be abolished.
Lets be honest. Private colleges and universities exist for the purpose of reproducing INEQUALITY of opportunity. This is true of the Ivy League and other elite schools, but also of the the second and third tier schools where not-quite-as-rich parents buy their not-quite-as-bright children degrees that will still give them a leg up on the kids who go to public colleges and universities.
We tell our children that education is the great equalizer, but it is a lie. Its not. At least not in this country. Students with good grades and good test scores from poor families are less likely to complete college than students with bad grades and bad test scores from rich families. There are a lot of mediocre students who attend elite private universities and go on to exercise power over people far more talented than themselves. More than a few of these have ascended to the highest offices in the land.
Yes, a small minority of highly determined kids pull themselves up a ladder rung or two every generation. Their stories are then used to sell us all on a system that as a whole is fundamentally rigged.
The time has come to stop lying to our kids (and to ourselves) and start talking about how to abolishf private education like many other advanced industrialized countries have effectively done. Our kids deserve a level playing field.
2
These kids may be rich, but actually they are poor. While they may have been given all manner of material goods and brand names, including Harvard, it is impossible for me to see how parents like these could have done a good job instilling worthy and solid values and moral in their children. Instead, what they got was hollow. Therefore, they are impoverished in a very important way.
2
Little thought is given to the students who are admitted to these schools by nefarious means. How are they going to feel around students who are far more prepared academically for the rigorous, competitive environment?
1
Of course there are exceptional students every now and again, and some kids come from resource-rich environments that others could only dream of.
But in my experience, being "academically over or underprepared" is a bit of a myth. I think it's a story that elite schools like to tell about themselves to sustain illusions of earned success. None of the Ivy League grads I've worked with have been recognizably more gifted than my coworkers from state schools. Although the Ivy League people are considerably more entitled and like to name drop their alma mater (especially Yale grads) despite the fact that their education is now half a lifetime or more ago.
4
"And colleges have a legitimate interest in emphasizing various forms of diversity. But it seems safe to stipulate that being born to wealthy parents is not by itself meritorious."
The NYT says that it is legitimate to base admission on criteria other than academic achievement ("various forms of diversity"). But then the NYT says that it is illegitimate to favor children from wealthy families.
If everyone can agree that the scales should be tilted, why is obvious that there is a universal moral principle that can guide the tilting?
2
@Philip Greenspun
We have discovered an honest American thinker right smack in the middle of progressivisms' thickest settlement.
Once you leave honesty and transparency behind, who is making the decisions?
Colleges are businesses and have to look carefully at their finances. That is one reason that they admit wealthy foreigners who pay full freight. Alumni donate to thank the college, and also to possibly enhance their children's chances of admission. Parents are supposed to give their kids genetic and environmental advantages. Parents do not have children so that other kids can be advantaged.
1
So the golden calf in 2019 is an elite school on the resume. All it really means is that a student did very well in high school. But people want to worship idols in sports and on resumes so why not Harvard, Yale, etc. You can't tell a book by its cover and the kind of wisdom needed in a difficult environment generally comes from learning from failures. You do recall honest, non-bribing, frequently failing Abe, right? He led us through this conflict in the 1860s. It was the only time post revolutionary Americans faced war on their own soil. The critical conflict took this admirable quality called courage for success, difficult to recognize on a resume, and, NOT for sale.
1
In an era when most Americans are struggling to succeed economically....
Come again? Have you not looked at the unemployment rate or the recent increase in wages? Or have you not noticed than in the past 30 years, 20 million new jobs were created at wages above Median? Perhaps reporters are struggling given their expectations and the success of their more avaricious college classmates who sold their souls to business, not punditry.
And please: no emotional ranting when discussing such an important subject. College admissions are stressful, and the shameful and illegal activities of 33 parents (vs 2.2 million freshman) do not completely upset the apple cart. Better if you were to address the real question: why are public schools failing to attract affluent students?
2
I dare say college is an overpriced rip off that is unnecessary. We have 13 years of free education in this country and it is not enough to get a decent job. Why?? Why do we need to spend so much extra time and money to go to some hallowed ground. Why isn’t something useful taught in high school. If you are interested in gender studies, communications, etc, take an online free course on coursera.
4
@C Agree college isn't needed for many or something all people need to pursue. But good luck teaching people to be pharmacists, vet medicine docs, engineers, nurses, dietitians, med doctors, lawyers, teachers and many other professions in four years of high school. Not all college students have trust fund parents scamming like this example. Blinding dismissing college as unnecessary, is "I dare say", oversimplified and unfounded.
2
Back in the day when there were Normal Schools, getting a teaching degree only took two years of ‘higher education’. Then it became four. Now you need a masters and continuing education in order to maintain a teaching certificate. Yet we’re graduating more ill prepared children than ever. We’ve become ensnared in the educational-industrial complex which is wasting inordinate resources with very little return on the investment.
1
Lost in this discussion is the acknowledgment that students can receive an excellent education at state universities and other less prestigious schools as well. Is the designer label worth the price paid in bribes and humiliation?
5
I worked day and night to pay for my college and finally graduated with a lot of effort and thanks in part to Pell Grants. To see this happening in this day and age really breaks my heart. However, it does not surprise me. Just look at our President and all of the cronies he has surrounded himself with. Only in America. A sad commentary for the future, or lack thereof, of our country.
7
The idea that we have a meritocracy in college admissions has in practice rested on a social contradiction, that, as President Kennedy once observed, life is unfair. So it is, if everyone has a bribe price even in a supposed academic meritocracy. Besides, a meritocracy was the last place that the parents bribing university officials wanted to send their children. To the wealthy most academic knowledge is worthless anyway without a degree. And when you want a Ph.D, you hire one.
1
"There are many takeaways from this appalling story. One is how crassly hypocritical parents can be. I bet that more than a few of those charged are proud liberals who talked about the importance of equal opportunity and an even playing field, then went out and did whatever it took to push their kids into the winner’s circle."
The above is from Frank Bruni's op-ed.
Time for the US to join the rest of the world.
Universities are for study and research.
Get rid of athletics, get rid of essays, get rid of interviews, cut legacies to a bare minimum (it would be best to get rid of them). Accept based on standardized test results (school grades are also not objective and can be doctored). This may not be fair, but it is not fair more across the board. There should also be a standardized high school matriculation system as is common in Europe and other parts of the world. There are states that have this such as the Regents in NY, but the level would have to be raised.
As for diversity, admit based on merit. There can be a preparatory system run by the universities which allows one to re-apply and to be admitted or not based on merit.
And after all the frills are cut, tuition should be lowered everywhere.
6
Any school that has as many students from the top 1% as they do from the bottom 50% has no respect for merit. The tax breaks non-profit status gives their foundations go to enhance the education of those same children of the rich, and average tax payers, who pay the bill, have children who can't benefit.
1
I was a scholarship student at one of the schools implicated in this scandal. A few of my acquaintances clearly were accepted based on very generous donations from their parents, but most of my friends were also hard-working scholarship students. The campus had all the latest and greatest technology, lots of funding, and beautiful, shiny new buildings stamped with the names of rich and famous donors. If it takes a few million to get your kid into a prestigious school, fine, as long as a lot of other hard-working students (not just the sailing coach) benefit from the exchange of goods and admission.
5
Wealthy folks paying to artificially inflate standardized test scores and to have others write college essays for their children is an even greater perversion of the admissions process. As a former college mathematics professor I can tell you that when the rubber hits the road and a student with faked credentials is smacked in the face by reality, the hurt is just as real to that student as it was to the better qualified student who went elsewhere, and at least that deserving student was able to take advantage of the opportunity that did present itself.
1
My high school senior complained to her father and me recently how much cheating goes on at her competitive NYC public high school, with a “why do I have to bother doing the right thing” kind of sigh. She also lamented that several friends have bogus “learning disability” accommodations they readily admit are so they can get extra time on tests.
We are middle class. We also tried to do the right thing by scrimping to put funds away for her (and her sister) in a 529 account from the time they were babies. Saving hasn’t been easy. Medical bills for cancer cleaned out virtually all our other savings several years ago.
Now she and we are waiting anxiously in the next few weeks for news to come from college applications, and I have to wonder how deep this scandal goes beyond those outed in today’s articles. How corrupt will our higher educational system turn out to be?
Regardless, I will continue to tell my kids that in the long run they will benefit from honesty and being true to the values they have grown up with. I will encourage them not to overthrow those values because of cynicism. But in my heart of hearts I hope this advice will help and not hurt their chances in life. We need much better governance of so many aspects of American life - our educational system, our financial system, our social protections. But trends are moving in the wrong direction.
35
The most important part of the story is that positions in classes are saved for children of talent even if they don't academically qualify. Since some universities with football and basketball gain more students through winning teams, athletes are used to gain tuition from greater enrollment that is usually supported by federal financial aid. (Just look at all the students that attend Duke because they want to go to basketball, although it is well documented that football busts the budgets of most D1s.) Ultimately, the system is quite corrupt. At the very least, the athletes who have gained admission through lower standards need to get paid for the great wealth that the schools receive through federal student aid based on the tuition of other students.
Does this "scandal" say even more about selective colleges and universities than of the perpetrators of these crimes? "Ivy" college admission practices leave the public with the odor of rot. Admissions scams have multiplied along with income inequality. How can a kid from Brooklyn compete with a rich kid who does public "service" in the Andes with indigenous tribes? Whose college admission "essay" will get the better read? College admission offices need to explain the how and why, but their secrecy only encourages criminal behavior. It is hoped that the legal system will force these college to come clean. Prospective students should know their chances up front, in writing. They should know if a 60 million dollar building donation will have weight over their essay about rats in the subway. Transparency would put these types of admissions coaching out of business. Ivies are complicit. As long as top universities persist in their practice of secrecy, they will continue to support admissions schemes as well as the wealthy who value influence more than an education.
3
How many college applicants get in because their parents donated a building? Don't most of these colleges admit many students on financial aid and through affirmative action? Aren't their kids going to benefit from legacy-admit policies? Aren't legacy admits expected to be sufficiently academically qualified to thrive at the institution?
I don't see why the interest colleges have in promoting alumni loyalty is not a legitimate one or why they are morally required to adhere to some externally defined standard of merit. If they have a legitimate interest in promoting diversity and hence admitting students who are less academically well qualified, why can't they have a legitimate interest in promoting alumni loyalty?
5
Sure it makes for attention grabbing headlines when out of millions of students applying to colleges a few were found to have been helped with illicit methods. Let’s remember that we in America still have the greatest opportunities for our students to select the most appropriate colleges for their interest and ultimately succeed in life.
Unlike China or France or many other countries where elite education determines one’s success in life to the greatest degree, the success in America can be (and certainly is) achieved by graduates from many colleges by their hard work, determination and natural talents. Let’s not be dejected by the wrong-doing of some to conclude that “the game is rigged”. Let’s prosecute the offenders but focus on what’s right with our colleges that still remain the envy and the most desired destination for students from all over the world.
3
We can't take the money out of elite private schools. We can, however, take away the value of elite private schools quite quickly, by no longer holding those who graduated from such institutions in high regard.
3
@Edward Allen: Sure, but the obvious question is why one should take having graduated from such an institution as one reason (among others) for holding a person in high regard. And perhaps those who have experience with both elite and not-so-elite schools have some understanding of why it is or isn't a good reason.
So Kushner got into Harvard with $2.5 million and that was years ago before the Bush and Trump tax cuts made the 1% even richer.... sounds like bribery gets you in for only a few hundred thousand while university gifts require at least several million. No wonder folks are using the bribery route.
5
I can't help noticing that while you've carefully delineated the realities, you haven't said they need to change. The moral outrage, if discernable at all, is quite carefully modulated. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall for the deliberations that negotiated this editorial.
7
If you have the ability to hire a test prep tutor and you don't, aren't you really committing parental malpractice? The solution to poor quality schools and lack of opportunity in some areas of our society is not to shame parents who do what they can for their children, it is to FIX THE SCHOOLS AND SPREAD THE AVAILABILITY OF OPPORTUNITY.
5
The part you are leaving out, and the real rub, is that the very high tuition that universities charge is not enough to cover the costs of running these schools. Wealthy donors help balance the books and without them, even fewer impecunious students would be able to attend. Difficult fact. So if Kushner Sr bought a place for Jared by paying the tuition for full rides for 12 other students, then what?
3
Oh well, if we can't beat them by studying hard and ability, then we should at least tax them.
6
Why do People make such a big deal about these colleges anyway? They have gotten so politically correct that some of their graduates are scared to think.
1
I'm sorry, but I don't think it right even if the parents build a new Physics building to buy their kid into Harvard. All the does is perpetuates the concept that the poor get kept poor and the rich get richer.
4
Seems like comparative advantage to me - almost everyone wins - but only if the money goes to the institution.
Some good people unfairly lost out, but many more receive the bounty from the school's extra money.
1
I don't understand how the students were recruited as athletes, but did not even practice the sport. First, don't people in admissions check those things? Also, I am not all that familiar with American colleges, but wouldn't the students have had to join the team's at some point? Lastly, how could the students not know they were participating in a scheme when, for example they were recruited as soccer players and did not play soccer or had to take the SAT in an exotic location? I understand they may not be exceptionally bright, but certainly gullibility has its limits.
6
I think that there is a big difference between working hard enough at a sport to get a slot as a recruited athlete and buying one. This editorial completely misses that distinction, toward a utopian dream of correcting all of society's ills in the college admission process. What policies could possibly issue from the ideas set forth in this editorial, which seems to fault kids who work hard and studied for their SATs and at sports to which they earned a national or international ranking, as much as parents who buy their kids' way into college by hook or by crook? Perhaps the writers should read a little more Kurt Vonnegut to understand what happens when everything's made equal.
2
Related to this is the fact that the wealthy, accused parents will now spend their wealth on highly paid lawyers in order to influence the legal system as well. Money doesn't just get people into college, money also helps you beat the legal system. I guess well see if I'm right by how many are acquitted or have no jail time.
7
@W.N ".....and liberty and justice for those who can afford a great attorney".
Money also makes class of people like Trump to become President of USA !
How disgraceful .
If the University Administrators had gotten a cut of the money given to the professors/coaches, this would never have been investigated. All bribes must go through the front door- the Dean of Students- or some other high ranking "gift-taker."
I don't think the charges will hold up in court, there is too much evidence showing that this sort of activity has been going on for centuries for the upper class.
4
This OP-ED illustrates the fact that any admissions process based on human interpretation is subject to gaming and to the whims of the admissions department/officers.
This situation has strengthened my support of the city's SHSAT (Specialized HS Admissions Test) which is an entrance exam that is the sole criteria of admittance to NYC's elite public High Schools.
It is a blind admissions process. Critics have pointed to replacing the test with essays, resumes, recommendations, and grades. As this article shows - most of these metrics can be embellished and gamed.
Essays can be coached to be emotionally compelling, athletes get bonus points by just being athletes, volunteering/extra curricular assignments can be easily exaggerated, and rich families can just donate their way in. These metrics are far from blind.
The test is not perfect, there is the issue of families that can afford test prep and those that can't. I believe that even test prepping is a far more benign (these kids are spending their free time doing MORE work and studying) than the types of shenanigans depicted in this article.
5
If this weren't so tragic I would laugh out loud. Getting into a top college guarantees neither advantage nor opportunity to a middle class student.
Both my brother and I went to Ivy League Schools (Harvard/Yale). As one can imagine, most of my friends went to either school. I have a fairly large sample pool of outcomes. If there is one thing I learned about these schools is that, contrary to popular mythology, if you don't go in well connected you don't come out well connected.
The children of rich and powerful people go to Yale and Harvard because they want to, not because going to Yale and Harvard makes you rich and powerful. Having hard working kids with freakish SAT scores makes them look good, but doesn't mean they are opening doors for those kids to enter the economic elite.
I can't help but notice that the parents most desperate for their children to go to a top school didn't go themselves. If they had, they probably would see that those with famous last names and colossal family fortunes are now, not surprisingly, famous and have colossal fortunes. Those who worked in the dining hall or at the gym are more likely than not still trying hard to keep a foothold in the middle class.
Giving millions to get your kid into Yale is vanity, they already have all the opportunity anyone needs.
10
I have never understood why American universities give preference to applicants who are athletes, much less to "legacy" applicants. I remember a student of mine who had performed well academically in high school but was far from outstanding. Nevertheless, apparently because she played hockey she was selected by Harvard. She would likely have been accepted by a good Canadian university based on her marks, but her hockey playing would not have influenced the admission committee. Moreover, whether her parents or grandparents had attended a Canadian university would have had even less impact on her admission to that institution.
2
It's not the end of the world. If student A goes to Stanford and graduates with a 2.0 average, and student B goes to Green Grass State and graduates with a 4.0 average, which are you going to hire? For most positions you'd be better off with student B.
"By any means necessary" is for the little people. For the wealthy, its "buy any means necessary."
5
To defend the wealthy and their privilege is on its face anti-democratic and counter to our countries founding principles of equal opportunity.
"The allegations underscore the urgency many American parents feel about securing a place for their progeny at a selective college. In an era when most Americans are struggling to succeed economically, many of those who have prospered are terrified that their children will not get every opportunity to replicate that success."
In an era when most Americans are struggling and these wealthy individuals are not struggling and to defend this privilege citing that the wealthy are "terrified" that they won't get an opportunity to "replicate that success" when that success could have well been based on the privilege of the wealthy, is disingenuous and a totally false comparison to the truly economically struggling.
2
Was this really a surprise? These are simply the more covert options for the rich and elite class to bypass the processes that mid-income/working class background students must navigate.
Would Bush jr have been admitted to Harvard had he not had familial affiliation and serious financial donation to the school? Buying those who are intermediaries in these processes is simply the next step in this logic of buying your way into admission.
I suppose what makes this situation seriously outrageous is how much this further highlights the inherent inequalities built into the education system in the US.
If you rely on public education alone, your fate is sealed by your geography. Certain schools are better staffed, others do not. Certain schools offer more rigorous curriculum, others do not.
We all already know the wealthy uses its capital to gain further advancement in society through all possible routes (wether we are aware of them or not). What people are frustrated over is that the playing field is severely uneven to begin with.
Ineuqality is built into the foundation of American education from K-12, could anyone really be surprised that higher education would be miraculously equitable? Given that no major reforms in the American education system (such as more funding!) have taken place, inequality will only accumulate.
The real outrage should be, public school teachers don't make a living wage, how can they be equipped to teach your children. Change!
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I was admitted into a graduate program at Harvard in the late 80s. I had worked hard, took the GRE and got in.
In retrospect, I am sure that I would never get in today. Harvard meant more to my parents as immigrants who felt like their hard work finally paid off.
It was a hard 2 years not having the cushion of scholarships or family money. I did lab work, I TA’ed two classes and finally my lab supervisor funded my summer job. I was about 100K in debt when I finished my program.
One of my friends was an RA, he drove the Harvard bus at night. My classmate drank every night because he did not want to be there, but his parents did.
It’s sad that my child will have to fight harder to have opportunities.
So many kids commit suicide because of the pressure to succeed. The fear of missing out drives most parents today. I think all of these universities have made large sums on summer programs, SIG, CTY.
In private school, kids get peer pressure to apply to Philips Academy, Deerfield and many others. Taking SSAT comes in 8th grade. The first taste of rejection is 9th grade.
With the constant gutting of the Education system, overcrowded public schools without enough resources for teachers or for schools, Private schools help challenge your child. Unfortunately now you join all the Parents with FOMO and you are the one pressuring your own child.
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@TL | Why do you think you wouldn't get in today? Grad school admissions are quite different from undergrad. Athletic prowess, for example, plays no role whatsoever at Harvard's GSAS. Legacy status: hard to imagine how it could play any role. The admissions decisions at GSAS are made in the individual academic departments, not by the admissions office. Why would a science department care that your parents or other relatives attended Harvard?
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Last year my first daughter finished high school, and I learned for the first time about the American college admission process. I am both enraged and puzzled how people can put up with it. Healthcare is, at least, widely discussed. But college? Essay where applicant explains how great she is? With no way to verify whether it's true and whether she herself wrote it? "Enriching experience," over which the kids have no control? Some of my daughter's classmates worked in Sonic all their free time and had parents who could not drive them to extracurricular activities. When my daughter with 36 ACT was rejected by all the elite colleges, all my American friends (I mean, not immigrants like our family) said, it's because of affirmative action. I am fine with that - if this is true. If my daughter did not get into Harvard because some poor minority kid got there instead, I do not mind. But how do I know that this is, indeed, the case, with the phony "holistic" approach, that is, "we take who he want and will never tell anyone why"?
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@Yulia | "When my daughter with 36 ACT was rejected by all the elite colleges …" | Many students with that score were also rejected. That score guarantees nothing. Elite schools are under no obligation (and would never want) to take all applicants with perfect test scores. Here's an important fact to remember: Students with perfect scores are too numerous to be accepted en bloc. Students with perfect GPAs: ditto. Other criteria are (and must be) taken into consideration.
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@john
If Harvard wanted to do the right thing, it would use its hundred billion in endowment and found a couple of new campuses and make them excellent too, not for franchisee profits, but to create more excellent opportunities for others to find "Veritas" in an America with an expanding population. If there are many fold more highly qualified deserving applicants than slots, step up to the plate and be bothered to help the world more. "Rem Facere Ius".
@Yulia Do some statistics - your daughter is in top 1% based on her ACT, there are approximately 3 million kids taking these exams so she is one of approximately 30,000 kids. Harvard accepts like 2,000 kids, so how do you think they going to pick these 2,000 with approximately 5 kids per spot having the same credentials?
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