Honestly, what's the solution? Replace one form of subjectivity with another ?. Obviously, cheating on entrance exams ( in addition to the other forms of cheating revealed this week) is reprehensible. The truth is we can never make everyone feel like they were treated fairly. Someone will always complain about one form of favoritism or another.
1
I simply cannot believe that this problem is merely 30 parents and a handful of colleges. I raised my children in NYC and they went through the admission process for nursery school, grade school, high school, and college. I have met many Snowplows in my experience and have seen how these kids are raised - special test sites with extra time, $1000 per hour tutors, prime spots in school sports and plays (coaches and teachers are afraid of these parents who WILL exert their power if Jr. isn't the star). I can't even begin to describe the advantages these kids have and the privileges they assume are normal - trips all over the world, expensive summer camps, private drivers, tutors and coaches for everything, designer clothes and handbags, expensive beauty treatments and orthodontia - the list is endless. So far, there is only ONE family in New York who cheated? It's only a few colleges and universities? Only one Ivy League school? I say NO WAY.
35
It would seem too many parents are anxious that the only way to a good or Distinguished job or to have choices Ian to get into one of these colleges.
Then again all of the SUpreme Court Justices come from a diverse set of law schools which feed from an incredibly rich set of colleges from all over. Or ! they mostly come from elite schools!
Many good careers are this way and there is fear that there are fewer good jobs. Hence why he intense jockeying.
4
I disagree that athletes need to be recruited. We high school coaches learn to make do with what we are given. Depending on the sport, that might include having to recruit kids who have never played before. Would thjs lower the level of competition? Sure. But who cares? I don't think college athletes enjoy their victories any less than high school kids do.
4
We are a capitalistic society, and that means money rules. Why is anyone surprised when money buys access to things like better education and health care? Money buys access to everything.
4
As many have already pointed out, there is not a "thin line" between fraud and bribery and paying for a math tutor for your child. No, there are hundreds of thousands of miles between these two things.
Sure, very rich parents donate millions hoping that could tip the admissions scales - infuriating, but not illegal, and if there were a defined quid pro quo the IRS would be all over it. And don't forget cases where donations were made, but kids were in fact not admitted. Donors can be realists.
We all wish that college admissions were less agonizing, and we all agree that criminal fraud needs to be eradicated. But let's do a thought experiment. Yale could decide tomorrow that from now on its priority is no longer academically gifted students but rather outstanding athletes, non-US citizens, and virtuoso guitar players. That will never happen - it's a hypothetical. But so long as Yale were not thereby discriminating on the basis of gender, race, etc. (since that's illegal if you get federal funding) who Yale wants to admit is up to Yale. Indignant commenters here are saying that institutions should be forced to admit only only high SAT or GPA applicants or face consequences, and that preferences given to other categories of applicants (children of alums) should be forbidden. But who exactly is supposed to be doing this forcing and forbidding and punishing?
6
NYT reporters:
Perhaps a follow-up study on cheating in higher education is in order.
They who cheat/buy their way in are most likely to do the same to cheat/buy themselves to graduation.
It happens regularly especially among business, science, and engineering majors these days even more than among the arts and humanities majors because the financial reward-stakes are higher in the STEM disciplines and in business-related disciplines.
Luckily, honest students still outnumber the rest. Sadly, dishonesty is rapidly gaining ground.
2
I don't understand why universities do not push back hard on all the services for students being offered in the legal realm related to preparing or professionalizing a college application. That defeats the entire purpose if the application itself is simply nothing other than the original work of the student applicant. This should be the standard that every university and college in America sets for themselves and their institution. In a very simple first step, every single college application in America could include an attestation that the student received no assistance and that the application comprises the original work of the student applicant. The student would understand that if the attestation were to be found violated, their admission would be revoked. It is a pretty simple fix and in the interest of everyone to just get rid of the entire industry of doing college applications for students.
2
The only solution to this mess is to infuse the selection process with two simple, core principles:
1. Academic Merit above all
2. Transparency.
The way to achieve this is also simple: follow the model employed the U.K. universities and by CalTech, the only US higher education institution (aside from, possibly, the service academies) that still prizes academic superiority as measured by tests, grades and interviews with professors.
These institutions have clear admission criteria and rely exclusively on merit.
You will not hear Cambridge or CalTech mentioned in connection with graduates who can't do math, or seniors who know less about history than when they arrived as freshmen, or crybully screaming brats like those at Yale and dozens of other colleges.
Adopt the U.K. model.
Require national subject tests of those who seek to study X or Y subject (AP Subject tests are fine for this purpose).
Of those whose test scores meet the very high threshold required - at least one standard deviation above the norm for state colleges, and two standard deviations for elites - require an in-person interview at no more than 3-4 top school choices.
Ensure that those interviews be with actual professors in the field(s) the student aims to study.
Then let the Professors choose.
Merit now.
Transparency now.
9
I always believe that the admission of higher education is based on merit. I always believe that the whole education system is justice and fulfilled with transparency. I always believe that I can go to my dream college if I work harder than peers. However, the news tell me that I am dead wrong. It gives me a big hit that i am not sure if my relentless efforts for going to my dream college is worth it. Please tell me that American dream still exists
2
the college admissions game has changed in the space of just one generation. forty years ago as a decent student, athlete and test-taker, i was not laughed out of any ivy league admissions office. it wasn't quite 'if the check is good and the body warm' easy, but it certainly wasn't the rat race of today. my son (vastly better across all metrics) went 0-3 with h-y-p.
my suspicion has always been that an influx of high-achieving asian students has raised the bar to world-class height. i've seen this as mostly a good thing, america's best being required to up its collective game. however, if it's instead driven by economic inequality -- which has also doubled in a generation -- than radical change is in order.
6
Are we going to talk about the pressure that universities put on faculty to raise funds?
1
So why isn't lying and bribing your way into college a crime, with penalties and/or jail time?
If it is a crime to bribe a judge, why isn't it a crime to bribe a university or its employee(s) who took the bribe?
NPR "All Things Considered" had a segment today about a hedge fund manager who was part of this group cheating to get his 3 children into college.
So if I were an investigator for white collar crimes, I would start with this guy and check his tax returns and what else he has done in his business practices to make money for himself.
Chances are if he is cheating to get his kids in good colleges, heaven knows what he has done as a hedge fund manager to make himself rich or take advantage of clients by lying and fleecing.
We have a whole crop of rich people--and our president, many in his cabinet, and politicians elected to office--who clearly believe that rules, ethics and laws are for other people, especially the little people who naively believe rules and enforcement are important to a society.
And Trump is trying to scare us about Mexican criminals coming across the border (which my sister-in-law believes fervently to be true). In fact, it is a lie (based on crime statistics), and the biggest criminals doing damage to the very fabric of our country are the white collar criminals, which cost this country far more than street crime.
8
The greater tragedy if one could rank them is the sheer number of graduates from elite schools that stole jobs from people that had bona fide abilities but graduated from regular colleges and universities. Nothing happened this past week, except that it was discovered. It has existed in one form or another since the elite schools received their charters. How many lawyers, doctors, wall street "gurus", politicians, etc., were hired at hyper inflated salaries because, well, just because they slid in with the help of a little or a lot of lubricant?
4
Institutions of higher (l)earning in the United States figure on my list of hopelessly corrupt organisations along with the Roman Catholic Church.
There is a commonly held view that Amazon is a firm which should be avoided due to alleged mistreatment of employees.
In the same light, how about a thought for the scores of exploited coadjutant instructors in US universities, nothing more than underpaid casual labour (a precursor of a Uber Eats biker) whilst a small number of grossly overpaid administrators and sports personnel benefit from the lion's share of salaries.
Finally, everyone knows by now that the extortionate tuition hikes imposed upon American students are totally unjustifiable against the backdrop of stagnant wages in the United States. I hope that this is just the beginning of governmental investigation into the wholesale corruption characterizing the American university experience in recent decades.
9
this article is way overstated. just because there are embezzlers at a bank doesn't mean that the bank manager is crooked. of course Singer, the mastermind, wants to claim that "everyone does it" because that assuages the conscience of his marks/the guilty parents. In general admissions practices have enormous integrity, at least at the ivies. the testimony about the Harvard practices demonstrates that. It seems that sports-centric schools which rely on the coaches to produce winning teams have opened up a loophole, but the admissions privilege for the athletically inclined (vs the academically inclined) is well known. the US needs a much deeper investment in higher ed throughout the system so that many more students can gain access to highest quality education. Fighting over a handful of slots ignores this gapping and growing need.
2
This whole bribery scandal is disgusting. Smart kids of modest means should have a fair shake at getting in to "the best" schools just like Felicity Huffman's kids.
But everyone can't go to Yale or Harvard. Fortunately, this is America. It's not as if you're condemned to a life of abject misery if you can't go to an Ivy League school!
There are tons of great institutions out there for the vast majority of high school grads who can't (or don't want to) attend the nation's snobbiest universities. These options include community colleges, technical schools, midsized state universities, and "Public Ivies" like Ohio State or Purdue University.
Graduates of all kinds of schools can do very well in life. Sometimes, alums of less selective schools outperform the Harvard set. Success is subjective, and it's guaranteed to no one. Sure, Ivy League alums usually end up wealthy and powerful. But that doesn't mean they end up happy.
Bottom line-we should focus not just on making Yale's admissions process more equitable and less corrupt, but ensuring that ALL young people have access to post-secondary schooling they can afford. We need carpenters and electricians just as much (or more) than we need lawyers and CEOs. If only we would respect all people and professions equally, rich folks wouldn't be bribing coaches and consultants to worm their disinterested kids into exclusive schools which ultimately benefits no one.
4
This is just another aspect of the systematic collapse that's coming.
Administrators serve themselves first and the students what's "left".
Bourgeoise self-indulgence and a decaying cultural ethos: This cheating scandal, parents to administrators to faculty--QED
2
Here are some more adjectives for college admissions: corrupt; bankrupt, farcical; idiotic; disgraceful.
The problem, of course, is that there really, truly is a huge benefit attached to graduating from an elite college, which is why so many students are desperate to get into one. The jobs and social networks that Stanford and the Ivies have in place all over the country and the world are incredible. Here's one small example: if you went to Harvard and were on the Harvard Lampoon, Hollywood jobs (writing for motion pictures and television) are pretty easy to come by. For everyone else, it's harder to get one of those jobs than it is to get into, well, Harvard.
And with a degree from one of the handful of elite colleges on your resume, that resume stands out and you are assumed to be extremely intelligent and hard-working -- two attributes that employers look for in hiring. I've hired countless people, and if I review a resume from someone who graduated from No Name U, that person better have graduated first or second in his/her class. Otherwise, it's just safer to hire someone from one of the elite schools.
So for those peddling the notion that a degree from Stanford, Harvard, Yale or Princeton won't benefit you in a big way for the rest of your life, well, look at Donald Trump. And, please, go peddle your notion somewhere else.
8
Admissions are exploitable but not for all. The kid from Dalton with mostly A's who shows up with a psychologist letter to get extra time on the SAT is exploiting. The badminton or water polo player from Darien grabbing a slot is exploiting. The celebrity spawn, the middling legacy, the hedge fund kid whose dad donated a painting or a library wing, the academically unqualified kid who "adds diversity" all have exploited this system. The kids who can not exploit it are the economically disadvantaged, whether they be White kids from flyover territory or those from "overrepresented" groups, South Asian, Korean and Chinese mostly, who sadly just do not add the "right kind" of diversity.
3
"Other documents in the Harvard lawsuit showed the strong advantage that universities give to recruited athletes; at Harvard, their admission rate in recent years was 86 percent."
Well, D'oh: If the college recruits a student for any expertise - say, AAN Neuroscience Research Prize, Google Science Fair, a Davidson Fellow, Scholastic Art and Writing Award winner......- then obviously that student has a higher chance of admission.
I was recruited to play bass trombone in the Princeton marching, stage, symphonic, jazz bands, orchestra, and pit orchestra in the Triangle Club. ANd I did.
Athletics is simply another venue of excellence. But you have to have the grades, the APs, and the SATS
2
To those who want everything but standardized tests removed from the application process, we move to a common core curriculum for this could work. As it stands now the curriculum within the same school district is as arbitrary as the admissions process.
My husband and I both have nephews in the second grade at different schools within the same district. We sometimes have one of the boys after school and help with their homework, its like they're in different grades! Almost nothing is the same.
We'd need to ensure that students are being taught we are testing for but we currently have no standardized way of doing so.
1
“The charges against the parents, who include Hollywood actresses and powerful executives, have exposed how thin the line is between admissions help that most middle-class families consider not just legitimate but de rigueur, like sending a child to a Kaplan class for SAT help, and outright fraud, like paying a ringer to take the test for the student.“
No, this is not a thin line; it’s a clear, thick one. The parents involved in this scandal paid thousands of dollars to have their children’s scores outright falsified. That is in a fundamentally different category from tutoring, which requires students to put in the time studying between sessions and to actually sit for the exam. As a former tutor, I also speak from considerable experience when I say that tutoring isn’t a guarantee of anything, regardless of how much money is involved. If students don’t do their homework, if they don’t pay attention during sessions, if they get distracted during a test because the kid in the next row was tapping his pencil... that’s a lot of money down the drain. The parents in this case did not simply hire tutors because they did not want to leave anything to chance, and because they most likely assumed that even with tutoring, their children’s scores would still be too low. Yes, test prep obviously helps *some* students immensely (as does equally expensive subject tutoring, which allows well-off students to bolster their transcripts), but please don’t conflate these two issues.
227
@EM
IMO savvy parents can provide most of what is needed at fairly low cost.
SAT tutoring is available for free, on line and at the library. As good as a private tutor? Depends who you ask.
Essay consulting is available from the counselor at school, from an English teacher or for an hour's consultant fee.
Guidance about all the gamesmanship is available for free at the library.
Information about colleges is available, in abundance, on line.
Dealing with a disabled child may be different since the right kind of evaluation may be costly, although it might be available for free from the public school.
That said, the main difference isn't usually large amounts of money. Rather, it is in the approach taken by the parents. That may correlate indirectly with wealth, but a good application does not require an enormous sum. A parent who makes the effort to self-educate can do most of what is possible at low (not zero) cost.
13
There should be a college applicant matching system, like that used by NYC schools or by new physicians to be placed in a residency. Students rank the schools, and schools rank the students. A computer algorithm matches students to schools.
Today's "common application" made it possible (and perhaps necessary) for students to apply to many schools. Each school wastes time reviewing the extra applications. The students' actual school preferences are obscured because there are so many applications.
Elite schools can admit a few students with the expectation that many will accept. Other schools have to use early admission or other indications of preference to know whom to admit. This is a very imperfect system.
In contrast, a college application match system will make the system a lot more efficient and rational. More students and schools will end up pleased with each other.
However there is a large entrenched college admissions industry which will not want change. Lots of application fees and admission jobs will be eliminated by a match system.
36
@GH,
that is such a great idea. it should be linked to financial aid too, as calculated by FAFSA or College Board based on income and assets.
6
Getting into the top-rated tier of US colleges was just as difficult and just as desired two or more generations ago as it is now -- based on my long-life experience. What makes them what they are -- again based on my own long-life experience -- is not the faculties, nor the course outlines (same texts as used elsewhere.) What makes them what they are is the fierce competition there within a student body that ranks high in academic drive. I truly pity anyone, not of that ilk, who gets admitted. They are going to feel like fish out of water. Usually they end up leaving after one or two frustrating semesters of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is sad to witness.
27
@Penseur
Having gone to such schools, I think the non-driven wealthy kids felt just fine. They had their own social circles, and considered the hard-driven kids in the engineering school to be losers. Grade inflation eases the distinction once you're at university, and there are always a few majors that are forgiving enough to let you ease through a four-year vacation.
24
"I think that as America has become more and more unequal, affluent parents have become desperate to pass on their privileges to their children and avoid downward mobility at all costs."
That's the most intelligent observation I've heard in awhile. We are experiencing the first downwardly mobile generation in American history since the second World War. I'm not saying everything was "Leave it to Beaver." However, this is first time in the better part of century children are more likely to be worse off than their parents. College degree notwithstanding.
You should think about the decisions those parents made over the course of their now diminishing lives that brought this tragedy to fruition. A college degree is no longer enough for even an average lifestyle. The gap between success and failure is so wide parents now have to cheat to afford their average or below average children even a chance at generational success.
How very, very pathetic. How very, very disturbing.
35
There is another factor here that does not get enough attention. Why do elite schools get to maintain tax-exempt status for multi-billion dollar endowments when their contributions to the common good fall short of the benefit they receive?
I'd like to see higher required minimum distributions from tax-exempt funds - along with requirements to expand access. That could be partly through on-line courses -but there should be a requirement to expand on-campus access as well. There is tremendous resistance to this idea - because it makes the experience less exclusive - and therefore less valuable to the elite. However, high-endowment schools could easily double the number of students they server without lowering their admission standards. Access has not expanded in line with population growth.
I say this as the parent of two Stanford students For the record, my kids are non-legacy, non-athletes and I didn't so much as pay for test prep, let alone a private "coach". Nor did I donate a building! For us the system worked, but it felt very much like winning the lottery. (I actually discouraged the older one from applying when he received an invitation from Stanford because I cynically assumed it was a ploy to increase their exclusivity rating at his expense. I'm glad he ignored me.)
I suppose it is now in our best interest to support the status quo, but as a (now) insider, the system appears even more rigged than it did when we were on the outside looking in.
31
Maybe a totally private institution should be allowed to admit whomever it wants to admit, and exclude likewise. But schools that take public money aren't exactly being totally private, and their tax-exempt status suggests they ought to be carrying out some mission that has a public benefit. Therefore their admissions policy ought to have some sort of component related to the school's public benefit mission. Fine. They have a lot of leeway. Beyond that, let's not pretend that college admissions represent a meritocracy.
12
This issue has nothing to do with affirmative action or minority recruitment. Neither the NYT or other papers has done a good job of explaining the recruiting of and need for walk-on athletes in college athletics. As an ex-D1 athlete and an undergraduate admissions committee member at an elite public university, this is how the process works. Every team for both sexes from football on down has a number of NCAA-regulated scholarship slots available every year that are managed jointly by athletics and admissions. In addition, all sports have a few additional slots, also jointly managed by athletics and admissions, for athletes deemed worthy of the team but not offered a scholarship. Normally, walk-ons are academically much closer to the general student body. These positions have nothing to do with affirmative action. I suppose at some schools this might be an avenue for "development" cases who are actual athletes, but that's a very rare case. What has gone awry here is that coaches and a few administrators have exploited this like a soft military target and presented students who aren't legit athletes and in some cases have much lower academic credentials than legit walk-ons. What makes the USC case particularly pernicious is that the athletic department executive should vet candidates was also on the take so there was no check to the system. I'd be sad to see the walk-on road closed off for legitimate student-athletes, many of whom eventually win scholarships.
7
@Juarezbear
You know more than the writers in the media, I would question the AD. He is the one that decides if the dept can fund the scholarship max. How can he not know about walk on preferential admissions?
1
My feeling about admissions to elite academic institutions is they include such extremes of subjectivity they are, in large part, arbitrary. Take Yale as an example, with an acceptance rate of about 7%. Are 93% of applicants unqualified or insufficiently meritorious to attend Yale? No.
What is the distinction between the ‘least qualified’ applicant to be accepted and the ‘most qualified’ applicant to be rejected at Yale? It’s so minute as to be inarticulable and, therefore, arbitrary.
Presumably, each year’s applicants include a cohort who are admitted without a second thought. The rest? You could hold a lottery among the top 25% of applicants and get a class indistinguishable from the one the admissions department individually selected.
10
@Joe Bob the III
Since the 7% includes the athletes, and people of color, legacies, the hedge fund and celebrity children the acceptance rate for the applicant off the street no matter how qualified would seem to be essentially like a lottery ticket. Clearly time spent playing football is worth a lot more than time studying. So if your kid is not an all state wide receiver or defensive end why waste the application money? Why depress your kids? With the destruction of our economy and the loss of stable middle class jobs parents are desperate. Years ago one could build a future with any college degree. Now employers seem to think that if you did not go to one of these schools you should be excluded. As I look at the social and economic residuals of Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan and our hedge fund economy it sure looks like our arrogant Ivy League leadership has failed us over the last 70 years. I think it is the arrogance. At least with a lottery the losers would not be depressed and the winners would not be so arrogant which is what has led this nation into so much trouble.
1
Nowhere mentioned but of primary importance is this:
"According to court documents, the admission rate for legacies at Harvard was 33.6 percent." The direct reslut of this 'legacy' enrollment is that Harvards endowment is about 39.2 BILLION dollars. As a private school, a private business, they feel they can do as they like. However, the caveat is that as a not for profit business these donations are not taxed nor do they pay property tax. Hence, how can they have no accountability whatsoever for their admissions and practices when they are heavily subsidized by the general public? The are having their cake and eating it too, so to speak.
15
@NYer
What do they have to fear when so many of their graduates hold positions of power in our government?
1
Americans are really bad at sharing and so they hoard life-chances for their families and call it playing by the rules. They fund their schools with local property taxes and thus make sure that the richest zips have the best-funded schools. We know that the poorer do better when they go to classes with the richer, but we make sure that they cannot do that. We bark that our colleges look for the best and the brightest, but we know in our hearts that they rely on standardized tests and resume-enhancers that favor the wealthy over everyone else. The whole idea is to prove to those whose life-chances are more limited that these limitations are due to their lack of discipline, when in fact it has everything to do with the way the game is rigged. The sad thing about this recent "scandal" is that even with all the advantages of wealth, these kids couldn't cut it.
22
If a family decides to commit murder, then when enough evidence is gathered, LE will arrest those involved!
Why are the children, who are 18 years-old and signed the college applications, not being arrested and charged?
Your college application states that you were on the rowing team? You claimed that you were a pole vaulter? You brag that you cheated the system and got away with it?
What use is our laws if they are not enforced?
Why have these lying and cheating young adults not been arrested?
Is justice only for the poor?
13
As is often my habit, I followed a provided link to a story (11/30/2018) about the school the Louisiana that falsified student records to gain admission into elite universities. Across the top of the article, there are at least 10 photographs, including names of the students involved in the scandal, all of which are People of Color.
However, in this current article (and most I've seen) there are no photographs, or names of the wealthy students mixed up in this current scandal.
Shame on you New York Times. I'm not asking to pillory this current crop of students, but was disheartened by your treatment of the students last year.
Your uneven coverage of similar stories clearly mimics how much privilege, and I would add protection, that these wealthy children and their parents garner, in light of equal acts of deception.
34
Could we start by abandoning legacy admissions and athletic admissions? Harvard is never going to be known for its prowess in sports. Harvard does not need a winning athletic team to be Harvard. They don't need legacy admittees either.
Almost all H attendees already benefit from superior schools. Isn't that enough?
9
@Alex
Stanford wins national titles w preferential admissions. They are the dominant women’s sports school. There whole rosters must be preferential admissions.
1
"Ivy League and sports, to me that’s an oxymoron,” said Christopher Hunt, a college admissions consultant.
I guess I should be proud to have gone to Columbia during the midst of its 44-game losing streak. Oh, for those glory years of Sid Luckman. We wuz national champeyuns in his day.
I only went to grad school there though, but my college degree is from Oberlin, a D-III school that at one point had only 18 players on the team.
2
Perhaps the SAT would be rendered obsolete if only we had a nationally uniform curriculum and actually measured how you did?
Common Core anyone? Can’t have your cake and eat it too.
@MeritocracyMatterz
At my daughter's high school, one 11th grade AP English teacher gave fewer than 10% "A" grades. Another English teacher gave about half the class As, and the third AP English teacher gave well over 50% As.
Unless you were a student in the top 10%, the grade you received was much more a reflection of the teacher you had than the quality of your work.
You cannot even count on being able to compare students in different classes at the same high school. You might argue that it all evens out, except that some students were always able with the help of a sympathetic advisor or teacher to maneuver themselves into the classes of the easiest teachers.
2
Take it from a 30-year veteran of the industry: this admissions cheating scandal is the tip of the tip of the iceberg. Higher education is broken at every level, starting with the Oxfords and Harvards and all the way down the line to the cheesiest for-profit college you can think of.
20
NYT has a problem with all objective criteria for college admissions such as SAT scores and GPA's. So if you discard all the objective criteria, you are left with the subjective ones. Once you are using subjective criteria, the debate boils down to who sets the criteria. The Ivy League presidents prefer to base it on how many buildings your family donated. NYT and the liberal media prefer to base it on how dark your skin is and how deeply you can convey your deprivation and hardship. Real Americans like my kids lose out no matter which camp wins, so why should we care!
6
Earlier in the week, the obituary of Bill Powers, former president of the University of Texas, demonstrated the short-sightedness of his ilk, noting:
"Mr. Powers had pressed for dozens of students who were well-connected but who had poor grades to be admitted to the university over the objections of the admissions staff.
"The investigation found in early 2015 that he had admitted 73 such students over six years. He acknowledged doing so, but defended their admission, saying that the students’ families knew wealthy donors and lawmakers who controlled state funding for the university, and that admitting them would benefit the university in the long run."
No, Mr. Powers, it WOULD NOT benefit the university in the long run! Corruption is corruption, and it has a corrosive effect that remains and deepens. That is YOUR legacy: short-term transactional thinking at the cost of broad faith in our civil institutions.
Up until that point in the obituary, I was thinking he was a pretty good person. But the Times buried the lede, so I didn't despise him until getting through an otherwise inspiring life story.
7
It really depends on how one defines ‘benefits the university’. If it refers to the integrity of an honestly admitted student body then not. If it is measured by the procurement of budget resources, capital and endowment growth, well perhaps yes.
3
This whole "scandal" is emblematic of the loss of a moral center in this country. The concept of doing the right thing v. the expedient thing is no longer applicable. From the president to the republicans in congress, the idea of country first, helping those less fortunate, etc, no longer applies. Stick a fork in us, we're done.
8
@NDanger, because Democrats like Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton always did the right thing and never the expedient thing? Gulf of Tonkin incident and 58,000 plus dead in Vietnam (not to mention millions of Vietnamese)? Or LBJ's Warren Commission, which even Warren Commission members like Hale Boggs and Richard Russell knew was riddled with expediency and based on constant lies and obfuscation from LBJ's CIA and FBI? A Democratic president succeeded the assassinated president and arguably chose expediency over doing the right thing.
Or Bill Clinton's "moral center" in accepting illegal campaign cash from the Chinese for the DNC (via John Huang), and then allegedly killing fellow Democrat Barbara Jordan's immigration reform legislation as a quid pro quo? Let's not pretend that one political party is the sole source of expediency. Plenty of bipartisan expediency to go around.
2
The article noted “as America has become more and more unequal, affluent parents have become desperate to pass on their privileges to their children and avoid downward mobility at all costs”. Perhaps the real reason is because college admissions have become more EQUAL, and there is less chance for an average to below average but affluent kid to get in through the ‘front’ door. It’s not an excuse but it clearly shows that more of the mediocre elite are paying for the back and side doors.
3
"Standardized test scores are manufactured. Transcripts are made up. High-stakes admissions decisions are issued based on fabricated extracurricular activities, ghostwritten personal essays and the size of the check written by the parents of the applicant."
It's called Values, and big money has taken over in this country, while ethics and morality have been parked by the curb to quest after money and wealth as an end in itself.
So here we are in 2019, where navigating the college admissions system--by any means necessary and where the ends justify the means--is the training ground for elite status. wealth, and life in America.
And those who successfully game and play the college admissions system go on to run our corporations, become doctors and lawyers commanding obscene fees, contribute big money to secret PACs to buy their politicians to do their bidding, and may even become President of the United States, which can be used to further increase one's wealth and business enterprises around the world.
And it doesn't matter how you get where you are; it only matters that you played a zero-sum game where you "strategized" a win for yourself at other people's expense.
At least, this appears to be how these elite parents think who cheat to push their offspring to the front of the line--never realizing the damage they are doing to their children and others in the process.
That most of us are outraged about this selfish behavior is encouraging. Now, what to do about it?
2
Maybe we’ll get around to looking at race-based admissions to California public universities.
Cal Poly - San Luis Obispo adopted an admissions policy in December 2017 that had the deliberate goal of driving down white and Asian enrollment in favor of blacks and Latinos.
My son works hard, gets excellent grades, volunteers, plays high school sports, has solid SAT scores (1360, combined), etc. but has already been denied Cal Poly - SLO.
My wife and I were high earners for decades and paid a ton of tax money to the State of California but our son can’t get into one of the better engineering programs here.
Why should we have to settle for a lesser school in the Cal State system, or go out of state and pay dramatically higher tuition just because someone with 1100 combined SATs gets in because of his/her race?
12
I think it's time for the government to step up to the plate. I has been argued that elite universities are primarily private and so may admit whomever they wish. True, but they get enormous amounts of federal money in research grants and in other forms. How about federal regulations denying research money to institutions that don't meet mandated admissions policies? You want federal bucks, no legacy admissions, no large donor children preference, affirmative action adheres to federal guidelines (to be published), athletes go through the normal admissions process and no faculty children preferences. Statistics on admissions would have to be published and not left to leak out in lawsuits. If a university wants to get by without NSF grants, fine.
2
I look at affirmative action and the wave of unqualified students getting into elite schools and fear for the future of our country. We are wasting much of our educational resources on unqualified people. That is a far worse problem than this one though I do not mean to say this is not a punishable offense.
All of this is thoroughly depressing. It just feels like our society is falling apart. The two political camps bitterly hate and mistrust each other. Other countries have gone from eyebrow raising, to laughter, to pity for us. And our rich don't even seem to see themselves as citizens like the rest of us... we're supposed to just pay our (and their) share of the taxes and offer our heads to stand on while they continue up the ladder. And why not? The man at the top cheats and stomps all over others for advantage too. Why should we expect our citizens to behave any better than our 'leader?'
14
At least one problem in this corrupt system can be solved at once - the "legacy" privilege must be removed. Its motivation is purely financial. All other explanations are nothing more than cynical pretexts.
3
Maybe what this scandal is teaching us is that "selective" depends on the situation. For example, if you are a middle class Asian-American, the Harvard admissions process is extremely selective. If you have rich parents who are Harvard alums and big-time donors, not so much.
The question then becomes, should Harvard really be considered a selective school? If a rich Harvard alum mentions at his country club that his kids go to Harvard, is that the equivalent of a middle class parent boasting that their kids attend the University of Texas (which has an overall acceptance rate similar to Harvard's legacy rate)?
Usually, the type of corruption we're seeing with college admissions is associated with institutions in their end state. What comes next? Open enrollment schools come with their own set of problems, but maybe it's just a matter of time before some variation of that model wins out.
3
Given such a focus on SAT scores, I always wonder what the correlation is between SATs and ultimately students' grades. If SAT scores are truly an indicator of students' success in university (and therefore a valid selection tool by the universities), then it would be interesting to know how these students' inflated scores tracked against their academic success.
As for sports as a side door, I don't have an issue with it, however, the universities could protect themselves by linking ongoing attendance at the university with the students' visible and active participation. By allowing students to step away after a semester, the universities should reevaluate the continuing acceptance on the rest of the application package (e.g. with updated grades of university level courses, etc.).
Using grades and test scores is often a poor method of selection for many faculties - the universities are essentially awarding admittance based on one's ability to take tests. The person with the best marks does not always make the best teacher, just like the best professional athletes don't always make the best coaches. The ability to motivate others to learn, perform and excel is often overlooked.
At the end of the day, it's unfortunate that some put so much focus on the image of an institution (and the potential wealthy connections) rather than the field of study. Wealth is so much more than money once one has their basic needs met.
1
Why do you so often quote college admission counselors who are a huge part of the problem? These independent consultants charge exorbitant amounts to privileged families who keep them in business. Yet here they are criticizing the system while picketing their fees? Find better “experts,” please.
8
While I appreciate the scandal that is unfolding, I think that the primary basis for college admissions is not broken, but must be monitored scrupulously to maintain its integrity.
I will only use one case in point: My first wife worked at Library of Congress, a position she worked for in earnest. Later on, realizing her potential, she competed a Harvard Law degree to become Chief Council at FDA. No one bought this path for her. She earned it.
By the way, if anyone wonders, we went separate directions for practical purposes. I have always wished her the best.
Lest we forger such examples, let us, instead, focus on what is wrong with the system and fix it.
1
A common response to the scandal is to point out the dishonesty of the parents involved and the corruption of the coaches, but the real cause of this problem is the greed and arrogance of the elite universities. It's not enough for these institutions to enjoy their status as the envy of the academic world; they also must field sports teams that compete at the highest levels, even if doing so means compromising their standards. The schemers found a backdoor to get in, but the schools themselves created this pathway to admission.
6
@B Magnuson It is not just the ‘elite’ universities, it is the ENTIRE US system. Centered on winner take all and celebrities. And doubt that will ever change. So - gud luck!
@B Magnuson
It seems like the greed and the arrogance is a vicious circle. A parent goes to an exclusive school, they want their kids to have opportunities to make wealthy connections, the school has a policy around legacies, others envy the wealth and opportunities and want a slice of the pie, ... the whole system is a mess and really, it comes down to the worship of the institutions along with the wealth and privilege associated with them. True success is not about the amassing of monetary fortunes, it's about the legacy of the positive impacts one leaves on the world.
1
That not parent whom Singer approached with a scheme saw fit to blow the whistle on him shows how accepted this sort of thing is. As long as admissions are handled by fallible human beings, who are inevitably susceptible to the lure of a fat bribe, the system will never be "breachable," no matter how many tweaks are made.
4
We read here that admissions directors "may bear some responsibility for an admissions process that has spun out of control." But only because this admissions process has come under intense scrutiny by the the press is the public becoming aware of longstanding admissions practices that reveal what these admissions directors are also responsible for: marketing a "reputation" at the global level and meeting fundraising goals that are in the multi-billions. That is, these admissions directors are always keenly aware of their duty to promote and protect a marketed "reputation," precisely so that, as Jerome Karabel states here, these elite colleges "become a status symbol with the legitimacy of meritocracy attached to them, because getting in sanctifies you as meritorious." Therefore, an elite university as a (high) status symbol clearly means that the university's own students are now also in on this game; none of these new players are going to say or do anything that de-legitimizes the symbol they're using to attain their status. Which then raises the question of why the press is not scrutinizing the other end of the admissions process, the student termination process (i.e., throwing students out the back door is a process that is just as necessary as admitting them). So why are NYT reporters (and students) not concerned about how these elite universities are throwing their students back out? A case at UCLA offers answers: www.uclastudentabuse.info
Why haven't the children been arrested?
2
@The Critic
Probably because, in many cases, the kids didn't know what their parents did. In others where they did know, well now so does everyone else.
I think the same reason as why we aren’t sending back DACA kids.
2
@The Critic WHAT crime has been committed? Is ‘bribing’ a non-govt individual illegal? Unethical yes. Using fake IDs? Not declaring income, tax evasion??likely. Are the applications ‘under oath’?
Seems to me that other than ID faking and tax evasion, the rest are private problems to be dealt by the relevant organizations.
Until society and corporations stop putting a such a shallow premium on name brand schools, cheating will never go away. There's such a small amount of spots for such a huge population, just the idea of being in those types of institutions and graduating from them is almost a lifetime guaranteed access to networks of people with means, connections, opportunities; one of many symptoms of inequality in toxic capitalism.
Want to stop the cheating? Stop the incentive. Once you lessen the value, you lessen the demand. Put these college consultants out of business. Companies stop fawning over ivy leagues, encourage hiring from city and state schools. Fund them properly. Not to sound alarmist, but ever widening inequality is a recipe for violent revolutions, we know how those went in the last century.
7
Really, doesn’t the NY Times share in the adulation of Ivy League and other “elite” universities and colleges? As a state university-educated person, I have been slightly annoyed for years at the attitude I detect in articles concerning the perceived “rank” or “exclusivity” of the college being discussed or mentioned. Public institutions are mostly just ignored, except when they appear in an accomplished person’s bio.
14
Yes, I got an undergraduate degree at a college consistently in the top 19 and a master's at another elite institution. As part of a midlife career change, I'm now pursuing a master's at the local state university with a mediocre reputation. But, I'm blown away by the intelligence and drive of my fellow classmates and their commitment to make the world a better place.
Frankly, I don't see a difference between my current classmates and my former elite classmates, except the current ones talk more about struggling to pay the rent.
6
Trump has threatened Wharton--the top B school in the country-- if it ever releases his academic transcripts. I wonder how he got in? This article makes me wonder.......Fred Trump did a lot for Donald, as the NYT taught us several months back....Just sayin, that's all.
14
Lot's of comments about athletics in college... by people who didn't play college athletics.
Let's clear things up. Sports do not make money for schools. Sports are actually a huge financial loss for colleges, unless it's a DI football or basketball program. Most sports don't even charge for tickets to their events. If you have a problem with the money in college sports, blame the fans who turn out in droves to watch their football/basketball teams play. Without them, there is no money in college sports. Schools invest in all the other programs because they enrich the college experience for both the athletes and student fans. Having a good sports program is a significant factor in school choice.
Second, student athletes have significantly higher GPA's than non student athletes. And unless you play DI football or basketball, you don't get an "aid" to take your classes for you (they could go pro out of high school but the pro leagues say they can't, so tell me what they should do). So that means 99% of student athletes take their own tests and get better grades than the rest of the student body as a whole.
Athletes aren't the issue here. They are recruited and accepted at higher rates because they are better students and contribute to a school more than the average student. The 86% acceptance rate at Harvard is AFTER they have already passed the basic admissions requirements, which are pretty much the same as everyone else's.
NYT should really clear that up.
6
@Tom "Having a good sports program is a significant factor in school choice." Why?? Why are these team sports needed to "enrich the college experience"? People are in college to learn, not to have an experience.
5
@Tom Um, no. The 86% acceptance rate is the percentage of athletes recruited by coaches that actually get accepted. If a coach wants a student to play on the team, you better believe that the student won't have to have a 1600 SAT and 4.0 GPA.
11
With all due respect, athletes do not have higher GPA’s. A Middlebury professor studied the academic results of 80,000 Division III athletes over several years and found that the athletes performed significantly worse in college than their non-athlete peers. See attached article for details.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.slate.com/culture/2017/12/wesleyan-university-football-is-good-business.html
3
The system is totally broken, imo. Here's an example from my own child's life.
My son was a straight A's student in junior and senior high school, took every AP class offered, did very well on the SATs, worked every summer, and was captain of the high school tennis team. This background, however, was clearly not enough to guarantee his acceptance at his chosen colleges.
Knowing just how difficult it is to get accepted, his parents paid for a college admissions consultant during his high school years. Based on my son's goals, the consultant gave him suggestions on the classes to take, extra-curricular activities, work & volunteer activities, SATs/ACTs, college applications, and college essays. The consultant earned her fees and did a good job as a legitimate and honest college prep coach (no cheating!).
The good news is that my son was accepted into a top UC's engineering program in 2012. He has since graduated and is now doing extremely well as an engineer working for a technology company. He truly worked his tail off in order to maintain his grades and do all the extra things that are now necessary to compete for college acceptance!
However, it shouldn't be this difficult for a young person to achieve their goals and build a life/career. Should it?
Note that UCLA received 135,000 applications last year. It's obviously become completely crazy. Good luck getting accepted, regardless of your prior stellar achievements.
4
@SalinasPhil
Any engineering program at any accredited state university is a fine program. It is hard to get into and graduate from any of these programs.
I have no idea why you would cite UCLA as it is not a particularly noteworthy engineering school.
Long and short of it - a BA from a 'name' school is important but a technical degree like engineering is nor dependent on an Ivy pedigree - as a matter of fact, most Ivy's don't have strong engineering programs.
This is all stuff your son should have known before he graduated from HS.
1
Why does a university have a professional football team attached to it?
Professional football (aside from long term injury to the players) is a legitimate business. But it has no obvious connection to education.
The proper content of undergraduate education should be something open to continuing discussion among those producing it.
Professional football diverts attention from this discussion.
The same point can be made for other sports,
10
Some have suggested a lottery system which, unfortunately, can also be corrupted. No, the answer is that the schools themselves must have a far more rigorous vetting process that looks for potential violations and acts accordingly. They appear to rely too much on what is given to them without looking past the top sheet of the application.
Several here have noted that athletes tend to have a higher rate of acceptance than the majority of applicants. I would suggest that in the case of large colleges with big time sports programs, it is all about money as they need to fill those monstrous stadiums every week and maintain their TV contracts. Yes, I am being cynical but I see that as adding to the overall problem discussed here.
1
@R.Edmund Moran The internet has made the application process simple and global. Now, high school students from around the world apply online with a click. This means the number of applicants has exploded. UCLA received 135,000 applications last year and that number keeps rising. As a result, deep vetting is impossible. The application game is now a matter of getting past all of the digital filters that are designed to weed out 95% of applicants. There aren't enough hours in an entire year for the review panels to even glance at every application.
1
@SalinasPhil
Clearly you have not filled out the Common App or the Coalition App recently. There isn't a single application to be submitted with a simple click. It's long, it's tedious, and each institution adds its own customized questions or essay requirements. Then there are the colleges who have their own applications... And of course the transcripts and teacher recommendations that must be submitted to each place also... So, while there is no postage involved, it's not all that "simple."
1
@R.Edmund Moran The schools themselves already have rigorous vetting processes in place. The problem is that they can easily be gamed by anyone willing to accept a bribe.
2
Nothing in this country is a meritocracy. The meritocracy myth is perhaps one of the biggest fables Americans believe in, but it's as much of a fable as Santa Claus or the Easter bunny. The American Dream doesn't exist. American exceptionalism was a lie. We don't live in a meritocracy - not even close!
8
Since a hundred million dollars in New York and twenty-two fish-hooks on the border of the Arctic Circle represent the same financial supremacy, a man in straitened circumstances is a fool to stay in New York when he can buy ten cents' worth of fish-hooks and emigrate.
- "The Esquimau Maiden's Romance" - Mark Twain
i suggest these kids pick up some fish hooks and head north.
2
Once again the middle class folks are getting the short end of the stick. If you aren't "lucky" enough to be the one percent that can bribe your way in or aren't "lucky" enough to be a minority (except if your are Asian) then you will have to do it the old fashioned way, earn it. But half the spots will already be taken.
8
America is morally bankrupt. From Wall Street to Hollywood, DC to SV, and everywhere in between: media, academia, the judiciary, rich, poor, middle class, we are a culture that's rotten from the core. This is what happens in a society that worships success and wealth, compounded by increasing population size and multiculturalism. The bigger the population and the more diverse we are culturally, the less common bond we have with one another. The only that binds us all together anymore is money.
Now add to that the indulgent attitude from the left that excuses all bad behavior, constantly telling criminals, drug addicts, welfare leeches, people who broke our law to enter this country: it's not your fault, it's all the racism, sexism, bigotry, what have you. We are a conscience free, guilt free society. Everything is excusable, nothing is ever your own dang fault, everything is always someone else's fault.
The result -- we're becoming increasingly like a third world country, rotten from the top down, all around. This is how all empires eventually meet their demise.
3
People who are frustrated that they can't get a job that they're qualified for, or that their children get turned down from selective universities, have a right to be upset. However, as this article shows, to blame such things on black people or other minorities getting "free stuff" (i.e. affirmative action) is barking up the wrong tree entirely.
7
@C.M. It's equally wrong to blame it on a child being from a wealthy family. Neither the poor child nor the rich child chose his family.
1
On the surface the current scandal seems a damning indictment of all of higher education. Upon reading the FBI documents, it becomes clear that a few people (in the grand scheme of things) took advantage of weaknesses in the "side door" admissions process - where a different standard is applied to, mostly boutique, sports recruits. These highly selective colleges have boutique sports programs because they are more likely to be attractive to the upper class (tennis, rowing, water polo). It's a fact - upper class people are more likely to become regular donors than lower-middle class. Upper class students are also more likely to be paying full tuition.
In addition to the side door, making ACTs and SATs more accessible created weaknesses in preventing test cheating.
The overwhelming weakness that no university can 100% prevent was the number of unscrupulous people who benefitted financially, starting with CW-1 who came up with the scheme, and the university athletics personnel who accepted bribes, the test ringer who was paid between $2K-$10K per exam, and personnel who were paid $10K or more to look the other way when the ringer showed up to alter the responses. Let's not forget the private psychologists who fabricated a learning disability diagnosis - without the accommodations made possible by fake LD diagnoses, CW-1 told clients the system would NOT work.
Sometimes it just feels like everything in America is rotten or rotting.
9
Speaking of tropes: Like Steven Miller, who’s been pushing the Administtration’s anti Central American refugee discrimination policies, Edward Blum, through his “Students for Fair Admissions” law suits has been pushing the canard that “affirmative action” in higher education is “unfair “ and unmeritocratic So, what do make out of this abuse by the genius, expedient class.
1
Test your new freshmen the first week of class, with some pass/fail exercises. If they prove to be impostors, send 'em home, and contact anyone on the wait-list, who may drop out of the safety school and instead enroll in the newly opened slot. Just the threat of on-campus verification will deter. And the business world is just this way. Prepares them for job interviewing -- and evaluations, which are...constant. No parent can buy them out of this. Will enhance the prestige of the school. We test all of our applicants.
3
@tommyjeff1800 Far from proving who the impostors are, that will only send home a lot of people who, for lots of reasons, will fail the test.
1
The stats on legacy admissions are interesting. I would love to see how the test scores and GPAs of legacy applicants compare to the rest. Children of ivy league graduates are probably more likely to do very well themselves, academically, and they probably have good awareness of how to position themselves as attractive candidates (lots of extracurriculars, etc). So perhaps it's not surprising that their rate of acceptance is higher. But how much of that higher rate is due to better qualifications vs the simple fact that they check the "legacy" box on their application? I'd be very interested to know.
4
@Liz "But how much of that higher rate is due to better qualifications vs the simple fact that they check the "legacy" box on their application? I'd be very interested to know."
So would we all, but that might inconveniently reduce some of the outrage if included. Or perhaps not.
...Andrew
“If you’re going to have an athletics program, then you need to recruit athletes,” said E. Gordon Gee, the president of West Virginia University. “If you’re going to have an orchestra, you need to have orchestra players.”
This is patently false. High schools across the country have orchestras and athletic programs without recruiting. The teams and orchestra may not be quite as good without recruiting, but that is a different argument.
9
@D I wish the reporter had then asked him, "How many orchestra members do universities recruit with full scholarships these days?"
6
@HKGuy
I think you have misunderstood. The issues at hand have nothing to do with scholarships. The athletic spots at the heart of this scandal were not scholarship positions. They were admissions preferences based on sports achievement. Gee's point in the quote is that the university wants to find students who specialize in non-academic specialities. The question posed by commenter "D" is whether admissions preferences are actually needed to to support those activities.
I have a curious idea.How about having race,legacy,donor ,faculty relation,geographic location ,athletic ability blind admission.If you think there is a budding Einstein who is not strong in English you might make an exception.The demi-gods of the admission offices need to be put in place.Diversity is the the natural result of treating people fairly and is not a goal to attain for its own sake.
7
"Ivy League and sports, to me that’s an oxymoron,” said Christopher Hunt, a college admissions consultant."
Wrong. The Ivy League IS a sports league. That's where the name comes from.
9
One aspect of the Harvard lawsuit that went unmentioned in the article is how hard Harvard fought to keep secret its arbitrary admissions process. This makes an arbitrary process even more infuriating...people can't even know the recipe for the secret sauce by which a high school senior becomes a senior at America's most prestigious university. You can't even know why a particular applicant got in and your son/daughter didn't. At the same time Harvard steadfastly insists that its admissions process is fair. Sure.
6
How about this?
Move to an entirely blind admission process. No consideration for : legacy, gender, income, geographic origin, etc. etc. No essay, no consideration for forced extra curricular activities. Only consider grades, board exams and classwork, that's why you went to school for 12 years.
If you meet the school's minimum academic criteria you name goes a bingo drum and the dean pull the candidate's name.
Too simply and honest for America I think.
8
Irony of ironies, from this article: "If you're going to have an athletics program, you need athletes. If you're going to have an orchestra, you need orchestra players." -E. Gordon Gee (WVU President). Gee's single-year 2013 salary as president of Ohio State: $6 million.
3
“Elite colleges have become a status symbol with the legitimacy of meritocracy attached to them, because getting in sanctifies you as meritorious,” said Jerome Karabel, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a historian of college admissions.
And teaching at an elite university gets you quoted in the NYT, thereby perpetuating the elitism.
Why not reach out to more diverse sources?
3
@Shiloh 2012 The president of West Virginia University was also in the article.
I laughed when i saw that an ad—placed by an AI algorithm, no doubt—for Stanford University right below this article on the NYT app on the university admissions scandal. Another example of AI making the world a better place.
I bet Stanford’s PR people will be none too pleased with this ad placement. Stanford may even want their ad money back. Will Stanford kick out students placed at Stanford via fraudulent and/or unethical means and give their parents their money back?
2
The US college admissions system is a meritocratic one? Even when I was a high school senior a million years ago, I didn't believe that. I saw my classmates who had access to tutors and test-taking classes. I'd heard of kids with rich parents who bought Ivy League educations for them. I met kids at these schools who struck me as remarkably vapid and far rom being the best of the best and I knew that something else was at work aside from hard work and intelligence.
7
Guess what. The breaks continue through graduate school and beyond. In the late 80’s and early 90’s I was in the cat bird seat as an administrative manager in investment banking at Goldman Sachs. I, a nobody, was quite surprised that the new hires were considered the best of the best from Harvard, Stanford, etc. They were smart but not commandingly so. Most were very good looking. But standing out as exceptional after such a rigorous vetting process? I still feel that luck and connections had to play a role.
1
@tony in my school, there was a highly gifted science buff who went to MIT on a full scholarship. And I've met plenty of Ivy grads who were very, very smart. So SOME merit recognized.
1
Oh, come on. Any system can be gamed. I live in Canada, teach at university. We admit students on the basis of high school grades. How to game it? I had a student who did poorly in high school algebra (below 60%). He retook it in the summer, got 96%. Easy.
Our son applied to both Canadian and US schools. The Canadian process took half an hour. The US took half a year.
The US system is like a democracy: it is not perfect, but show me a better one.
7
What if we went back to generously funding our state universities, hiring tenure-line faculty to teach at them at living wages, and offered preferred admission to in-state students? Wouldn’t that alleviate much of our national stress and also level the playing field?
34
@JMF These families were not trying to get into public universities.
@Jackson
The point is to take the "cachet" away from the Ivies. Or we can let the Ivies become private clubs for the vapid rich who care about rankings, as long as there is excellent public school for everyone else. No one dies by not going to Yale or Princeton, but it is important to provide young people with a strong and affordable university education.
4
@Jackson
Actually, they were. Admission to UCLA is highly competitive, and it is one of the schools on the list. UT Austin, also.
2
So accustomed they, the wealthy parents, were to even immeasurably assert their firm belief that they did not fear the state, alternately nor its laws, draconian they could verifiably be, but only of their underachieved progenies not be permitted to attend elite educational institutions of higher learning, in the United States, those same culprits were charged of having engaging themselves, without reservations so, in the practice of grand fraud, of educational nature. This, in an effort to deprive a large number of other youngsters proven to be academically a lot more capable than the sons and daughters of the rich the intended beneficiaries were. Yet, a grand fraud that was perpetrated to first deny a given group of impoverished young men and women, all of them of working class background, the unprecedented opportunity to not only attend highly prestigious colleges, but be the first persons in their families to prove themselves capable of doing so, and successfully complete their educational journey. So would the same young males and females, those whose parents made even dirt-poor poor for generations, their new lords, in various ways, would continue to be the descendants, no matter how incompetent they were, of the well-heled culprits (parents, many of them Hollywood celebrities and prominent business leaders) charged by the United States in a college entry fraud, on a day of Mid-March, 2019.
@Prof. Yves A. Isidor
For a professor you sure write run-on sentences...
5
Rules are for those who can't afford to break them. The wealthy will always do everything they can to optimize their lives.
3
Please do away with the essay requirement as well. It’s just another way to justify admission to less qualified applicants with money.
8
But one other trend in high school education today is that fewer and fewer students know how to write. I am a professional writer so perhaps I'm biased, but I think writing is a critical skill. Preventing essay fraud is certainly an essential thing to do and I don't claim to have the answers for how to do it. But some attempt must be made to have students prove that they are capable of forming and articulating a position using critical thinking.
4
@Wayne Doleski. One improvement might be to have the student write the essay on site. Otherwise, you have no idea who is doing the writing.
9
It is the capitalist kind of education. As long as it costs money, and a lot , it is not democratic and by essence becomes corrupted.
The catholic of Maryland in the 18th century were refusing to send their kids to the private schools in England because they were saying that they were just social strata ladders for rich kids whose success were paid through while they were just partying and learning nothing. So they were sending their kids to jesuit colleges in France. And they had indeed a much better education than the protestants of DC.
1
"Ivy League and sports, to me that’s an oxymoron,” said Christopher Hunt, a college admissions consultant.
I get the sentiment, but the Ivy League is literally a sports conference.
11
For these parents involved in the bribery to have committed a crime, their actions must violate the moral and ethical standards of the community; if not, they have a moral defense that their actions have no business being construed as criminal, that the legal code itself is flawed and must be corrected.
The bribers can very plausibly claim Americans don't really have or want a system of non-nepotistic "meritocracy", as the Ivy leagues & their system of donations-for-admissions (& legacies) preference attest.
The ONLY, ONLY, ONLY, ONLY thing that separates these bribers from the dormitory donors is the amount of money involved. Any claim otherwise is full of baloney. Either you're paying to circumvent the achievement token arms race (which is what our "meritocracy" is, make no mistake, itself a highly corrupt, largely money-driven scheme to begin with) or you're not.
Whether the bribes subsidize underprivileged students, walnut burl paneling at the dean's office, or a coach's mortgage payments makes no ethical difference; to disagree just penalizes the lower-level bribers for their lesser resources.
Either the crime is using bribes to circumvent the achievement token arms race ("meritocracy") or it isn't. Expensive feeder prep schools likewise substantially circumvent it by the way.
Either all the money-based shortcuts are criminal or none.
The further you dig, the more "meritocracy" is exposed as a fiction, across the board. The colleges know this already.
1
@Andrew
You sign your name on the test. Implicit in that signature is that you have taken the test yourself and taken it under appropriate circumstances. If you haven't, then that's fraud, and if you use those fraudulent test results to get something of value, that's a crime.
If you don't believe in that, then I'll be signing your name to a bunch of checks and cashing them. And you'll have no recourse, because, after all, identity theft is rampant, people send out mass emails without caring who they're going to. Therefore, community values would suggest that no one cares who anybody actually is; if I can get my hands on your money, it's mine.
1
Nothing new in this--just the nasty and brutish side of college administration coming to light once again.
As long as administrators use politically expedient and secret-handshakes as a means to satisfy and enforce a variety of cultural quotas, there will never be anything close to "legitimacy of meritocracy attached" to college admissions.
Done deal.
1
I taught and was on admissions committees at small and large universities. Mostly public. I never once saw any problems and I was the annoying professor who double-checked EVERY document I did not like in any way. Transcripts from overseas or translated transcripts especially.
Universities and professors are not the problem, it is how easy it is to pay of coaches and use other tricks to stack the deck.
If more departments required project based admittance — the applicant should complete 1-3 projects which the department they are applying to reviews as a major part of admitting — it would be much harder to fake entry. A kind of portfolio to get admitted. If you are an athlete, you must also submit video of your playing and do try out.
The solutions to avoid this are simple. Applicant: prove to us you are real and can do things, yes, at a very very basic level. Otherwise, who are you?
Architecture, art, design, and performing arts do all of this and, it works pretty good. They also do mid degree progress reviews (cuts for acting!) and, a final review of all the work the student did, to approve graduation.
Either you are a serious and dedicated scholar or, you are not. It is that simple and must be visible from day one of applying.
3
@Mr. Point
But that was the problem in this cheating scandal: the parents bypassed the "prove it" by paying others to do just that in the names of their children. This isn't about getting out - mid-degree progress - this is about getting in.
1
So accustomed they, the wealthy parents, were to even immeasurably assert their firm belief that they did not fear the state, alternately nor its laws, draconian they could verifiably be, but only of their underachieved progenies not be permitted to attend elite educational institutions of higher learning, in the United States, those same culprits were charged of having engaging themselves, without reservations so, in the practice of grand fraud, of educational nature. This, in an effort to deprive a large number of other youngsters proven to be academically a lot more capable than the sons and daughters of the rich the intended beneficiaries were.
Yet, a grand fraud that was perpetrated to first deny a given group of impoverished young men and women, all of them of working class background, the unprecedented opportunity to not only attend highly prestigious colleges, but be the first persons in their families to prove themselves capable of doing so, and successfully complete their educational journey. So would the same young males and females, those whose parents made even dirt-poor poor for generations, their new lords, in various ways, would continue to be the descendants, no matter how incompetent they were, of the well-heled culprits (parents, many of them Hollywood celebrities and prominent business leaders) charged by the United States in a college entry fraud, on a day of Mid-March, 2019 were Hollywood celebrities and prominent business leaders.
@Prof. Yves A. Isidor
I see you are writing from Cambridge, MA and that you label yourself "Prof." so I assume (yes, I know what that means) you teach in one of the elite colleges there.
My less-than Ivy league education asks What?
2
Of course, still another thing to investigate is how the Singer-fraud kids did at the schools to which they were admitted. Because if they didn't flunk out or even finish in the bottom 25% of their classes, something is seriously wrong. Shouldn't be hard for some enterprising reporter to look into. Just find their friends and roommates.
2
There are always going to be way more kids who *could* do well at these universities than spots available. So even if the fraudulently-accepted students are doing fine, that doesn't mean the standards for acceptance should have been lower.
2
@Observer of the Zeitgeist
Just because someone got in on a bribe does not mean they couldn't be a top performer at the school they entered.It just means that they got in over those who were more deserving.
2
Although Senator Elizabeth Warren claims that her "Native American" status was not used for college preference or career advancement, it does not seem credible to most people.
Gaming race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, and the causes affiliated with them (organizing an AIDS awareness walk, building Habitat houses for the poor. etc.) play to the PC biases of admissions boards.
It has become so commonplace that anybody who is not gaming the system is considered a chump.
So, yes, the system is broken, not just vulnerable to exploitation. To fix it, admissions out to be exclusively merit-based and blind to the applicant's identify or identifiable traits.
3
Name a quality that is purely indicative of "merit" that is also unassailable and impossible to manipulate or cheat on. It's not so easy.
2
The elite colleges seem to be like deer in headlights. But you know what - they were well aware of what was going on. The virtually identical tuition for private colleges - can we call it price fixing now please. The so called “liberal” educators have a capitalist mindset when it comes to cost and paying themselves. I hope the media does not play the apologist tune to what has happened and has been happening over the years. The media needs to take up the topic and investigate in details and present the findings to the general populace. Looks like another gem in our society has turned out to be cruddy and needs a thorough repolishing.
Enough already with the hyperbole!
The group identified this week: they should go to jail but they can’t be more than a tiny % of applicants. They are repulsive and are criminals for sure.
Legacies and those with advantages: sure, it’s unfair, but they are also a small % (albeit probably more like 5% at elite schools.
That means more than 90% are on a fair playing field. It should be 100 but let’s all show a little balance in the reporting and in the comments.
10
@David Read more on the testimony that's come from the Asian organization's lawsuit against Harvard. It's endemic in the admissions process there.
3
What happens when a under-qualified student who has been admitted under false pretenses arrives at a school unable to do college level work? 'Getting in' doesn't sprinkle one with competency fairy dust
3
The 50 individuals are not accused of taking advantage of the many legal inequities in college admissions. They are accused of blatantly breaking the law. They should be prosecuted, and if found guilty, punished to the full extent the law allows.
Part of what motivated these people, in no sense a valid excuse, is the culture of gaming the system that has become so prevalent. Granting preferences to donors and alumni is legal, and at private schools (but not public institutions) probably ethical. Life isn’t fair. Inheritance laws insure that wealth is not distributed equitably. Genetic roulette is such that some are born smart, good looking, and/or athletic, others are not. And so on.
That said, colleges should rethink legacy admissions.
Another problem is that we have evolved a culture in which gaming the system is socially acceptable. Affirmative action, as practiced today, is based on race, ethnicity and gender, rather than personal economic or other hardship. It is, by definition, unfair. The Elizabeth Warrens of the world have come to think it’s perfectly fine to tick the right box on application forms.
The ADA was intended to give the truly disabled opportunity. However, today, examinations are often gamed, with parents who have the Benjamins getting the pieces of paper that allow their children double time on tests. For those who are truly disabled, accommodations are appropriate. But the available statistics suggest that all too often ADA is abused.
So it goes.
4
"...the best and the brightest young people...," is the underlying factor for both students who think they deserve to be enrolled in purported "ivy" league schools and the universities. We need to redefine those words because graduates of these universities are not always the best and brightest in their respective field. I am a public health expert, and I have met a significant number of "ivy" league public health graduates, and not one has surpassed my level of leadership and diverse ingenuity in the area. Their degrees do open more and wider doors initially, but eventually it boils down to skills, ambition, determination, and yes, leadership.
I'm surprised the actresses in Hollywood find college a status symbol. In a strange way, it gives me some hope that people want a college education. When I was growing up, it was lame to be smart and a nerd. The US way is short-cut/fast food - wanting it your way in 30 minutes or less. Lets get back to the fact, in academics and sports, you need to put the work in, talent and money will only take you so far.
22
@Yolanda Perez
Uh, no. That's exactly the problem. Money alone will take you very, very far. That's the entire problem the scandal highlights. You can put the work in and still lose to someone like Donald Trump. A child whose entire existence is tied up in a tax fraud scheme. A smart or athletic person puts in the work. A rich person checks the boxes and stamps the ticket.
Think about that dynamic when you vote in the upcoming primary. There's a reason Millennials support Sanders. If the system is going to be unfair, you might as well make it unfair in fairest possible manner.
5
Following the football scandal of 2011, Ohio State created a compliance office that is detached from the rest of the university hierarchy and reports directly to the Board of Trustees. In essence, the chief compliance officer is our Inspector General. While no system will ever be totally resistant to corruption, having a central office that handles all compliance issues certainly helps.
While the big public universities are routinely, and often justly, accused of over-emphasizing athletics, it's also true that there's no way a coach at one of these schools could "recruit" a non-athlete. The spotlight is simply too bright for that kind of behavior to go un-noticed.
4
This is a scandal entirely befitting our Era of Ever Greater Inequality. It is still another display of how the very upper reaches on the wealth spectrum work to grab and grab some more. Tax cuts and income gains tip more and more toward the very richest, who then (naturally) use their enormous accumulations to insure that they and theirs continue to take
in more and more and more...
“Ivy League and sports, to me that’s an oxymoron,” said Christopher Hunt, a college admissions consultant.
The Ivy League was founded as a collegiate conference, it's not an oxymoron, it's history. The corrupting influence of sports on colleges and college admissions goes way back. I am not saying that college sports are bad. But once colleges decide they want to win, and they start recruiting athletes for their teams, inevitably this leads to different standards for admission for athletes, and just as inevitably leads to cheating and corruption.
5
We'll know its over when all students have access to AP courses, not just wealthy and urm.
I have long said that in Canadian Higher Education, there is a separation of Education and Sport. As others have pointed out Ivy League sports teams are always lower tier sports wise. Except maybe for Canadians who play Varsity Hockey in the USA could not qualify for a top Canadian University academically. But they get full scholarships south of the border? Often taking majors like Communications? Teaching them how to read and write? big LOL. Most of these Majors at State Universities, are not offered at Cdn Universities, they are at Secondary Community and Provincial Colleges.
« American universities are often cast as the envy of the world »... Maybe, but frankly, I don’t. Yes, some of the most prestigious universities are American. However, the fees are sometimes ridiculously high, the admission system, as pointed out, in riddled with irregularities and is arbitrary. Research seems more and more driven by the demands (and the interferences) of the private sector. American universities are also the starting point of the movement of « political correctness », « ultra-sensitivity » that is now contaminating universities elsewhere in the world and is threatening academic free speech.
1
"Colleges say they use a “holistic” admissions system — weighing factors like hardships and service to the community — in part to account for the edge given to those who can attend better schools or pay for test coaching."
This is nonsense! I can't think of system two would be more open to abuse than "wholistic" ratings.
There's at least some objective measure of achievement with standardized testing. And many of the students who do well on those tests are not rich kids, but are minority students who are truly motivated to improve their opportunities in the world.
In fact, it is exactly the rich kids who tried to buy their way around the tests but having others take the tests for them. The solution to that is not to get rid of the tests but to improve the standards for identifying the test-takers.
5
There is only one solution to this mess that makes any sense, but it's also the one solution that will never happen.
Go back to what college is actually supposed to be about - not signalling your superiority, but actually teaching things.
An admissions policy based upon a college as a teaching institution would be interested only in whether a candidate is capable of taking advantage of the learning environment the college offers. In other words, whether they are minimally qualified. Conceived of in this way, any student who meets the minimum requirements has an equally valid claim to a spot.
Therefore, such a system would take all the applicants to a school, weed out those who are not *minimally* qualified, and then just allocate the available slots by lottery among whoever made that initial cut.
It would in one fell swoop destroy the entire snobbery economy, and it would restore colleges to a place where they'd actually have to teach kids, instead of being the snobbery clubs they current are where nobody actually learns anything.
Of course, that is precisely why it will never happen: because the whole point of college in America is the snobbery club.
1
Many associate Ivy League with potential for great success. They may also associate non-Ivy League institutions with more modest potential. But actual success in real world serves as the great leveler.
2
While we're on the topic, I think it is worth noting that the same kind of flawed admissions process is also in place at large companies all over the country. Offers are routinely extended based more on who you know than what you've done. In some cases, one's skin color, age, religion, and/or gender tips the scales in one's favor. When I browse LinkedIn, I am always amazed at how people in my field get hired into positions for which, by any reasonable measure, they are not truly qualified to hold. I hope society uses this moment in time to also fully examine how favoritism, bias and quotas are also being silently applied in the work world, whether in law, tech, finance, design/ fashion, etc.
7
Agreed. A few years back I was working as a Financial Advisor at a major firm, after having been in a 20-plus-year career in money management culminating in Partner at a prestigious co. Oh, but I had taken some paying years off in between to be a stay-st-home mother (over all those years I did steady pro bono board work directly related to the industry). When I interviewed at a national firm, seeking a position as an Advisor, the Regional Manager slotted me into candidacy as an Assistant to Advisors. I had exactly zero experience in that job and very little administrative skill, so I had to conclude it was some combination of ageism and sexism.
1
“Ivy League and sports, to me that’s an oxymoron,” said Christopher Hunt, a college admissions consultant.
There's a serious problem with this statement. The Ivy League is literally a sports (athletics) league, it is only figuratively a group of elite universities. These are some of the oldest athletic traditions and competitions in the country and mostly in the "boutique" sports. Just because 3 million people do not tune in to watch on Saturdays does not make these programs less important. In fact because it involves so many more athletes than the few who can participate in "mass appeal" programs, I'd say they are more important and without all (I guess now its just, "as much") corruption.
2
@James H
I agree with you James. Most of the "boutique" sports are also Olympic sports and college athletes use their tenure at these colleges to train for the Olympics. There is no men's Olympic Water Polo Team without water polo programs in college. Most of these athletes love their sports and have been playing since their middle school years. If anything is corrupt it's football and basketball programs where athletes have no intention of remaining long at their respective colleges and are only looking toward the pros. Those programs are money makers for the schools and crowd out the "boutique" sports. "Boutique" athletes stay for four years unlike "one and done" basketball players.
clearly there is a huge problem. Perhaps they should look at the two schools mentioned in the legal documents that had 'no way to hide a (poor) student.' And the Singer character told parents not to try there. Vanderbilt was one of them, Notre Dame the other and news about Vandy said they have certain procedures to help insure the integrity of the system.
As to several people just saying jut go by SAT scores or highest GPA, what you would end up with is a school filled with just pre-med, pre-law, a few engineers and business majors. A university needs all types, all majors and placement from all over the country (for national colleges).
5
It seems to me the 'big news' is not that these wealthy parents were caught. The 'big news' is that the FBI bothered to investigate in the first place. Are there no other crimes that need investigating by the FBI?
Is anyone shocked to learn that this type of bribery scheme happened? My guess is that this type of thing has been going on since the time universities came into being.
Is it possible that the FBI's investigation is another attempt by the Trump administration to attack, yet again, institutions of higher learning? He has made no secret of the fact that he despises the 'liberal institutions'.
2
“Holistic” admissions system are so fraught with preferences and partialities that it’s no wonder students who are not eligible for affirmative action look for “side doors” into the halls of academia.
Some of the 33 parents snared in the college admissions scandal allegedly paid admissions officials to falsely designate their children as members of racial or ethic minorities to make them legible for affirmative action. In some states, this would simply have put their children on equal footing with the majority of students. In our most populous states—California and Texas—non-Hispanic white students are an increasingly small minority. Non-Hispanics white students make up about 23.3 percent of California K-12 students and 28.1 percent of Texas K-12 students. In these states, non-Hispanic white students know about 70 percent of their classmates are eligible for racial and ethnic preferences when it come times to apply for college admissions. And who could blame Asian American students applying for admission at campuses where Asians American students are “over-represented for disguising their ancestry?
Schools should set minimum academic standards and conduct a lottery to determine which students who meet or exceed the standards are admitted.
4
So you found fifty kids who entered using illegal means... and you claim it proves that the entire system is broken?
The system that is broken here is our criminal justice system. None of these parents will see a day of jail time, because they’re rich. When you’re rich, you’re allowed to bribe people.
But impoverished Americans who commit very minor crimes, such as minor drug charges or registering to vote when unknowingly ineligible, face years of imprisonment. That is the broken system.
22
What would happen if we doubled our investment in public higher education and broadened access to create an environment of opportunity similar to what obtained in the ‘60’s and 70’s? Oh, wait, more educated people means more “liberals”? Yikes. Can’t have that, right?
7
@John The people caught in this scandal represent the literal archetype of 'liberals'. Seems sculduggery runs the political gamit.
@John Nothing stops states from increasing their funding. And yes, it would produce more liberals and socialists.
I wonder if the socioeconomic tier system the City of Chicago implemented for its public schools might be writ large for university admissions. The university would group all candidates by tier, then admit equal numbers of students from each tier by lottery. Any admitted student in the top socioeconomic tier pays full tuition. Students in the second tier pay half tuition. Students in the bottom two tiers pay nothing.
Stop the madness of grooming kids their entire lives to get into college. Why the heck does Harvard care how studious and charitable a high school student is when it’s just going to spit out a grad who works at McKinsey and helps pharma companies figure out how to sell more opioids. It’s not like the Ivy League is producing an army of Mother Theresas.
25
We learned long ago that U.S. colleges are money scammers. Now we learn they're cheaters as well.
8
America was founded by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men who owned property who believed that they were divinely naturally created equal persons with certain unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Living off of the blood, sweat and tearful labor of their enslaved black African men, women and children property on land and resources stolen by them from brown Native men, women and children.
2
https://www.nytimes.com/section/upshot
Check this and one will find out the problems with admission. It is the colleges and universities need to change their admission policy.
This system is broken in more ways than just the admissions. From its economics that continue to rise unabated to its political one-sidedness, it is time for a wholesale re-thinking of how the system operates.
2
60 years ago I sent letters to half a dozen colleges and universities requesting their catalogs and application forms. I studied my options and applied to three that seemed the best fit for me. Two schools were in California so I couldn’t visit them. At the time everybody knew the names of the elite schools but just going to college was laudable in itself. It didn’t matter to families that had never had a college graduate in their midst that the acceptance letter didn’t say Harvard or Yale at the top. I was the first in my family to attend and graduate from college. I went on from there to teach and to earn a doctorate. I can honestly say I earned what I got. No test prep courses, just a book of sample SAT questions. No private preparatory school. No athletic scholarship - I don’t even know what that phrase means - no side door, back door, or trap door.
Thanks in some large measure to all the college rating publications and internet sites higher education has become a commodity that is not unlike fine wine or fine dining. And, I guess, if you are wealthy, once you start viewing education as a commodity, getting into the right school is simply a matter of knowing who to approach and paying the price. It’s a sad situation, primarily for those young women and men who deserved a place in the top schools but didn’t have the golden ticket. I’m hopeful this scandal will lead to substantive change.
25
"“If you’re going to have an athletics program, then you need to recruit athletes,” said E. Gordon Gee, the president of West Virginia University. "
How odd! You can't have athletics programs at an institution of higher learning without recruiting athletes? Why not?
Why should someone who is really good at throwing something or playing a game get red-carpet side-door treatment over someone like my kid, who worked very hard to achieve the highest possible grades and scores? She also did 12 seasons of sports for the fun of it, became captain, but she wanted to go somewhere for academics, not to play a sport. It's been instructive to see athletes at her public school with much lower academic achievement ushered into the same highly selective schools that she would love to attend. Of course private schools can do as they wish, but I find it strange.
2
setting aside the arguments about wealth disparities and income inequality, which are important and largely valid, the real issue here has to do with corruption in our society.
dorian columns and academic robes do not protect universities from corruption because universities have effectively become endowment and donor motivated corporations. look at corporate funded academic research (an obvious incentive to falsified data) or the "business" of collegiate athletics: we now have a scholar-corporate complex to buddy with our military-industrial, vatican-predator, racial-judicial, drug-pharmaceutical and media-political ones.
power, money and class have a corrosive effect on integrity and rule of law -- always has, always will. we don't fix this through wealth or income redistribution; this only lowers the going rate for corrupt influence. fix corruption in higher education and it will just migrate somewhere else -- so long as "money" is the main thing and "winning" the only objective.
1
I wonder how many of the posters deriding the Ivies attended or had children who attended them. My daughter, a non legacy, middle class kid from a lackluster public high school, received nearly a free ride from Yale. In her experience, there was little to no elitism. She was astounded, all four years, by the intelligence and even genius of her classmates, including students with legendary last names and fabulously wealthy parents. Even more remarkable was Yale's level playing field. Once you were in, you were in - no questions asked. Nobody cared that she didn't summer in Greece or have a parent who owned polo ponies. Her classmates cared about what and how she thought. When one of the famous political scions of America was not accepted to her improv troupe, I was amazed, and asked why not? Because, said my daughter, he wasn't funny. Pretty basic, yes? Your name and money didn't get you very far if you didn't have the goods. Maybe these so called elite colleges have to rethink admittance policies, and maybe once upon a time they were largely the province of the rich, well connected, and untalented. From my daughter's point of view, those days are long gone. And to that, I say boola boola. Bill's wife, Colleen
9
If true, how does Yale explain admitting someone as unqualified as George W. Bush who bought his way out of the Vietnam War draft and bought his way into Yale?
Years ago a College degree was more than enough but with the downsizing of the middle class the competition for those jobs has exploded.
4
I am a professor at a tier 1 public research university, and father of one college kid with another in high school. I have experienced college admissions from both sides of the roped-off entrance. It looks biased, unfair, and opaque from both sides. Kids from well-off families have always had privileged access. The recent outrage over Singer's racket is just the tip of the privilege iceberg. As discussed in recent articles, there are many institutional advantages that favor kids from families with money, and disadvantage minority and first-generation kids. Some steps could be taken to address the more egregious abuses: 1) Universities should stop using the SAT/ACT, as many now do. The College Board is a corrupt organization and should be forced out of business; 2) eliminate legacy admissions; 3) Eliminate essays from applications, or require students to write them under teacher supervision at high schools and only accept essays submitted directly by the school; 4) Institute application reviews blind to student identity; 5) No more athletic scholarships! The whole college athletic enterprise is corrupt and corrupting. It exploits the athletes, distorts college finances (the highest paid WA state employees are athletic directors), and often admits students who are not academically prepared, then drags them to graduation; 6) States must fully fund public colleges so that tuition is affordable, and provide adequate financial support. No more crippling student debt.
138
@EB
Think what your reforms would do to the mental health and wellness of today's teenagers.
7
@Gwe Yes, that's another benefit. An undiscussed aspect of the Singer scandal is that these wealthy parents aren't doing their kids any favors by bribing them into selective schools for which they may not be qualified academically. These parents act as though getting admitted is the endpoint. From our perspective as profs, be admitted is the starting point for their college education. If they aren't prepared, then they can struggle to keep up at selective schools.
6
@EB And just how do you know that the College Board is a "corrupt organization"? It is probably the one thing that to at least some degree levels the playing field in college admissions. A school cannot inflate grades that are not backed up by the SAT and the Subject tests. Any university admissions office in the world would quickly catch this!
Very few highly competitive colleges even give athletic scholarships. You're a professor and don't know this? The Ivy League gives none as do NCAA Division III schools.
You are mixing up state university athletics and funding with those of elite universities. Yes, the basketball coach and the athletic director at my local underfunded state university (with mainly adjunct professors) make a small fortune. And yes, many for hose admitted and given athletic scholarships have about as much academic interest as my two dogs and about as smart (or not) as well.
That's just not what this is all about.
4
The real scandal is that we force families to bankrupt themselves to pay college tuition or force students to take on burdensome student loans so they can get a job most could have performed just as well straight out of high school, provided they got a good high school education.
Most corporations are not interested in what students “learn” in college. They don’t think colleges teach students anything worthwhile. They value college degrees only because they show graduates were bright enough to get into college and ambitious enough to attend class.
We should permit corporations to base hiring on IQ tests or SAT or ACT scores rather than college degrees.
We should prohibit colleges from granting degrees and diplomas. Their purpose is to spread tuition money across as many academic departments as possible while stigmatizing students for dropping out before they completing a four- or five-year degree program. Diplomas and degrees are the reason student debt rivals the national debt.
Universities provide only transcripts. Students should be allowed to take course the will have them meet career goals or personal development goals.
3
When the president pays an attorney to scare anyone who dares request about the president’s own SAT scores or transcripts, need we say more?
My grandkids work hard because their parents have told them, strongly, if they don’t work hard, study, and make the grades, plus do real community service and being active in real sports, they will not get accepted into the college they want to attend.
Oh, how square of my children’s parenting!
2
1) Two admissions lines for private colleges (not counting the line for bribers): those who can pay $70,000 per year per student, and those who have to ask for even partial financial aid. An article in the NYT this week *finally* quoted private college admissions staff who admit this. It's about time.
2) Undergraduates in public universities, and increasingly in private universities, are taught not by professors but by "adjuncts" who make (literal) poverty wages. Or, by graduate students as young as 22 years old. For at least two of the four undergrad years. For as much as $70,000 per year.
3) Admissions offices discount wonderful talents in areas where the candidate would bloom, thrive, and honor the university... because the student isn't also a "champion athlete" (though he or she may be a "champion" singer, actor, artist, humanitarian - too bad).
4) Seniors in competitive high schools all know these days, that the richest among them seek learning-disability diagnoses as early as 9th grade, to be ready to take the SAT and ACT with huge time extensions- while on Adderall, the "focusing drug." Our youngest tried to tell us this was going on. We didn't believe him. (We apologized, this week).
5) The "admissions game" is now so insane in the USA that for all the reasons above, we sadly concluded that we had to opt out, for our youngest.
6) He just learned that he will attend a prestigious, historic university... in another country, come September.
We're thrilled!
9
Colleges need to stop being minor league sports leagues, social policy laboratories, country clubs and just about everything except places to go and study and make something of yourself and thereby contribute to the world. Admission should be based on objective, measurable and uniform standards then randomly from those that meet the bar. Sick and tired of the bogus fig leaf of 'holistic' admissions.
2
The problem is that we as a nation are asking colleges to to something that they were not designed to do...namely to be vocational-technical schools that train large numbers of people for the job market. That is not what these schools were designed to do. They were designed to be "finishing schools" for young Christian gentlemen...and for most of their history, that is what they were. That changed after WW2 and even though over 3 quarters of a century has passed...these schools have not been able to adapt.
This is why many go to the UK, Canada or Australia for college. Much cheaper, and except for the very top tier 10 colleges, better.
4
ROFL.
How did this happen? Duh. Double your population over 50 years without adjusting for double the number of subpar students in an economic environment that requires more knowledge not less. Not everyone was qualified to go to college even in the good ol' days of the 1960s and 1970s, fewer today. The U.S. has to return to a dual track for jocks and the non-academic: trade schools and associate programs at community colleges that will more than garner most bad students a very good wage, if they apply themselves to more than beer pong and drugs.
The elite colleges have become even more elite and more expensive, because the cattle pen filled with more aimless 18-year-olds than the system could hold. How many are actually graduating 4 years later from any university, and how many of those are graduating with solid career skills for a profession for which they are actually qualified?
2
This quote is disgraceful:
“If you’re going to have an athletics program, then you need to recruit athletes,” said E. Gordon Gee, the president of West Virginia University. “If you’re going to have an orchestra, you need to have orchestra players.”
1. You don't need excellent athletes to field a team - any actual student should do - or don't call yourself an institution of higher learning.
2. Music is an actual academic discipline - it is something people major in and it is on part with history, English, psych, etc. You don't major in soccer, football or lacrosse.
What should happen is EVERY college and university should tell their coaches - that they will only help students who can get admitted on their merit - and then the coach can push those eligible students across the line. The problem is the schools want winning teams - and that includes all the Ivies and Stanford who make major concessions for athletes (something I know first hand).
4
Our child graduated from the University of Iowa in December. At least 90% of the graduates that day were Asian. They were not Asian-American. They were Asian—speaking Mandarin among themselves. We were astonished that this land grant, public university is educating so many Chinese. Another parent said it has been this way for many years. The former governor is now the ambassador to China. It is preposterous that Iowans are subsidizing the cost of educating Chinese students.
3
@Dee Captiva
They're not subsidizing foreign students ... that's why there are so many. Public schools rake in cash from out-of-state students. The in-state students attend at a discount.
The temptation is so strong now, many states have requirements that a certain threshold of in-state students be accepted.
3
@Dee Captiva it's the other way around. Chinese students are subsidizing the cost of educating Iowans.
@Len Arenas
Every seat that's taken by a Chinese student deprives an in-state student of an education at a state public institution. It is a corrupt pay-to-play system of higher education in this country that is disgraceful and outrageous. What message does this send about how little we value the education of American children and young adults? Public funding of these institutions must be prioritized in order to mandate that they educate U.S. students.
1
My impression is that the big research universities are mostly interested in research. Teaching undergraduates is something they just have to do. Professors are rewarded for research not teaching. Schools have come to realize that they can increase their status simply becoming more selective. That seems to be the thing parents and student care most about. So the schools do things like trying to get more high school students to apply even if they are obviously unqualified because the bigger the applicant pool the smaller percentage they can accepts and that boost their status. Universities are self-perpetuating institutions. They need to steer students into academic careers to carry on teaching and research and they need students who become rich alumni so they can give back to the university. The 100 top rated research universities in the world are dominated by US universities so to that extent our system works. I would be careful about tinkering with it but at the undergraduate level there is certainly a lot of unfairness and that does need to be addressed.
5
Not the author's intent, I'm sure, but the point made by this piece essentially undermines the much of the argument for "diversity" and "inclusion" in colleges. The main argument is that "disadvantaged" kids need preferential access to "elite" schools because if they don't get it economic disadvantages will perpetuate. I.e., admission to "elite" schools carry economic benefits that are unavailable elsewhere, and since certain groups have historically been excluded from these schools, preferential admission is required to rectify the resulting economic disparity. But as the article points out, the schools themselves don't confer economic benefit. The economic benefits go with the students, whether they go to Columbia, Manhattan, CCNY, or Fordham, or two years at a community college and then get a college degree somewhere else. What the column doesn't point out is that admission to an elite school can actually be harmful to kids that are not adequately prepared. The reason is that they are in classes with kids who are disproportionally better prepared and better students, so they do poorly in comparison, often can't keep up, get discouraged, end up dropping or failing out, and in the end getting no degree at all.
8
@M. Duggan It would appear that based on the bribery scandal and roped-off seats for the wealthy and we'll positioned, many people are not "prepared", even those with seeming evidence of preparation.
The myth of meritocracy in higher education has been exposed. Money clearly oils the process.
As long as there is a huge supply/demand gap with elite colleges, there will always be a sense of unfairness by those who didn't get in.
7
The statistics about the admit rate for athletes is very misleading. Let's put aside coaches engaging in fraud for a moment (I still have to believe this is an insignificant number) and talk about student athletes in general. When recruiting, coaches the game. The GPAs and test scores of their "team" have to average to some threshold. Once the coach has balanced the athletic ability of each recruit with their academic credentials, his/her application is put in front of the admissions committee. My children did not play division I athletics, but had many friends who did. Once coaches found about about their high ACTS/SATS and grades, door's opened. There is some balance to the system despite how this story is being reported. People who don't care about sports underestimate the sense of community it instills on many campuses.
2
With due regard for the cheating scandal on its own "merits", its coverage detracts from more serious, chronic problems with American higher education. These extend beyond a few students and parents and some elite universities:
1) The high cost, and decades of cost increases well beyond inflation. Reasons include cuts in state aid, major increases in the the salaries of top administrators, and major increases in the number of non-teaching staff.
2) Recent high school graduates are now less than half of the total college population. Over half are working adults, balancing jobs, kids and elderly parents. Their needs and ability to pay are different; higher ed is only starting to adapt.
3) Too many who enter college are are not prepared for it. A large proportion of entering freshmen fail placement tests in math and English and must take remedial courses.
4) Not all jobs require a 4-year, liberal arts degree. In addition, the vocational programs at community colleges which award 2-year associates degrees are often inadequate preparation for what the private sector needs.
5) Too many fail to obtain their degree in reasonable time, or at all. Lack of preparedness, inability to pay, and hours spent working or doing childcare all detract from studies.
6) The most recent fad, online education, is expensive to start. Results have been mixed.
7) The debt trap (nationally, $1.5 trillion) deters some students from attending and imprisons others who have graduated.
20
The next thing to investigate is the wholesale falsification of test scores, transcripts, recommendations, jobs, experiences and whatnot by overseas students applying to colleges and graduate programs in America, particularly from China where it is hard to verify. There are companies that specialize in helping students do this. The only honest thing that so many of these students can offer prospective schools is their willingness to pay full tuition.
The overall solution of course for both overseas and American students is to drop consideration of anything but performance on a test for which the students are fingerprinted on site and assigned code numbers. That test can combine recall, reasoning and writing ability. It is not perfect but it is sure is way better than the frauds that colleges now encourage and do little to police. Oh. I would also add giving a plus for any student who worked during high school at a minimum-wage, low-skill job that generated W-2s and an income tax return.
43
You raise a great point that has two prongs.
Nearly all colleges create a category whereby the admit only those that will pay full or near full tuition. The first category is foreign students admitted under the guise of diversity.
Second is early admission. These kids rarely receive financial aid or it is minimal. Why, because their parents can be full freight.
So pick which battle you like. Level the paying field or let the tuition kids subsidize all the others.
When there's a RonRich wing at my favorite college, you can bet all future RonRichs will be attending.
6
"College Admissions: Vulnerable, Exploitable, and to Many Americans, Broken"
Correction - "America is Broken" And their is no fix. Sorry but time to wake up to reality.
5
@zigful26 "there" not "their".
1
"College Admissions: Vulnerable, Exploitable, and to Many Americans, Broken"
Correction:
College Admissions: Vulnerable, Exploitable, and OBVIOUSLY Broken
This decades long trend towards creating a 'diverse' student body (I was raised by lesbians! I'm half Korean and half Mexican!) and looking at an infinite number of soft criteria like volunteering and starting businesses (all of which is done cynically to boost admissions chances) should be eliminated
All I would want to know is the following:
High school transcript
SAT scores
Family income/net worth
Education of parents
I would give an edge to kids from poor and non college educated families and that's the only edge I'd give
18
@Luciano Why the extra point for income/parents education? I know plenty of families where the parents are not college educated, have successful business yet their W-2 shows a much lower documented income.
1
@Luciano
Fix the public school system that's been broken since the 1970s and you'll not need to "give an edge" to anyone, especially those who are not academically qualified, regardless of parental income or lack thereof.
3
@Luciano,
while that sounds great, I really appreciate racial, ethnic, sexual/gender spectrum, geographical and political diversity in a college- you know, like in real life/world. it makes the learning climate that much richer and more meaningful.
1
Just another message to those children whose parents will cheat to help them have a "great life"...then what?.....more fraud that they and their parents will commit for their "benefit". Those kids must feel like frauds all their lives.
1
The social passports, Final Cubs etc., are closed to the ringers and pubbies anyway, and there are only so many gut courses, why bother?
4
SAT coaching/tuition is a sign of some privilege sure. But why lump that with bribery and fraud?
32
Totally ridiculous and elitist system. It is the American way to perpetuate the aristocratic system with a democratic facade. Already rich ones preparing to get better paid jobs and become richer. Poor ones gotten out to keep the system intact. Sports and “education”, plus health, of course, only for “the best”.
3
A "thin line" between sending a kid to test prep and paying a ringer to take the test? No. Simply no. What these parents did was reprehensible and criminal. To equate that as a natural progression of sending your kid to Kaplan is to excuse the behavior of these entitled and morally corrupt parents.
109
Legacy admits are the life blood of most universities.
Who wants to bet the current class at Harvard is expecting their kids to get in Harvard because they are there.
That is the whole point of elitism.
10
Restoring state funding for public universities would go a long way toward reducing the power that wealthy donors have over public institutions (so, not the Harvards of the world... but at least the UC system and others).
Thirty years ago, a state university I used to work for had more than half its operating budget covered by the state. The rest was covered through students' tuition payments, research grants, and yes, SOME philanthropy.
Today, the state covers less than 7% of that institution's budget... so of COURSE they and other schools like them are more vulnerable to wealthy donors' enticements. These drastic budget cuts also inflate the institutions' overall budgets, as additional fundraisers and other administrators are hired to raise the institution's public profile and increase overall philanthropic income, to cover budget shortfalls caused by the public's abandonment of higher education.
Obviously, more robust public funding wouldn't resolve admissions issues relating to private institutions. But back when public institutions were actually supported by the public, those colleges and universities were less vulnerable to donor influence. Additionally, many students were able to graduate debt-free, as they were able to cover the costs of their educations through minimally-paying summer jobs.
42
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Leonard Cohen
23
@Mikeyz
The fix has been also in for the poor. What do we pay people to breed multiple children they do not want and cannot feed, clothe and shelter. AS we approach tax time again, consider how many deductions there are for those middle and lower incomers with 3+ offspring, who more often than not down through the decades were the resource of low wage labor and Pentagon Inc. cannon fodder. At least the rich feed their own 1 or 2 kids, without taxpayers doing it for them.
2
Talking of the wealthy privilege, abuse of our system, we must talk of Republican conservative president Donald J. Trump. How much his wealthy millionaire father paid for Trump's high school diploma, college degree? Trump still hid the high school . college records. No one knows if Trump ever passed secondary or high school? much less for a college degree!
22
As usual, no discussion of the biggest source of unfairness: the affirmative action for men known as "gender balance."
Today's female high students academically outperform their male counterparts by wide margins. A purely merit-based admissions policy would result in a student body that skews heavily female. At public universities, like the University of California system, which are forbidden under Title IX from engaging in sex discrimination, student bodies do indeed contain high female-to-male ratios.
But private schools, like the Ivies, enjoy an exemption from Title IX, and they discriminate to their heart's content. They claim it's "healthier" to have a roughly 50-50 male/female ratio, bc otherwise heterosexual female students have trouble establishing a committed relationships with heterosexual male students and a "hookup culture" results. The truth is that these are profit-making enterprises that believe a roughy 50-50 ratio makes them more marketable to consumers.
And so far women have largely failed to challenge this blatant sex discrimination, apparently bc straight women care more about finding a boyfriend/husband than their own human rights.
Thus, Ivy League and other private schools discriminate in favor of men to benefit straights. Gay men benefit, and lesbians suffer, even though they don't actually affect the straight dating pool.
And all of it is legal.
8
@SomeoneWomens grades are inflated dar more than mens
2
@Someone Put AP Science and honors/advanced math back in the high schools and the gender balance will equalize.
Colleges should stop recruiting for "boutique" sports. Nobody goes to see them, and they add nothing to college life.
23
@Jordan Ravenhoff Really? Do you go to count the heads at Harvard and MIT's squash matches? The "boutique sports"' as you call them, have far fewer problems than football and basketball at any state school in the country.
1
The article wonders about rich white kids getting an athletic preference for being athletes in minor sports?
This may be a bit politically incorrect but it does seem like most of the fake athletes are young women. Schools are under enormousTitle IX pressure to fill slots on Womens Teams in order to offset the numbers of male athletes- especially on football teams.
Over the last 20 years schools have eliminated many males teams and created many womens teams for that purpose- crew and LAX are tow major examples of where Womens sport has exploded at the college level., Lac
Of course, the schools use the women to their advantage too, by lumping the GPAs of the women in with those of the lower scoring heavily recruited men in order to advertise that the average Jock at dear Old St State is 2.5, when the women are 3.5s and the men are 1.5s.
The whole thing is a sham. The only legit sports on campus are the clubs that are organized and run by students admitted under the normal process.
18
@Lefthalfbach
Uh-oh, dude on the rampage about women athletes in college. Tell you what, Bubba, before going there, first:
1. Reduce those $million salaries for college football and basketball and baseball coaches;
2. Require male athletes to pay for their room and board and FOOD, as well as actually show up for classes;
3. Then, also pare down those $billion male sport college programs that exist for TV networks and old men;
4. THEN also stop requiring college females to pay quarterly/semester "activity" fees that are nothing but another funding pipeline for male athletes.
3
We should have recognized since cut and paste began that nothing was not pretend.
2
I've always considered the standardized testing to be an exercise in futility--higher education is & always has been about the ability to get into college if you have the money to, & wealth speaks volumes. All testing does is try to intimidate average students, & if anything, lower test scores can then be used as another reason to block entry; it has very, very little to do with how well a student is going to do in college.
The educational system in this regard has been broken for decades. At the high school level, counselors take an active interest in the rich kids & how to get them placed into good schools, while the general population gets ho-hum responses. Then there's the whole dynamic of acceptance, which we've seen as, not surprisingly, being grossly corrupt. And upon graduation, the student has to rely on how eager the school is to help them get a good job; again, this is pretty selective. Once the tuition check clears. helping graduates succeed is at best a metric in many institutions.
This all comes at a time when public education is under threat, as the rich insulate their children in private institutions, disadvantaged students are shunned, public school teachers have to seek better-paying employment, and public funding is increasingly being diverted off into "charter" schools. None of this has happened overnight, but you can see the "let-them-eat-cake trend take a definite spike upward in the 2000s.
2
The line between hiring prep coaches to assist your child in performing well on standardized tests and hiring someone to actually take the test for your student is anything but thin. Such thinking is likely how these parents rationalized their way into conduct that violated federal laws.
81
A rather simple solution - (1) create a double blind random number generator, (2) give an acceptance number to all who meet test, gpa, essay requirements, (3) run the random number generator, and (4) accept 1 through X until class is filled up.
Eliminate athletics, legacy, large donor, Title IX, or other preferential qualifiers.
Random number acceptance of merit based qualified students will over time match the demographics of those that meet acceptance criteria.
Oh wait, that takes the money incentive out - so NOT going to happen.
23
"I am shocked, shocked that there is gambling going on here!" Once again, only the delicacy of a large check is acceptable. I think it's time that the nonprofit status of private colleges and universities be rescinded. That status seems to belong to a more meritorious era.
8
I knew a kid whose mother "donated" $40,000 to her daughter's robotics team. The $40,000 was the "value" of the marketing and graphic design services of an employee of the mother's firm. I believe the mother deducted the $40,000 as a charitable donation. The daughter claimed on her college resume that she fundraised over $40,000 for the robotics team, of which she served as treasurer.
38
@Wrytermom
donation of labor service is never deductible on a tax return. It can, however, be listed in the value of contribution or donation for a non profit organization.
"The charges have exposed how thin the line is between admissions help that most middle-class families consider not just legitimate but de rigueur, and outright fraud, like paying a ringer to take the test for the student."
This is incorrect. These rich /celebrity cheating stuff has nothing to do with middle class parents trying to get legitimate help for their kid to help them with their studies. One is cheating and fraud other is simply honing your kids skills to be better.
The two have been conflated again and again. Do we want our children to improve in mathematic and tutor if necessary or be better at tennis and get a decent coach if needed ? Obviously yes.
What these ultra rich were doing was pure fraud- manipulating scores and bribing staff.
I think admissions should be merit based. There should be help or monetary or other wise ( tax credits etc ) for those who need to go to private tutoring to improve in any subjects they want.
The field is not equal and never will be for those with more money or less - but it should be made more equitable as much as possible.
Finally the higher education should be free or far far more cheaper.
It is really unfair system. And this brand name stuff is equally horrendous.
We live in a world of corporate greed and obscene competition to get ahead. The education system has eveloved in that environment.
7
The problem with a meritocracy at universities is a problem in the metrics of merit.
Merit is easier to measure on a basketball court or at a track meet than it is in selection of students who are supposed to be "the leaders of tomorrow."
Only Cal/Berkeley actually has taken meritocracy to it's logical conclusion by basing admission on a numeric formula involving test scores and grades. When they did that, eliminating interviews and all the "soft" criteria (which Harvard used to exclude Asian nerds) they got a class which was 28% Asian and 3% Black/Hispanic.
The real trouble is that a test can be objective without being meaningful: No football coach in his right mind would eliminate a defensive tackle because his number on a 40 yard sprint was bad, and yet Harvard rejects applicants because they are not good "sprinters," i.e. they have not scored high enough on some narrow gauge of one sort of ability.
There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that Harvard Med School admitted applicants by lottery one year and four years later, comparing the performance of the class randomly selected with the classes to which various metrics had been applied for selection, nobody could discern any difference. That story has persisted for decades, because to doctors who have been through medical school, elite and state, it sounded like the truth.
7
Black enrollment at UC Berkeley is 3%, Hispanic is 13%. Not 3% combined or even separately as your comment may suggest. I don’t know if you are misinformed or purposely understating the percentages, but I tend not to give anyone the benefit of the doubt when discussing demographics these days.
"The charges against the parents . . . have exposed how thin the line is between admissions help that most middle-class families consider not just legitimate but de rigueur, like sending a child to a Kaplan class for SAT help, and outright fraud, like paying a ringer to take the test for the student."
Anyone who thinks that is a fine line lacks a moral compass.
76
It is unquestionable this scheme is wrong, unfair, and unjust on multiple levels. However, let’s avoid characterizing it as an example of social injustice - a.k.a. Elite white folk creating inequality. It is that but it is much more.
Schools like Yale, Harvard, etc publish the number of applicants rejected each year. What other business on earth is proud to reject so many customers?
Theses schools have always had a finger on the admissions scale for legacy, large donors, and connected individuals. Does anyone believe Ted Kennedy would have been admitted to Harvard on his own merit
100% of these schools take federal funds in one form or another so we have aright to insist upon change. Transparency is lacking from the admissions process and it is sorely needed. Getting in the ‘right’ school is hard enough. At least make the rules visible so we know what battle to fight.
17
"They have expressed shock at how the system was manipulated, while being acutely aware that they, as part of the system, may bear some responsibility for an admissions process that has spun out of control."
Please. Colleges are not the innocent victims here. They are responsible for creating this "holistic" admissions process that is opaque and easily manipulated. I am sure there are many more Singers, hopefully cowering in fear. And why wouldn't there be? Cheating is rampant and no longer scandalous (behold our POTUS). There was a demand, and they filled it.
Colleges need to stop being coy and expel/rescind degrees of students involved. Too harsh? As another commenter brilliantly put it, if my father gives me $100 he stole from the bank but I didn't know that it was stolen, I may not have to go to jail, but I certainly need to give the $100 back. The students need to give their fraudulent admission back.
81
Maybe it’s time that universities take down the red rope.
....and maybe it’s time we stop choosing colleges that have them.
Our kids are not allowed to apply to schools like that. Our rationale? We want mentally healthy high schoolers who work with purpose.
For us, we first want them to find and know a true capacity for joy and optimism. We believe long term happiness comes from genuine motivation and motivation comes from having goals that make sense to them. Character, kindness, balance and work ethic all important as are resilience and emotional
EQ and if they find a subject they love, there’s always graduate school.
Life success is not predicated on how much data you can chew out nor what kind do sticker goes on our car. I know too many miserable people who went to elite schools and are on rat races to nowhere. I want our kids to be innovators. I want them to think independently. I don’t want to make them miserable for four years cramming large amounts of data so they can jump through external hoops that lead them to paths that don’t reflect who they are. I want them to go places where they can explore.
Our kids could live another 100 years. The world our children will be inheriting is going to reward the thinkers, the savers,the disciplined, the innovators and the resourceful. I’d rather leave them to be adaptable and resourceful than as a professionally miserable lemming who can take tests designed to rank and not inform.
I hope other parents consider the same!
8
@Gwe What if your kids want to "explore" one of your banned schools. Then who is the one blocking them from thinking independently?
2
College admissions are “broken” because our social contract is broken. Businesses don’t have to pay a fair wage or provide enough tax revenue to rebuild infrastructure or pay for the education of the community - etc. Citizens have to fear getting laid off as they, getting sick, or getting targeted by the legal system. Of course they will do anything to get a degree so they have a hedge against a system so broken! Fix the sources of the problem and it will no longer be a problem.
18
50 fish got hooked. Surely there were more. I'd like to see the government dig deeper and go after those folks as well.
13
The corruption might still be criminal, but long ago it was already manifest in the social mores of the consumer society — status can be bought. A basic ethical falsehood.
Even more corrupt is the underlying principle of this corruption — value must be earned. The consumer society and the consumerism which has replaced traditional religion alternative spirituality and intellectual ethics is fundamentally authoritarian – it posits that there is no inherent value in a human being at birth, it must be judged by an authority and is not inherent in our being, that value can only arrive via approved behavior and it must be weighed, graded and scaled in a competitive ritual at every stage in life with the status quo as judge and jury.
In the end it's a case of the chicken or the egg — which came first the willingness to game the system is rooted in the self evident amoral nature of the system itself. One scam inside of another.
Anger at elitism is not an idea of the right or the left, it is anger at an injustice, the rational recognition that those in charge are not better people or even worthy of their wealth and position which is no more complexly bestowed upon them than through simple inheritance and willing conformity to precedent without independent thinking.
The real reason our national debate about education has taken so long to struggle forth into the light is that ultimately it's about values and culture and as such more of a threat to those in power than it appears
3
One of the problems that I see is that K-12 education is so bad in the US for the most part. Grade inflation is rampant, So you can't rely on grades as "everyone seems to be getting A's" - so how do you know who can handle the academic rigor of a college education? Entrance exams? I had to take language entrance exams for college many years ago. Maybe we institute these again for all subjects. You can't rely on outside testing - that's for sure given what we have recently seen.
10
Our college admissions process can never be remotely meritocratic when our entire society is rife with inequality. Access to healthcare, pre-K programs, decent schools--all of these goods and services are parceled out unequally. Add to that the myriad advantages that educated and wealthy parents bestow on their children. And then, when all these young people, rich and poor, are seniors in high school and begin applying to colleges, we pretend that they are all toeing the same starting line in a fair competition? And, of course, many cannot afford college, or are not sufficiently prepared to go to college. Of course the scandal that erupted this week is troubling, but it is hardly news to anyone who has been paying attention that our college admissions process is anything but fair.
6
@Chris Rasmussen
Life has never been fair anywhere on the planet, at any time in history. As the planet continues to fill with an overpopulated bloat of humans, illusion after illusion will fall away. That's the territory we are now in, and it probably does shock or appall those who haven't been paying attention since the 1960s to the slow frog boil that results from doubling the number of humans on the planet just about everywhere. Education is just one of many resources that long ago became compromised and reserved in its purest form for the elite who can afford to get away from the madding crowd. Zero population growth would only hold things steady, but not to do so will only increase the lack of resources, economic realities and stressors on the planet. Outrage away, but use condoms and put your money behind population controls everywhere on Earth.
2
Back in the day, many of today's so-called "elite" schools were anything but elite. They were merely good schools. Today, with the ease of applying for admission electronically and not manually and colleges advertising their low admission rates (in multiple college ratings), a hysteria has been created around getting into a school that's highly selective, as though there's a direct correlation between admission/rejection rates and a good education.
As a result, a vicious cycle has been created based on faulty logic: the more difficult to get in means the better the education, the greater the prestige. Students, parents and prospective employers need to break this cycle and come to grips with the simple reality that school is normally what you make of it, and feelings of prestige and elitism are neither here nor there; they're just feelings!
11
@Jahan So true. Back in the stone ages when I applied to school (80s) a "most selective" school such as Harvard took in roughly 20%. Imagine seeing that number attached to the institution now. The administrators would have a nervous breakdown.
2
Although my elite alma mater, a highly ranked small liberal arts college, was apparently not involved in the scandal, it easily could have been. I do not think it is well known among alumni that the college has a separate system for admission of athletes. I read about it years ago in a post on College Confidential (a large internet forum on college admissions). The mother of a high school athlete had a question about the college and volunteered the information that the coach had told the family that her son could attend the college as an athletic recruit provided he had a achieved a specific SAT score that struck me as quite low- well below the average scores at the school.
I am waiting patiently for the president of the college to send an email message to alumni with her comments on the scandal. I think she is struggling because she knows many of the alumni, especially the older ones who attended the college back when the athletic program was very small, will not be happy to learn the truth. Surely, some have already begun to ask questions.
10
I think admissions fraud is far more widespread than most people realize. A few years back I worked with a very wealthy International student who had already been accepted to one of the universities named in recent the FBI case. He was totally unmotivated, and his essays were word salad. Meanwhile, local kids who have stellar grades and high test scores are not admitted. My friends who teach freshman composition at some of these institutions have told me that many of their students are woefully unprepared. It makes me wonder who wrote their application essays. The schools have no incentive to scrutinize applicants more closely. The only solution is for the government to impose some standards on these schools as a requirement for receiving federal aid. Also, all of us need to stop putting so much faith in degrees conferred by these institutions.
24
@Rachel
Years ago during a career sabbatical, I taught a senior-level college course at a large state university that prided itself on its large minority and "diverse" student population. Few of my students could read at college level, fewer wrote at even a high school level. Yet, reading and writing + grammar were the core skills of the profession every one of my students believed themselves headed into. I was one of a few adjuncts with bona fide career experience the department brought in to mitigate 4 years of rote academic uselessness that didn't move the needle one centimeter on their poor literacy standards. Only a few of my students were actually qualified to be in college, most still operated on a 10th grade level. Only 1 or 2 had ever been in the college library. I quit teaching when the department ordered me to gift students with higher grades than the D they'd barely earned, proudly so. Before leaving, I had a heart to heart with the dept. head, a lifelong academic with zero life experience outside academia. It shocked her to be told that only a handful of my graduating seniors might ever find employment in their chosen field, and the rest were barely literate. Most of my students were under the impression they were A-level when most were C-level, at best, and that this university dept. was one of the best in the nation, when it was also C-level, at best. How did their parents fail to notice over 16 years that their own kids couldn't read and write? Starts there.
1
Why am I not surprised by the blatant lawlessness of the wealthy. Personally I would require the affected universities to review the bona fides of all students admitted since 2000 and expel those who are wrongfully accepted and retract the degrees from those who have already graduated. No student should be allowed to reap any benefits from a crime committed on their behalf.
52
@Indy1 Most of these kids, if not all, were minors at the time and it sounds like the majority did not even know this was going on. I think the question of how to handle this aspect of the situation is not so clear cut. Who’s to say they were undeserving if they never competed for admission in the first place?
@Indy1 What a waste of time that would be. Just because someone is wealthy does not mean they are "lawless" anymore than if someone is very poor then are also "lawless". When we start flinging these generalizations around we best be careful as they can be used in other ways.
Yes, those admitted this way need to be re-evaluated and if they falsified their applications then they should be expelled. I think i would be very difficult to rescind a degree that has clearly already been earned.
1
Clearly, there's only one solution to this problem, at the level of principle: Harvard College should offer admission to everyone who submits an application (and refund application costs).
Since this would obviously create an impossible burden at the level of instruction, the only way out that's actually practical is for Harvard College to continue to only admit the number it can teach but also to start automatically granting bachelor's degrees to all U.S. residents on their 22nd birthday.
Then maybe we could get on with higher education.
2
@Joe Ryan
This current scandal and the more pervasive manipulation of the college entry system are a sad outcome of our obsession with "elite" colleges. Wow, thanks, Joe for nailing it! Teens, along with their parents, go through mental breakdowns and ulcers to get into "elite" schools. The irony is that huge numbers of students in these colleges are miserable and ultimately do not meet their career potentials (see "little fish in a big pond vs. big fish in a little pond" college syndrome research). If you can get in to an elite school without "killing yourself," maintain a balanced scholastic and social life before and after college, then an elite school may be for you. Sadly, I don't believe this is the case for the vast majority of students and parents.
2
It’s unfortunate, but perhaps this needed to happen in order to expose the elitism built into the American college system. It’s been too long that money, connections, and sports have determined who gets access to these institutions of power and authority in our culture. We should determine once and for all what the point of college educations are. Do we continue to model college around the antiquated notion of aristocracy learning to be encultured and empowered, or are they career training institutions for all Americans?
20
Once upon a time American universities were actually very good. One can look at Caltech's Feynman Lectures, or Berkeley's five volumes of introductory physics, and marvel at their rigour and beauty.
You could look, too, at the GRE and the SAT/ACT, which were widely considered fair.
But over time money has become more important than integrity, the GRE and SAT were dumbed down, admissions were corrupted, and the courses themselves were watered down.
Some years ago I asked Caltech whether they had any additional problem sets for the Feynman Lectures, and they said they were no longer using the Lectures because they were too hard. At Caltech!
So yes, the university system is broken. But there's hope - maybe Trump U will be re-started.
63
Admissions to a fancy college as a privilege, and not a right. Great grades and perfect SAT scores don't entitle you to anything. Nothing in life is fair. Hard work doesn't guarantee you the results you want.
I'm fine with these schools using whatever metrics they want to admit students.
With that in mind, I think the Ivies need to be more transparent about their values and what it means to be an admitted student.
These schools do a disservice to the populace by pretending they only admit the very, very, very "best" academically performing students. This has never been the case.
102
@CG
I quit my volunteer work interviewing applicants at my elite alma mater, a small liberal arts college, when I learned about preferential admission of athletes and discovered that the college had a quota on admission of students from public schools. (With rare exceptions, the college only accepted one applicant from any give public high school, even large suburban high schools with large numbers of high achieving students. However, as I saw during the three years I volunteered, the school did not have a quota for applicants from private schools. One year, the college admitted four out of 37 graduates of a local mediocre private school with low average SAT scores.
Nearly all colleges accept federal money. The public deserves to know the truth about admissions. I am not "fine" with such admissions practices at private schools that accept federal money.
22
Oh, just let mom and pop pay your way in, right? Would that be acceptable also?
3
@Karen My late husband was head of his Ivy's Alumnae Schools Committee in 3 different states in which we lived.
I can promise you, there were no "quotas" and many candidates came from public schools. In fact, at most Ivies, at least 1/2 their students went to a public high school. The Ivy's WANT students from a wide variety of educational experience.
The "preferential treatment of athletes" is not as "preferential" as one might think. In the Ivy League, it is no more than 1% off the regular criteria. This means that no one is going to Harvard to play a sport with 900 on his SAT and a 2.0 GPA.
Many of the athletes are very strong in their academics as well. Please note - I'm NOT talking about Final Four University basketball programs here - that is a subject for another day.
One thing that sets an Ivy League athlete apart is that he has outstanding time management skills. He has to! How could he possibly give 2-3 hrs daily to his sport, take multiple AP subjects, and get very high grades as well? He isn't spending his spare time playing video games! They tend to be very driven and highly focused.
2
In my opinion “the holistic approach to college admissions” is flawed to the core.
Why not have entrance exams?
12
@Puzzled at times
We could go back to that, but here's what I think would happen: Lots of students who don't do well in a high-pressure testing situation would feel like the exams were unfair because they discount all of the day-to-day academic work they did in high school. In my mind, the real problem is unequal K-12 education in this country. If we had more equitable education, colleges would feel less obligated to correct societal imbalances by race and income, reducing the perception that students of color are unqualified and accepted only because of their race, which would make white high school students and their parents less tempted to search for side doors and back doors to admission. But at the end of day -- this whole scandal is not about education at all -- it's about status and networks to leverage for future income.
"Mr. Karabel, the sociologist, said that the bribery crisis simply reflected problems in broader society. “I think that as America has become more and more unequal, affluent parents have become desperate to pass on their privileges to their children and avoid downward mobility at all costs,” he said."
I'd go even further: The societal norm is for _all_ parents to feel a constant anxiety and insecurity about their position. This is a natural result of our competition-based model - we're all trained to think if we stand still, we'll lose. And most parents are informed by this anxiety without even questioning the underlying assumption.
Our nation glorifies capitalism and denigrates labor; we give tax credits to 'job creators' and heavily tax those who earn wages; the wealthy are glorified for idealized and superficial reasons; the middle class feel embattled and stuck with little support; the poor are told being poor is their lot in life.
This is the result of the legacy of the Reagan 'revolution:' Win at all costs; you're all on your own; if you win, it's all your hard work and talent; if you lose, it's your fault. Our politics reflect this; our culture reflects this (no matter the political bent or demographic makeup). Americans have no faith in anything other than their individual purpose and false libertarian freedoms. Our society's corroded from the inside out.
39
In the end, the prestige of a university comes from the quality of their graduate's achievements over time. Accepting mediocre yet wealthy or well connected students dumbs down the class and in the long term will lower the school's prestige. Those who should have been accepted will go to other schools and their accomplishments will polish the reputation of what was once a lesser institution.
4
Said US Attorney Andrew Lelling, "There can be no separate college admission system for the wealthy, and I'll add that there will not be a separate criminal justice system either."
I'm sure he means well but, unless you believe in fairies and the like, you know separate systems have always existed for the wealthy.
51
So much more of the same "it's not fair" whining. College admissions is NOT "broken!!! Considering how many applicants there are (2.2 MILLION!), admissions offices at most schools do a remarkable job.
Even at the Ivies, in 2018, there were 306,909 applications!!! Of those, 21,856 were admitted. Just imagine how hard it is to read all those files - they do NOT use computers to sort as do some state universities.
A few decades ago, the Ivies decided to add social engineering to the process. They started actively looking for applicants who were from an under-represented minority or first-generation family. Those two groups have grown over the years to now make up as much as 1/3 of each admitted class.
Then they added to that that ALL student aid was to be in the form of grans NOT loans. And that any family with a household income of $60,000 or less would get 100% in student aid - tuition, room & board. Just try getting that at the local state university!
Just about anything can be gamed at some time, but usually only in a tiny number - if it gets too big, those gaming it will be caught. This is true with everything, not just college admissions. It happens pretty rarely.
It's interesting that the general assumption is that a legacy someone who would not get in on merit. Really? Remember, while Harvard admitted 30% of legacies who applied, it turned down 70%!!! Gee those numbers don't look quite as good when trying to show "privilege", do they.
27
@India:
So a bribery scandal has been unveiled by the DOJ, and yet you say "So much more of the same "it's not fair" whining."?
Considering the many unrelated strawmen that you bring up, it's hard to respond point-by-point.
For example, "Considering how many applicants there are (2.2 MILLION!), admissions offices at most schools do a remarkable job."
Really? Because there are 2.2 million applications, they must be doing a good job?
Sometimes things are just indefensible.
8
@India When a non-legacy student's chances are 5%, 30% looks like privilege.
18
@India Legacy applicants were six times as likely to get in as the general population. I think it shows unearned privilege in pretty stark relief!
13
The problem with the College admission process isn't fraud or legacy. It is cost of attending. The fraud and legacy issues affect an infinitessimal percentage of the overall college application class. There are about 4 million kids born in US each year. That means the potential college class is 4 million kids. Let's say a little less than half or 1.5M go to a 4 year college. There are only about 40-50 really selective colleges. I would think that most kids that can get into a Harvard can also get into Yale or Princeton or another Ivy. Same with the last 40-50. So in reality, how many seats are really taken away from a derserving kid that didn't have any "connections". It's a very very small number. From the scandal, take USC they have 50,000 applicants and admit 8,900. Today There are 40,000 people saying that Lori Loughlin's kid stole their spot. But she didn't steal 40,000 spots, she stole 1 slot. Maybe. We still haven't seen proof that even 1 kid wasn't admitted because that kid was admitted. Kids go to highschool. They get a GPA, they take a standardized test. They apply to college. They either do or do not get into their school of choice. That's it for 99.8% of the kids. at most .2% are affected. Do we completely change a system for .2%?? Legacy for a college is a factor of admission, maybe in Ivies a big factor, I dont know. But in most schools it's a factor, not the factor.
3
This has seriously damaged the believability of the world rankings for American universities. The impression given that the top US universities are full of the best and brightest simply isn't true - they're just full of the children of people who are the richest and most corrupt. Having graduated from an Ivy League American university over 20 years ago, I'm disheartened to see this news. However, it's not surprising to me, when I recall going to get help in the maths centre for my calculus studies and finding tables of athletic kids doing 9th grade algebra. How did these people get admitted? My teaching assistant, a PhD student of mathematics told me that they got special treatment because they were 'jocks'.
8
@gf
The USA leadership ranks are shaped by Football.
1
"The charges ...have exposed how thin the line is between admissions help that most middle-class families consider not just legitimate but de rigueur, like sending a child to a Kaplan class for SAT help, and outright fraud, like paying a ringer to take the test for the student."
The line is not "thin" between admission help like a Kaplan class and a SAT prep class and paying someone to take the test for the student. That is a huge, truly enormous, divide. The idea of a side door--and frankly a back door--makes many of us sick.
I have enjoyed Lori Loughlin on TV for years. I can understand the desire to give "all" for our children. But when that all means fraud and other crimes, then something is really wrong. I think she's destroyed her career (and her husband has done the same). Besides that, she's tarnished her children's futures, the opposite of what she wanted to achieve. (Also, her daughters posed for photos pretending to do crew...so what kind of lesson is that?) It really can't have been worth it.
31
@Michael
With regard to your last point, it proves that the children of Lori Loughlin are complicit in this scam.
The children should be expelled.
6
@DD They have already withdrawn from USC. I am probably in the minority here, but I actually feel somewhat sorry for Olivia Jade Loughlin . She already had a career path she liked and wanted to pursue and had nearly 2 million subscribers to her YouTube Channel . She did not want to go to college - her parents wanted her to go . It was their dream , not hers . Obviously she is complicit - she knew she did not row crew and that was how she got in, but her parents should have just let her do what she wanted , which did not include college . They are reported to have been obsessed with having status of elite school , but knew their kids would never have gotten in as they had no academic focus or skills.
4
Hard to see this as one of America’s “major problems”. Good fodder for the “talk shows” of the rich and famous “brought down low” in the public esteem.
Preferential treatment has been around since the beginnings of “higher education”. Money and fame talks in higher ed just as it does elsewhere in our society.
Lets focus on the serious issues. For example, most college grads do not secure employment appropriate to their skill sets. For the simple reason they mostly avoid areas of strong job demand - hi-tech, science, math, engineering. So they graduate often with substantial debt and secure jobs not requiring college degrees.
The larger issue is whether we really do need so many college graduates. Especially when most lack the technical skill sets required by the modern work force. We have an unusual shortage of vocational skills in America. Getting worse daily. Our major competitor nations have taken corrective action.
if we’re really serious about securing a highly trained workforce we ought examine the backgrounds of hundreds of thousands of well trained Asian students who come annually to study at our colleges and universities. They’re not up to speed usually on Ancient History or Thucydides. But they’re crackerjacks with math, science and computers.
And it was a great joy to teach them. After all they had the right background for college and grad school - a modern hi-tech public school education. So we know our future. And it ought concern us.
5
College Admissions are asked to fix what should be fixed on the US elementary , middle and high school level: Equal education for all.
Thus, we now have a situation where Asian students, to be admitted into Harvard, need SAT scores 140 points higher than white students, 270 points higher than hispanic students, and 450 points higher than black students
These corrections for social inequality are too late in to be effective.
They need to start at age 3, not 18.
However, this is much harder. It would require equal for education on the kindergarten and K-12 level - removal of local control over education and removal of the US property/school tax system, that segregates students into "good" and "bad" school districts.
Much easier to attack Universities.
50
@talesofgenji,
It seems reasonable to criticize universities for transforming admissions departments into profit centers.
Although many on here would disagree, I also think that investing so many spots and so much of the admissions budget to try to woo competitive POC applicants away from state unis, while ignoring the failing public schools that are often located within 5-10 miles of elite schools merits criticism.
What if public elementary and middle schools in Roxbury, MA, East Palo Alto CA, Harlem, the Bronx, Watts and other locales were staffed with teachers who were given a free education by unis within the billionaire endowments club in exchange for 3 years of post grad teaching at failing schools?
Instead of more favorable optics on the admissions website, and cosmetic enhancements for the elite schools, you might actually end up doing some good.
1
Education starts at home and with parent. If one checks parents' age and education of students attend best colleges, you will see they are much older, well-educated, and with fewer kids. Colleges need to admit more students from poor families, but not 'we now have a situation where Asian students, to be admitted into Harvard, need SAT scores 140 points higher than white students, 270 points higher than hispanic students, and 450 points higher than black students' @talesofgenji
@talesofgenji
I asked my Asian 1st gen dentist how he managed to do well in school AND work after school in his immigrant parents' restaurant, when he and his sister hit @ age 10/5th grade. His response: we didn't have a choice - and he meant the excelling academically part, not the busboy part.
2
"Mr. Karabel, the sociologist, said that the bribery crisis simply reflected problems in broader society."
Amen! Witness the continual stream of lies starting with Trump's campaign. No one cares about the actual truth. Lie to get ahead, avoid the draft, etc., etc.
The fish rots from the head down.
3
There are few politicians, journalists, or thought leaders who really understand the widespread loss of faith in our institutions and, indeed, in the very structure of our society.
I teach at an inner city school in one of the most prosperous urban areas in the country. I bet there are maybe a handful of kids in this entire school who believe that their future will be comprised of anything but endless economic hardship, harassment by police because of their skin color, corrupt and uncaring politicians, a filthy and dangerous environment, rampant crime, and no way to pay for college.
Their view, dark as it is, can be commonly found in the suburbs, too. Our country, which used to aspire to lifting everyone, is now dedicated only to the wealthy.
Everything has a price, including the integrity of our most revered institutions - the White House (Trump bought it from the Russians, or so it seems, and billionaires), Congress (obviously), the Supreme Court (Kavanaugh's debts paid by eager right wingers, the persistent "conservative" majority that installed W. and legalized bribery with the Citizens United case and gutted voting rights), and now colleges.
American higher education is now simply another product sold to the highest bidder. Access to the ivy walls now has nothing to do with how hard a teenager works, or what he or she learns, or his or her potential to contribute to the betterment of the world or the nation. It has only to do with money.
Sick. Sad. Discouraging.
8
@CastleMan,
Thank you for your comments.
It seems to me that, at the heart of the dissonance between universities' feel good PR virtue signaling and the underlying stench of corruption in admissions, is an absence of exposure to reality. Your comment provides a dose of that.
Pipe dreams: maybe some of the trips to central America and Africa for fake service could be somehow taxed and have those funds diverted to needy inner city schools. Or maybe the test prep/college advising industry could be taxed -- at say 50% of revenue.
Any discussion of paying college athletes should be moot now.
5
Most of them are academically not qualified for admission.@Frank
Meritocracy in college admissions got taken to the cleaners, first by legacies, then by athletics, then affirmative action (although we’ve learned that not all colors are treated equally affirmatively), and now bribery.
The only categories for whom the ‘meritocracy’ applies — and that too, to fight for the crumbs that are left over — are the middle class families earning more than $100,000 (or may be slightly more) per year, and Asians (including S. Asians).
It is disheartening and dispiriting to see what’s being done to higher education in this country.
16
Buried in this article: there is an 86% admission rate for recruited athletes vs. an overall 5% admission rate?
I’m a believer in the value of athletics for developing grit, good mental & physical health, leadership, and perseverance. However, I have a hard time believing that recruited athletes have these traits in any greater measure than lesser athletes.
A gap this large is shameful.
Please, let the athletes go to places for athletes. Save the spots at top research universities for people with a thirst for knowledge and an inclination to use it for some social good.
170
@Anon
Where is the wondrous place for athletes you speak of? You act like athletes are just good at sports, and not good at academics.
Various studies prove that athletes have significantly higher GPA's than non-athletes. So in essence, they they get better grades AND can promote the institution through sport. That is why they are actively recruited and accepted by institutions of higher learning, and why average students are not.
You're right, sports take grit, good mental & physical health, leadership, and perseverance. You're wrong that just about everyone has those same traits in the same measure. If they did, everyone would be an athlete.
4
@Anon
As another poster mentioned that 86% athlete admit rate at Harvard is based upon a vetted group of applicants from an initial pool of hundreds of "recruited athletes" that finally get submitted to the admissions committee for review. They have already been vetted in a “first look” of their transcript/test scores/application/recommendations by Harvard admissions before they ever make it to the final pool of candidates that make up the 86% that get admitted. They must pass stringent academic and athletic criteria before the coach submits them to admissions. I know because my son was a potential Harvard student athlete – he had a 1550 on his SAT (with no tutoring) and was valedictorian of his 400-person large public high school (with no wealthy connections). Unfortunately, although he met the academic criteria needed to be a “recruited athlete” at Harvard his sport is very competitive and his athletic credentials were not enough to make the final list of athletes submitted by the coach to admissions. They told us what the academic benchmarks are to even be considered a "recruited athlete" and they are very high. The whole process was incredibly professional and the coach was amazing and upfront about it all – I can’t speak highly enough about it. Net I have seen it first hand and that 86% is the admit rate for those applicants who have already been academically vetted by admissions months in advance and then the 86% admission is essentially a rubber stamp.
6
@Anon
the key distinction here is "recruited" athletes. Harvard won't likely "recruit" athletes who are not good students and therefore not a good fit.
I was a D1 athlete and a fairly good student (top 3% of my class) and as such, could have gone to a D3 school such as an Ivy with a "merit scholarship" paying 25 to 75% of the way. I took a full ride at a state school, as I wanted to compete at the highest level. If someone is an elite D1 talent but academically mediocre, they are welcome to apply to Harvard, but their chance of admission won't be 86%.
Even I was not accepted to every school that recruited me: UNC offered me a 1/2 ride but I was not admitted. I was so busy training that I only took the SAT once and ended up with an 81st percentile score, which is not exactly stellar. '
Back then, I knew nobody who went to an "elite" school, so my attitude was "why would I spend $150k to go to X school when I have a full ride at Y state school?". Exposure to the wider world in the days before the internet, growing up in a rural town of 4,000 people, was limited. I figured that any education would be fine, and I had no idea the value that some people put on an "elite" diploma, nor did I understand how important "connections" are that grow from attending an elite school. The wealthiest person I knew in my town was the guy who owned not one, but 3 charter salmon fishing boats, and probably made $100k a year in today's dollars.
2
Pray tell, who casts American colleges as the envy of the world? Americans I suppose. Yes, a few very prestigious universities are in the US and those few do attract people from around the world but we also have our fair share of great universities on this side of the Atlantic. Cambridge, Oxford? Europeans have prestigious universities that provide high quality education, cost far less to attend and don’t carry “hidden costs” during the application process. (However language barriers make them less appealing and less known to Americans who only speak English) If Americans would stop beating their chest about how great they are and solve their real problems, who knows, they might make us envious. For now, Europeans are not feeling too much envy.
2
With all that has been written about college admission
gaming, there appears to be very little comment from faculty,
the group most responsible for the glowing reputations of the
schools parents want their children to attend. That is because faculty are not often directly involved with undergraduate admissions. The recent exposure of admission abuse is a message to all faculty to demand closer administrative oversight in their school's admissions requirements and procedures - including sports.
4
@Neil,
The problem is that many faculty have no desire to invest time mentoring and teaching undergraduates.
1
@Michael
Colleges and Universities are learning environments. As such, most faculty members willingly teach both undergraduate and graduate students. While a few may be exempt from undergraduate teaching, in most cases exceptional scholars and scientists were themselves mentored at early stages of their development and recognize the importance of teaching students at all levels of their educational development - particularly the early undergraduate stage.
1
Reflection of broader society or not... the system has issues. For the most part, however, it works and the admissions departments are not corrupted. Good students have more than enough opportunity in the face of the conspicuous consumption of advantage to educate themselves. In fact, good schools have a hard time getting people to see their worth.
I have a high senior who is down to two from 23 colleges that we physically visited in the last 4 years and 50+ on the initial list... yeah 50+. and I am forgetting some I am sure. We didn't visit all the best but we visited Bowdoin, Harvard, Williams, Amherst, Northwestern and many of the Colleges That Change Lives ..that people might consider elite or CTCL worthy.
To my dismay, none of the best schools even got an app from my senior. I got to know my kid in these last few years. She's making a good choice and the school is not one that I even knew about prior to her journey.
People who are alarmed by this are not seeing the forest. Good schools can't get elite students to even look at them despite offering viable undergraduate options.
As a parent, I think we need to break the K-12 model with a new K-14 path that could include a two-year state-funded community college experience. I couldn't talk my student into that even with a gap year parent-funded educational alternative.
This story has parallels to the NCAA basketball bribery probe.
I am shocked to find gambling in this establishment but not dismayed.
2
The corrupting influence of college on education at large can be seen in the widespread current belief that all students should be prepared to enter college.
Increased income is correlated with college graduation. It is not caused by attending a college. Employers do not pay more because someone has a BA degree, they pay more because that has always been a minority of the population. In other words, it isn’t the degree itself, it’s attaining the degree that matters, largely because only 1/3 of Americans achieve it.
When we fetishize the BA in this way, we ignore the fact that attaining one requires a specific type of thinking: abstract reasoning. The 2/3 of Americans who don’t get the degree likely are much better at concrete thinking, and don’t find the thinking needed to succeed at college easy or comfortable.
The good news is that concrete thinking is good for all sorts of careers, including technical ones. These do require preparation, though, just not the kind found in college.
Post HS technical education is out there, but too undervalued. Technical jobs are hard to fill because we prioritize college. We need to eliminate the bias against technical programs in HS, and prepare students for post HS technical education and apprenticeships. We haven’t because the college bias prevents counselors from recommending tech ed. This occurs because we tend to tell kids what they should do. Instead, simply inform them. Let them decide what’s best for their needs.
4
“If you’re going to have an athletics program, then you need to recruit athletes,” said E. Gordon Gee, the president of West Virginia University. “If you’re going to have an orchestra, you need to have orchestra players.”
What about not having anything but intramural sports and forming the orchestra from students who show up for academics? At a liberal arts college (or universities with undergraduate colleges that emphasize a liberal arts education) these items will work just fine.
Of course, at a conservatory, one would want special musical talent. And as for sports, well, stop pretending that there is something like big-time college athletics with "student athletes." Create minor leagues for football and basketball.
You're saying dropping considerations of athletic and artistic talent is impossible, but that's pretty much what U of Chicago did, beginning in the 1930s. They haven't fared so badly since then.
104
@Wiltontraveler
Absolutely agree, there is no justification for semi-professional athletes/students, other than for universities to make money. The fact that Ivy-Leagues take part in it is the height of hypocrisy.
7
Schools already do this. You have to audition to get into a music department-- those are not academically focused because that is by nature a kind of technical education. But, schools often have very good campus orchestras joined by students who want a liberal arts education and still want to keep up their music skills. To have that orchestra, you need all those instruments. So if you have one spot open and you have to pick between 30 violinists and a single bassoon player, assuming their academics are relatively similar, you'll probably pick the bassoon player. Otherwise, the university can't have nice things like orchestras, and that would be a real loss for the entire community.
1
@Wiltontraveler
Agreed. College athletics in this country have become so corrupt I wonder how it is all still legal. It used to be that STUDENTS at School A would compete against STUDENTS at School B for good old-fashioned rivalry. Now ATHLETES are recruited to pretend to be students (86% admission rate at Harvard? Oy!) so the schools can do well in their sports. The raison d'etre of the schools is education, not athletics.
6
If our country does not reform education policy, our obscenely expensive universities and unnecessarily complex processes for university admission and financing will push both U.S. and non-U.S. students to study outside the US. One of my sons, a U.S. citizen, is attending Canada’s #1 university, an institution that leaders there are always proud to refer to and which is recognized globally, at the fraction of the price of any US university with a national/int’l reputation. We’re paying what I believe is the too expensive foreign rate in Canada. If he were a Canadian citizen, the total cost, including housing on campus, would be less than 10,000 US dollars per year and this Canadian price is considered very high by Canadian citizens who can pay 50% less than that ($5000!) at other Canadian universities. It is long overdue that our government make meaningful investments in our citizens and residents, including through reforming our pre-K through post high school education system. Other industrialized countries have understood their interests in making such investments— Americans deserve a country that does the same.
39
@B PC
And while we're at it, how about getting rid of the notion that college students (and faculty) need country club-like facilities to get their work done? A little austerity never did anyone any harm. Then colleges could offer educational opportunities to more students.
3
Note: In Canada, we don't rank our universities, as in the US. The only people I hear ranking our schools "#1" etc are Americans. Just another way to show off your status... God forbid your son went to a school not rated #1..
6
@Alexandra
His Canadian citizen professors, Canadian publications and international publications have identified the University of Toronto as Canada’s #1 undergraduate institution. I’m not arguing about this, I am merely citing what I have read. Additionally, I am citing Canadian politicians who regularly and proudly refer to UofT as Canada’s flagship university that has educated several Canadian Prime Ministers and world leaders. Finally, please just accept that I am complimenting several aspects of Canada’s university system based on personal experience.
2
This article and the wave of press following this scandal love to suggest that something is broken in higher ed enrollment but then proceed to not give a single alternative. You can browse through past Times articles and find countless cases of comparing US health care or nutrition policies to those in place in Europe. But we all know why this is not done for this topic. What are you going to say....that Europe and East Asia has it much better by having tests taken at age 12 and then 17-years of age that determine the entirety of your education path....going to car repair or college prep...and in the end, whether you are even going to university at all. The US system is the fairest and most transparent I have come across in my 20-years of working in European and the US universities.
11
@DoctorRPP May I ask, how much do those students who end up in university or "car repair", as you snidely call it, pay for their much-needed educations?
I'll answer: pennies compared to what American students end up shilling out. The US system is neither fair nor transparent, especially if we are talking about private institutions. But yes, I'm sure the citizens of The Netherlands are just dying to trade their educational system for ours.
Perhaps working in universities has blinded you to what it's like to stand outside of their gates.
1
In the late 1950's in the province of Ontario, students who were competing for university entrance scholarships were identified only by a number in place of their names on their final exam papers.
These exams were set by a central committee in Toronto and written by the applicants on the same day at the same hour across the province.The exams were then marked by the central authority in Toronto.
Nothing else counted, only the marks.
That seemed pretty objective and fair--too bad it's no longer done.
17
@ac, you can still find the same singular test and central committee approach in a dozen countries from the former Soviet Union. This story in the US pales by comparison to the systemic corruption and lack of merit that goes in to their decisions taken centrally.
2
if you want a better chance at a fairer system, avoid applying to schools that focus on sports and function as minor league teams for pro sports. stay with schools that focus on academics.
12
@LL actually, in some ways, the inverse of this is true. At the big time sports factories (SEC, Big 10, etc.), recruited athletes make up a tiny percentage of an overall class. At an Ivy like Princeton, where the number of teams (and hence the number of athletes) is not much smaller than an SEC school, recruited athletes will take up a much higher percentage of any class.
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@LL
The athletic scholarships outside the revenue sports (where most of the scams were focused) are popular in a substantial part because the are far, far fewer scholarships or admission slots in other areas of talent (other than the token pianist). A student with athletic and another talent is more likely to get an athletic scholarship for athletics.
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@LL Yes, because Harvard and Yale are known for their robust football and basketball programs, along with their multi-million dollar revenue earning athletics department.
1
On behalf of the Canada, let me tell you that we do not envy the U.S. College system. We much prefer our reasonably priced system, where admission is based on grades and “admission consultants”, standardized tests, legacy parents and faking extra curricular activities are not required. Our scholarships are need or merit based and unrelated to athletic ability.
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@fadodado
To me that sounds like going too far in the other direction. I think it's a good thing to select students based on more than just raw GPA, given how a student with legitimate community service dedication, abundant extracurricular activities, and a unique background can add much to student life on campus. Schools should select for more than bookworms.
More to the point, GPA and school performance can be as much a function of socioeconomic background as any factor. I understand Canadians, much like the rest of the West, are enthusiastic about checking America's arrogance despite themselves administering a homogeneous, highly concentrated population smaller than California.... but check your own high and mighty attitude, too, why don't you?
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@fadodado Canada shouldn't be so smug -- it has its own "pay to play" for wealthy Chinese students, who are the envy of every university due to them paying international student tuition that is 4-5x higher than domestic rates. Read somewhere that University of Toronto has about a quarter foreign/international students admitted to attract that hefty tuition. Bet there are some rejects among Canadian domestic applicants to fit those Chinese students in.
22
For competitive programs, essays and CVs are part of the entrance equation for Canadian universities but athletic scholarships are non-existent. High school marks remain the main entrance determinant. There is no SAT or ACT equivalent. The generally high and consistent quality of our high schools (both public and private) seems to be the best gatekeeper for application fairness. Our system works well, is relatively affordable (although this is changing with professional programs) and produces well-prepared graduates. Many U.S. companies find our publicly funded schools fertile hunting grounds when they are searching for talent. These companies seem more interested in the abilities of our graduates and less about the reputations of the schools. Smart!
13
I went to one of those prestigious colleges in the northeast. A point of pride we students had was knowing that no one could buy their way in. Having a parent who went there created zero impact on admission decisions. Large donations would also not help. We mocked the other prestigious school down the road as a bunch of rich kids who bought their way in. Sure, we were snobby in our own way. And I never worked in the admissions office to know what was really going on. But it was clear that the average student came from significantly less wealth than that other school down the road. In light of this recent news it seems as though there are good ways to go about college admissions and not good ways.
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@Mr. SeaMonkey Why not name the school you attended? If you're right that admissions were merit-based only, I think there'd be more than a few people (including myself) who would like to know the school's identity. And you might hear from some other alums who confirm your view - or not.
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@Manitoba Dane
I’m trying to speak more generally regarding ways that college admissions could be done, rather than of my own experience. But your point is fair. How about I just say that I got a very good education in Cambridge, MA?
1
@Mr. SeaMonkey,
MIT admissions may be a lot more merit-based than Harvard, but admissions there is still subject to some corruption.
Cal Tech, OTOH, is completely merit-based, according to Daniel Goldman of the WSJ, who wrote "The Price of Admission."
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Fair Criticism. What would you propose to replace it? When stakes are as high as they are for elite college admissions, people will find a way to game the system whatever it is.
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@Phillypete,
Perhaps a fairer system would be a lottery. College Admission officers could select a larger pool of candidates deemed qualified and then randomly select ones that will be offered admission.
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@Phillypete,
Unfortunately, you make a great point. We live in an unequal and stratified (and market-driven) society, where government funding of education is limited and decreasing. The Ivy League schools and similar institutions traffic in elitism, and both cement pre-existing social status and, because of their resources, provide one of the remaining means of social mobility for applicants who come from modest backgrounds but were lucky enough to get in. (Spectacular examples of the latter include both Obamas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Lloyd Blankfein).
Elite universities are, at best, only partial meritocracies, and depend on brand image, donors and endowment. But I'm not sure what other models are workable. Perhaps what the Harvards of the world should do is just be explicit and transparent as to what their numerical targets are for development admittees, legacies, athletes, celebrity children, underrepresented minorities and first generation kids, niche talent kids, and purely academic merit admitees.
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@Jane
In some senses yes...but what do you do about diversity? What if a disproportionate number of males/people from a particular state/race are chosen by lottery? And unless you do something to address the "extra time" and preparation that people do for the standardized tests, it's still not "fair."
2