The fraud only worked because the whole system is corrupt.
The details of the revelations that wealthy parents allegedly paid a consultant hundreds of thousands of dollars to portray their children as successful athletes, thus giving them a leg up in elite college admissions, are enticingly, delightfully juicy. ( Jane Coaston’s explainer has some of the best anecdotes, including students being portrayed as top recruits in sports they’d never even played .)
But underneath the celebrity gossip and the choice anecdotes is the inescapable conclusion that the whole business of being admitted to elite colleges in America in 2019 — and make no mistake, it is a business — is corrupt all the way down.
When the Justice Department held a press conference Tuesday to announce fraud charges against dozens of people, including consultant William “Rick” Singer and actress Felicity Huffman, FBI special agent Joseph R. Bonavolonta described the scheme as “a sham that strikes at the core of the college admissions process.”
But what it revealed is just how rotten that core is. If the only goal of the college admissions process in America were to create a perfect educational environment for students — not to appease wealthy donors or boost the school’s brand through athletics — the fraud wouldn’t have worked at all.
The real scandal, as they say, is what’s legal.
The underlying logic of the scheme was this: Wealthy parents wanted to get their kids into elite colleges, but their kids had so-so grades and test scores that wouldn’t qualify them for admission through the usual process. Happily for them, college admissions isn’t a level playing field.
The children of alumni get a leg up. So do the children of major donors; a recent lawsuit over Harvard’s admissions policies revealed the details of how they are treated as much as revenue generators as they are for their potential as students. And athletes are routinely admitted with lower grades and test scores than other students.
None of these advantages in the admissions process typically attract as much attention and outrage as the most notorious admissions preference: race-based affirmative action. That outrage rarely considers that, legally, affirmative action cannot exist merely to help individual students overcome discrimination. Colleges, according to the Supreme Court, can consider race in admissions only to educationally benefit all students on campus by creating a racially diverse environment, and only if considering race is the only way to create that environment.
