The following statement was issued in a Massachusetts courtroom yesterday morning.
Dozens of individuals involved in a nationwide conspiracy that facilitated cheating on college entrance exams and the admission of students to elite universities as purported athletic recruits were arrested by federal agents in multiple states and charged in documents unsealed on March 12, 2019, in federal court in Boston. Athletic coaches from Yale, Stanford, USC, Wake Forest and Georgetown, among others, are implicated, as well as parents and exam administrators.
Among those charged were Felicity Huffman (Lynette from Desperate Housewives) and Lori Laughlin (Becky from Full House), the latter of whom apparently spent half a million dollars getting her two girls recruited by the USC rowing team as a way (presumably) to bypass all the usual nonsense involved in getting into USC through the admissions department.
(Yes, yes, I know. Why would anyone pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to USC, the biggest moral cesspit in American higher education, the “last bastion of the incompetent rich”, as Alec Baldwin once memorably put it? It remains a thing in the Los Angeles entertainment industry, apparently).
The scheme seems to have centred on a California resident who ran a college-prep business and performed a valuable arbitrage role for his clients by simultaneously a) paying ACT/SAT administrators to either correct student’s answers or actually take the text themselves on the students’ behalf and b) arranging for sports coaches at various colleges to designate the student as a potential recruit. The two strategies combined, apparently, were meant to put these students at the top of the pile as far as admissions goes. (Full criminal complaint available here).
You can learn a lot about American higher education from this episode. The first and obvious question all this raises is: maybe the clearing price for these institutions isn’t high enough? I mean, these are private institutions not subject to government price controls: if there are people out there willing to spend two or three times the sticker price to get their kids in, why don’t they just hike tuition to take advantage of the demand? And the answer is that while universities care about money, they care about prestige more. They forego all that extra income because they value the prestige more than they care about the money.
The second obvious question was: why didn’t these parents take the well-established and legal way of doing this: namely, to donate large amounts of money to the university at the same time as their child was applying and let the advancement office casually inform the admissions office of this timely fact? This path was been well-documented in Daniel Golden’s book The Price of Admission. Donald Trump – famous for announcing chartable donations without ever following through on them – appears to have laid down over a million dollars at UPenn around the time his children went to school there, and heck, every child who watches The Simpsons knows the price schedule at Yale (“a score of 400 – new football uniforms; 300 – a new dormitory, and in Larry’s case, we would need an International Airport”). I think the answer here is pretty simple. Those parents almost certainly checked out the legal route and found it too expensive. Instead, they went with a cheaper route which is arguably no more morally reprehensible but does in fact constitute a felony (which is of course why it was cheaper).
The third thing here is that the whole episode is a salient reminder of the extent to which education plays a role in social stratification. To the extent that your life chances are determined by where you went to school, there will always be attempts by those who have means to make sure their children have access to the best. This isn’t just an American thing, or a capitalist thing: as I showed back here, it was pretty common in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, too. What is peculiarly American is the way higher education intersects both with sports and philanthropy in ways which both promote access and opportunity and entrench privilege. And it seems hard to imagine how it could ever be reformed.
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You say it’s “a capitalist thing” albeit extended to the former Soviet Union. I recall you saying elsewhere, though, that Canada doesn’t have a very highly stratified higher education system. There seem to be elements of the American experience in particular — its high levels of stratification, its dedication to sports, its expansion without truly democratising — that are particularly open to criticism. Certainly, international parallels should not protect the American system from criticism.
That said, I haven’t heard of a similar scandal elsewhere. Maybe our number is coming up in Canada, but I doubt it, unless the tendency symbolized by the Maclean’s guide keeps picking up steam.
As for how the American system can be reformed, the means seem obvious. What’s lacking is the moral courage to implement them, and the intellectual clarity about what universities ideally are which would inspire a proper abomination of the practices which must end.