For
the socially and economically hopeful, raising a child in America is an
eighteen-year process of investing in the college-admissions system.
Photograph by David Madison / Getty
The college-admissions
scandal—in which fifty people have been indicted for scheming to get
the children of wealthy parents into top schools—makes for perfect
cocktail chatter. It involves a couple of celebrities among those who,
prosecutors allege, bribed and cheated their kids’ way
into college. It includes bizarre details, like the Photoshopping of
photographs of said children’s faces onto the bodies of outstanding
young athletes. It bears savoring and retelling, because it says
something intuitively obvious but barely articulated about American
society: its entire education system is a scam, perpetrated by a few
upon the many.
It’s not just that higher education is literally
prohibitively expensive (and at the end of it most college graduates
still don’t know how to use the word “literally” correctly, as I am
here). It’s not just that admission to an élite college—more than the
education a student receives there—provides the foundation of future
wealth by creating or, more often, reinforcing social connections. It’s
not just that every college in the country, including public schools,
makes decisions about infrastructure, curriculum development, hiring,
and its very existence on the basis of fund-raising and money-making
logic. It’s not just that the process of getting into college grows more
stressful—and, consequently, more expensive—with every passing year.
It’s not just that the process itself is fundamentally rigged and
everyone knows this. It’s all of it.
There
is an adage of journalism that holds that every story should be written
as if by a foreign correspondent. I generally like this idea: coverage
of many issues could benefit from a naïve but informed view. I now find
myself imagining applying it to the college-scandal story.
I
would, of course, begin by explaining that fifty people in six states
are accused of conspiring to game the college-admissions system. They
spent hundreds of thousands of dollars each to have other people take
standardized tests in place of their children, to insure that the
administration of the test itself would be fixed, and to bribe coaches
and falsify their children’s athletic records. Here, the story would get
complicated. A reader in any country can understand the concept of a
standardized test—in some countries, in fact, standardized tests have
been a tool to fight corruption in admissions. But what does athletic
ability have to do with college, especially a college considered
academically challenging?
Soon, I would find myself explaining the
exotic customs of American college admissions. As the parent of two
young adults—one recently went through the application process and the
other is in its beginning stages—I have accumulated some experience
explaining the system to my friends in other countries. (A Canadian
academic’s recent incredulous response: “In Canada, people just go to
university!”) I would have to explain the concept of legacy admissions:
the positively pre-modern concept that the right to an élite education
is heritable. I would have to explain that colleges depend heavily on
financial donors, whom they cultivate through generations. I would have
to explain the growing part of softer criteria like extracurriculars—the
race to be not only better-educated than your peers but also better at
being a good person in the world—as if education and an initiation into
adult civic life were not what college itself is for. I would have to
note that it’s essential for parents to be able to afford to pay for
their children’s extracurriculars and sponsor their volunteerism.
I
would have to explain all that before I even got to the standardized
tests. Then I would note that an SAT/ACT tutor in New York City charges
between three hundred and four hundred and fifty dollars an hour. I
would note that, to make parents feel better about parting with that
sort of money, many programs guarantee a precise bump in test scores for
their students: about a hundred and eighty points, out of a possible
total of sixteen hundred, for the SAT; about four, out of thirty-six,
for the ACT. I would note that gaming the test legally is such a
well-established practice that children whose parents can’t afford
thousands of dollars in test-prep fees will score more than ten per cent
lower than those who get tutored.
Granted, the test results
aren’t everything. Every college will tell you that it takes a “holistic
approach” to admissions. There are essays, for which there is also
coaching, and editing, and a formula; the hourly rate for these services
can exceed that of the test tutors. There is also additional college
counselling, because a guidance counsellor even at the best public
school can’t give an aspiring college student the kind of individual
attention, or the kinds of connection, that money can buy. And then
there are the connections that money buys indirectly: the parents’
friends who teach, or who work in admissions, or who have generous tips
on what colleges are looking for in an essay or an applicant’s list of
extracurriculars. One of those things is interest in the particular
college—an immeasurable quality, to be sure, but colleges like to see
that an applicant has visited the campus. Yes, in most of the world,
young people go to university in the city where they grew up, but in the
United States, I would explain, most young people aspire to “go away”
to college, and that means that even a pre-application tour is a costly
and time-consuming proposition. I might mention that the dormitory
system, a major source of revenue
for the colleges, is also a giant expense for the families, but, these
days, even colleges that used to be known as commuter schools require
first- and often second-year students to live in the dorms, even if
their families live in the same city. This is but an incomplete list of
reasons that many low-income students don’t even try to apply to selective colleges. The wealthy compete with the even wealthier.
I
would explain that many American colleges have made a concerted effort
to admit students from more varied backgrounds, but have failed even to keep up with the changing demographics of the country. The top colleges and universities continue, overwhelmingly,
to educate the wealthy and white. The proportional representation of
African-Americans and Latinos in the population of top colleges has been
dropping, with a few exceptions, which are, in turn, determined largely
by wealth: only the wealthiest colleges can admit a lot of students
whose parents can’t afford tuition. And if they want to keep these
students, they have to invest in revamping their curricula and training
faculty and allocating additional teaching and counselling resources to
help students for whom the culture of élite colleges is alien and
alienating.
Explaining
why these additional resources would be necessary would in turn require
an explanation of how education is funded in this country, how school
districts are drawn, how middle-class parents invest in a house in the
right neighborhood, where public schools will give their kids a chance
at a decent college. The best public primary schools, I would explain,
enable graduates to compete with kids who went to expensive private
schools. For the socially and economically hopeful, I would explain,
raising a child in America is an eighteen-year process of investing in
the college-admissions system.
All
this, I would hope, would serve to elucidate how a corruption scheme
like the college-admissions conspiracy could come to be. But it would
also raise the question: Why are these ridiculous crooks the only people
who might be punished for perpetuating—by gaming—a bizarre, Byzantine,
and profoundly unmeritocratic education system? Why is such a clearly
and unabashedly immoral system legal at all?
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