On College Admissions

“In the relentless chase for status and prestige, some people will do anything to get their kids into elite colleges, throwing all their resources at a system that, in one way or another, so often rewards the wealthiest participants.” – Eric Hoover in the Chronicle of Higher Education

First, some disclosures; I went to an elite private college and I worked in admissions at an elite private college. As a person of color I had my admission to that college questioned by other students on multiple occasion during my time in college – to my face. Currently, I work closely with the admissions office at my institution in my capacity as the Director of the Honors Program. So I have some perspective and some opinions on the “Operation Varsity Blues” admissions scandal that has been on our minds and social media feeds for the last few days.

There are three areas of interest to an organization of intellectual historians that I want to focus on, so here is what has been on my mind:

Status

The first topic I want to look at is status, especially intellectual status as it can be obtained by attending an elite institution. Some of these parents had enough money to try the old fashioned “back door” into the college of their choice – paying for a building or endowment fund, but they did not do it. The question is, why not? Why take the “side door” which they had to know was more questionable legally? It appears that these parents were trying to give their children a boost of self-esteem. If you give a new library then your kid knows every time she or he walks into the library that that might be the only reason she or he is at the school, but if you pay someone to create a dream admissions file your child does not know that she or he did not get in on merit. One of the reasons people are so willing to cheat to get into these schools is because of the almost unquestioned intellectual credibility that these degrees give you. Apparently being wealthy and having a nice car or designer clothes is not enough, to legitimate the family they need a kid with an elite degree and maybe some of those college window stickers for the Range Rover. We are supposed to feel badly for these parents because they live in such competitive enclaves and they are just trying to keep up with the Joneses. Perhaps they should not be thinking about which schools their neighbors children got into and thinking more about which schools are the best choice for their children to be happy, excel in a subject they enjoy, or (since pundits seems so fond of asking this question for people who are not wealthy) whether their children should be going to college at all.

Suddenly people are up in arms about a lack of meritocracy at our elite colleges and universities but that did not start with these parents. Let’s think about the magazines and websites that are forever coming up with ways to rank schools. Let’s think about the high schools that list on their profiles the names of the institutions their graduates are accepted to. Let’s think about the graduate schools and employers who place too much emphasis on undergraduate pedigree rather than just the degree. When more than half of the tenure track lines in history departments in the United States are held by people with degrees from only eight institutions then we know we have a meritocracy problem. We have all bought in to the concept of status at elite institutions to some degree. I can honestly say this – every college or university in the country has rejected students who could have done well enough to graduate had they been chosen and every one of those institutions has admitted students who ultimately could not hack it and dropped out never to complete a degree. Admissions is not a perfect science and to some degree intellectual status is for sale.

White Privilege

Shaun R. Harper, a professor and executive director of the University of Southern California’s Race and Equity Center said, “For me, this scandal is like a trifecta of whiteness. Most admissions deans are white, most head coaches at Division I colleges are white, and I can guarantee that the overwhelming number of people who benefited from this bribery are white.”

One of things that makes something like this scandal possible is white privilege. When a white student shows up on a college campus with a 1500 on the SAT and claiming to be a tennis or sailing recruit, no one bats an eye, but every black student at a private college or university has probably been questioned about how they got in. The assumption that every black student is some kind of “affirmative action case,” or a recruited athlete, follows these students around until many begin to question whether or not they truly belong. There have been calls for ends to affirmative action programs for as long as there have been affirmative action policies. I cannot count the number of times I have heard the argument made that a white student’s “spot” was taken by a less deserving person of color. But the “side door” was about non-revenue sports, not about race. Diversifying a campus in terms of race, gender, ethnicity, home state/country, has benefits for all of the students. Having competitive sports teams can improve campus morale and alumni connection (including annual giving). If both of these elements of the college experience have benefits, and those benefits are reflected in the admissions process, then why is diversity consistently under attack while athletics is only sporadically under attack?

When admissions policies benefitted white people (before integration) there was no talk of college admissions needing to be a pure meritocracy. Once colleges started to admit women, people or color, and others who had been kept out under the old regime there was an emphasis on merit. This has been turned on its head in the last couple of decades as merit (much like the term “colorblind”) is now a code for “reverse discrimination,” as though there is only one way to measure merit and it happens to favor the same people who benefitted from the system that was in place prior to integration.

You Took My Spot

For years there have been lawsuits, and there is one that has already been filed in this case, by students trying to make the claim that another less qualified person took their spot. In anti-affirmative action cases the idea was that a more qualified white student was kept out of a university class by a less qualified person of color. This is not how college admissions works. In order for a school to get 1000 students into the first year class that school will likely have to admit anywhere from 1600-3000 students depending on what the schools yield rate is. No school admits 1000 students and gets all 1000 to show up. If, after admitting let’s say 2000 students, the school in question only has 950 deposits then that school will go to the waitlist in order to get another 50 into the class. Most wait listed students will have already sent their deposits to other schools and moved on so it might require another 200 offers to get those last fifty spots filled. For the lawsuits to make any sense the student filing it would have to be able to prove that she or he would have been the next student who would have been offered a spot after the first 1000 spots were filled, but most schools do not rank their wait listed students numerically so this is difficult, if not impossible, to verify. And even if you could show you were the next person on the list – the first person who did not get offered a spot, how can you prove which one of the over 2000 students who was offered a spot ahead of you was the ONE who kept you out. Why was it not the second string long-snapper on the football team, or the piccolo player in the orchestra who had weak standardized testing but fantastic sight reading ability, or the amazing math student who met the head of the department at a conference and (while she or he did not have a great overall record) that department head made a call on the student’s behalf? There is rarely one thing that gets a student into a school, especially at the elite schools. There are valedictorians who get turned down because their recommendations are lukewarm or because they had no activities outside of class, and there are rated athletes who are given spots in a class that no one believes will stick around long enough to graduate. Colleges and universities are trying to build a class that meets the needs of the institution (including athletes, musicians, legacies, as well as geographic, ethnic, and racial diversity) that will make the incoming class interesting enough for those students to want to stay and for the institution to maintain or enhance its reputation so the next class will want to apply and the alumni will want to give.

Sexism?

I keep wondering why every article I have seen on this story has a picture of one or both of the actresses involved and only one had an article of any of the other high profile people involved. In more than half of the articles I have seen there are pictures of one high profile actress and/or her daughter (an internet personality). Is it because they had plenty of pictures of these actresses? Is it because they are the most recognizable names? Did editors think the story would not resonate enough, or draw enough eyes and clicks, without pictures of famous women? Is it because it is easier to shame women than men in our culture? Possibly a mix of all of these, but there is something there that is bothering me. The way that so much of this coverage has focused on a small group of women involved as opposed to the ringleader is off-putting. I have seen stories that mention the actresses by name but not William “Rick” Singer – admit it, you couldn’t remember his name until I just mentioned it, but you have seen several hashtags referencing “Aunt Becky.”

If parents and coaches are cheating the process that is one thing, and obviously a problem, but no admission officers are being accused of taking bribesor changing files – so as long as applicants are honest, there is still some credibility in the process.There have always been people who try to play games with admissions to get their kids into schools, that part is not new. The structure and scope of this scandal are unique but the underlying problems are not. In the end we are left with a few things that no one is particularly surprised by; people with money will use their money to game the system, people will try to make money gaming the system, college admissions is imperfect and sometimes favors athletes and wealthy people, white privilege exists, sexism exists, and sometimes life isn’t particularly fair.