THIS IS WHY FREE COLLEGE IS A NECESSITY: White Privilege and the College Admissions Scandal; The revelations give credence to the portrait of higher education as a system for only the wealthiest and most elite families in the United States.
By Lauren Camera, Education Reporter March 13, 2019, at 11:37 a.m.
usnews.com
White Privilege and College Admissions
A poster outlining the college admissions bribery scheme is displayed during a news conference on Tuesday. (STEVEN SENNE/AP)
"WHAT WE DO IS WE HELP the wealthiest families in the U.S. get their kids into school."
William Rick Singer, a Newport Beach, California-based college admissions expert, wasted no time cutting to the chase in a conversation with a parent, which the FBI recorded last June.
"They want guarantees, they want this thing done. They don't want to be messing around with this thing. And so they want in at certain schools. So I did 761 what I would call, 'side doors.'"
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He elaborated: "There is a front door which means you get in on your own. The back door is through institutional advancement, which is ten times as much money. And I've created this side door in."
Singer then moved to close the deal: "Because the back door, when you go through institutional advancement, as you know, everybody's got a friend of a friend, who knows somebody who knows somebody but there's no guarantee, they're just gonna give you a second look. My families want a guarantee."
"It's the homerun of homeruns," Singer later added, for good measure.
"And it works?" asked the parent.
"Every time," Singer said, sealing the deal.
Five months later, the parent, Gordon Caplan, who lives in Greenwich, Connecticut and is an attorney and co-chairman of the international law firm Willkie, Farr and Gallagher, would pay Singer $75,000 to arrange a proctor to correct the answers to his daughter's ACT test after she completed it.
The story is just one of 50 between Singer and NCAA Division I coaches, Hollywood celebrities and wealthy parents like Caplan who were charged Tuesday with bribery and fraud in connection with a sweeping college admissions scandal, according to documents unsealed in federal court in Boston.
The case – the largest college admission scam ever prosecuted by the Department of Justice – exposes a long-running racketeering scheme dating back to 2011, in which parents paid Singer a combined $25 million to help students cheat on college entrance exams and gain them admission to elite colleges and universities as recruited athletes when in reality they were not athletes at all.
The revelation is a damning portrait of higher education that the industry has been trying to shed for decades: That it's a rigged system accessible only to the wealthiest and most elite families in the U.S.
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"To zoom out a little bit, when you see critiques about how we have structured an economy that has different rules for different people, this is Exhibit A," Ben Miller, vice president of postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress, says. "A low-income family would never think to claim they falsely compete on a crew team."
In addition to Caplan, the parents – described by Andrew Lelling, U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, as "a catalogue of wealth and privilege" – include CEOs of public and private companies, real estate moguls, a fashion designer and Hollywood celebrities.
"This is a case in which they flaunted their wealth and set their children up with the best education money could buy – literally," said Joseph R. Bonavolonta, special agent in charge of the FBI's Boston field office.
All of them knowingly conspired with Singer, the documents say, paying him up to $6.5 million and disguising the payments as charitable donations, which they then wrote off as a tax deduction. Most of them paid Singer, who funneled the money through a fake charity, between $200,000 to $400,000.
"The elite colleges admissions structure is already so heavily weighted in favor of wealthy families that to see egregious cheating on top of it suggests there is no level of bad behavior to which some of these wealthy families will stoop," Miller says. "It's not enough they have enough money for a private SAT tutor, that they have enough money for admissions coaches and to pay for whatever strange extracurricular activity makes them look good, but they still have to bribe their way in."
To be sure, income inequality in education has a long history, in large part because so much of K-12 budgets are dependent on local property taxes, meaning wealthier communities with higher tax bases automatically have more money to pay for things like better teachers, AP courses and college counselors – all of which provide a leg up in the college admissions process.
Combine that with families who can also afford coaching for the SAT and ACT, additional counselors who go over college essays with a fine-tooth comb and costs for recreational sports, music lessons and other extracurriculars, and admission to the most elite colleges is assumed by many lower-income families to be out of reach.
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As one recent study found, 38 colleges, including five Ivy League schools, enrolled more students whose families are among the top 1 percent of income earners than from the entire bottom 60 percent. And children whose parents are in the top 1 percent of earners are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than those whose parents are in the bottom income quintile, the same report found.
"It's absolutely outrageous," Susan Dynarski, a professor of public policy, education and economics at the University of Michigan, says. "I've been studying inequality in college-going and completion for decades and intellectually I knew that this sort of thing happened, but to see it laid out in a legal proceeding drives it all home."
Dynarski's research shows, in part, that low-income students who are qualified for top-tier schools rarely apply based on the assumption that they cannot afford the cost of tuition.
But Dynarski found that assumption changes if someone from the school specifically gets in touch with low-income students and promises them free tuition if they apply and are admitted. In fact, they are twice as likely to apply, be admitted to and enroll.
"If anyone ever again asks me, 'Is college worth it,' I will just push this story in front of them because these parents clearly know that getting into a high-quality college is valuable," Dynarski says. "That these valuable admissions positions would go to unprepared, rich kids while so many smart kids, poor kids are being left on the sidelines is absolutely outraging."
Dynarski is quick to note that the entire system is not rigged and that the vast majority of college counselors and college admissions officers are doing a good job, despite the unsavory image the scandal paints of higher education writ large.
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"The admissions side doors – sports, legacies – are ripe for this kind of corruption, I think," she says. "These side entries through athletics, through legacy, through fundraising just need to be shut down. The credibility that higher education has in the U.S. is at risk."
Stories of wealth and privilege securing spots at elite institutions for families who donate massive sums of money or have incredible political clout are nothing new. They range from politically connected applicants given preference at the University of Illinois to a $2.5 million gift given to Harvard by the parents of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump's son-in-law, two years before Kushner was admitted.
Last year, when Harvard was forced to detail for the very first time its entire admissions process during a lawsuit that's challenging the school's use of race in its admissions process, it revealed special categories that admissions officers consider, including legacy applicants, applicants whose families made sizeable donations, children of faculty and recruited athletes, the latter of which were admitted 86 percent of the time.
"My hope is that this will prompt a larger conversation about all the ways non-illegal uses of privilege can also undermine the admissions process," Miller says. "Bribes are obviously bad and we should stop them, but we shouldn't forget that it's already an inherently unfair process for a lot of students."
The sweeping scandal is likely to provide a new lens through which many will consider separate, ongoing debates about higher education, including affirmative action and race-based admission policies and the use of standardized tests in admissions.
"It is stunning to me that in a world where there are serious efforts at undermining the use of race in college admissions, that we would talk about that issue at all in light of this," Miller says. "The real problem is the pervasiveness of wealth to influence admission; not race."
Tuesday's news prompted quick calls for internal reviews by organizations that represent colleges, universities and their admissions officers.
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"This behavior compromises the integrity of college admissions and reinforces stereotypes that people of privilege can circumvent the rules," Michael Reilly, executive director of American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, said in a statement. "It undermines public confidence in our institutions."
Reilly said he'll press the group's 11,000 higher education professionals who represent approximately 2,600 institutions to review their admissions processes, including those related to student-athletes, to ensure that they are "transparent, fair and abide by the long-standing ethical expectations of our profession."
"If these allegations are true, they violate the essential premise of a fair and transparent college admissions process," Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, which represents more than 1,700 public and private college and university presidents, said in a statement. "This alleged behavior is antithetical to the core values of our institutions, defrauds students and families, and has absolutely no place in American higher education."
Many in the higher education field say they aren't surprised that such a racket was in the works, but that the overtness with which Singer and the parents were willing to talk about securing an advantage – and an illegal one at that – is breathtaking.
"I think what we're seeing now is a process that has gone inside-out and upside-down," Peter Van Buskirk, founder of Best College Prep and someone who's spent more than 25 years in college admissions, including 12 as the former dean of admissions at Franklin and Marshall College, says.
"We have institutions that are almost inaccessible, with admissions rates of 10 percent, and some families, not a lot of families, but some, are willing to do whatever it takes to become the exception in that admissions process, ethics be damned," he says. "It's an incredibly selfish approach." |
