By now, I am sure you have heard of the admissions scandal that has recently engulfed various titans of industry and their progeny. No? You must not work in test prep! I do work in test prep and am somewhat conversant in the “arms race” of college admissions, and … thanks for all the texts and messages over the last couple of days! Let me tell you, the collective reaction of my colleagues and me who work in this field is … a massive *eyeroll*.
What is the indictment count at? 50? I wouldn’t be surprised if that number increases by an order of magnitude by the time it’s all said and done. How many parents out there are feeling just a little bit squirmy right now about ever working with The Edge College and Career Network, the company at the heart of the crimes? By the way, I don’t think it’s an accident that the name of this particular admissions consulting organization implies that you might need its services even after matriculation. If you’re willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to ensure your little brats get into [insert prestigious college here], what’s to stop you from securing him that coveted internship or that first banking / consulting / tech job post-graduation?
I could go on and on about what this episode says about wealth, whiteness, entitlement, and privilege in America, but nothing new under the sun there. On my very first day at Harvard Business School, a dean got up and said, “Look around you. These are all the people you’ll be asking someday to hire your kid.” I think he was joking, and we all tittered awkwardly, but weren’t many of us indeed there for, among other things, that vaunted HBS network? Certainly, that was a big reason why I was sitting there.
So, did these parents do a very naughty thing? Sure. Is what they did that different from the things that middle-class and upper-middle-class parents do to give their kids an advantage? Debatable. Instead of piling on to these deep-pocketed parents who, frankly, don’t sound like they respect or even like their kids very much, let me tell you what LBYM finds bizarre about the whole situation. I mean, besides the part about everyone wanting to get into USC (haha—a little Stanford alumna joke!).
When I was growing up, my family did not have a lot of capital, economic or otherwise. We did not have a lot of money, but more significantly, as an immigrant family, we did not possess cultural capital, an understanding of how the gears of America really turned, so to speak. Apart from the size of your bank account, what kinds of goods and behaviors signified social status and power? I didn’t have the words for it back then, but I understood on some level that attending and graduating from a big-name university was one of those goods. I think I’m pretty great now 😆, but back then, I needed external validation, an imprimatur from an esteemed arbiter.
Compare my status upon entering college to that of, say, a third-generation Stanford student. One private school educated, well-traveled, versed in art, music, and literature, from, perhaps, a prominent, well-connected family. Is a degree from Stanford going to make that much of a difference in this other student’s life trajectory? Or is it just one more line in an already-loaded curriculum vitae?
The amount of personal and professional risk these parents incurred on behalf of their children is particularly stunning and scandalous given how unnecessary it all seems. Sheesh, if those kids don’t even go to college, I bet they’d be lauded as non-conformist free thinkers. How much do you need to stack the deck in their favor? The youngsters seem to have all the advantages in the world already—wealth, knowledge, connections—and yet, those are not enough. You still need to bend and break the rules?
You know how LBYM feels about unnecessary spending.
Yes. Interesting how unsurprising any of this is, really.
How many stories of success I have heard over the years from self-made people railing against affirmative action while conveniently excluding from their success narrative the fact that they had a safety-net. Regardless of whether the safety net is ever used, it is there and it is real and has allowed and continues to allow many a self-made person to be able to take risks unavailable to or at least which are incredibly magnified for a person without that same net in place.
Yes, these kids whose parents used side-door entrances to top-level schools likely would have been fine without enrollment at these schools. Likely, they would have been financially fine without ever attending school post-high school.
And to a degree, I think this is the point that the local school district tries to make continuously when pushing back and defending the focus they place on those who aren’t making it. Yes, this focus might be taking away resources from the top performers, but the top performers are going to be ok, anyway. Those students on the margins of the bottom aren’t so safe and it is correct to give them a boost now before they become adults. This push for resource direction away from those who need it and deserve it (anti-Affirmative Action) isn’t just happening at the university level. It’s high school, middle school, elementary school, and even pre-elementary. It’s about the middle and upper-middle class parents and what measures we take at every education point to make sure our kids are able to maintain their ‘place’ once they leave home and enter the world of the adult.
Interesting article in WaPo recently examining countries with highest gap between wealth and poverty with overlay of parenting craziness (my term, not theirs) includes US with S Korea, India and other nations with predominate parental craziness to explain why the craziness exists. These countries/cultures are contrasted with those of more equal wealth distributions and less of a gap between highest and lowest earners and which interestingly had less parental craziness culture. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but it’s a very interesting coincidence.
To be perfectly honest, I am not innocent of any of this as I purchased a home knowing which public schools this would allow my children to attend. My kids could have attended any school in the district and likely would have been just fine. To my credit, I have never paid a tutor or paid for test prep. I’ve had two kids take SAT and ACT – and I’m particularly irked by the cheating on these tests – both kids scored at levels these parents paid $75k to have their kids achieve.
Last point, I’ve long felt that the most difficult part of university education in the US and some European countries (I know nothing about university structures in other parts of the world) is being accepted to the schools. There are some universities at which the hard part is *staying* in the school because the education is incredibly rigorous and demanding. In the US, I think for the most part, once you’re enrolled odds are great that unless you cannot afford to pay tuition or you screw up majorly, you’re going to graduate with a degree from that school. I’d be interested to see how the students with the less than stellar GPAs and test scores that would normally not have won them a spot in the school are faring in their classes. Given the higher GPAs and test scores demanded by the schools when making admissions selections one should be able to predict that these students who didn’t have the intellect and/or work ethic to win admissions fair and square and thus did not actually *belong* at these schools wouldn’t be able to survive the academic rigor. Wouldn’t it be interesting if within these schools, these students who gained entrance through their parents’ schemes were in the end average students as compared to the rest of the student body? What does this tell us about university education in the US and other countries with similar admissions/retention structures?
Agree with all of your comment. I’ve done interviews for my alma mater and I would say the vast majority of students who apply would be able to handle the academic work and graduate with a degree. Do the universities bear some of the blame in creating an unnecessary sense of scarcity? It’s hard to look at their endowments and not wonder about opening up more spots.