A kind of poignant thing about this college admissions scandal is the way the kids themselves were protected, in many or most cases, from knowing that they were involved in a fraud:
Sitting very still and wearing a dark suit, [master criminal William Singer] described how he arranged for students’ SAT and ACT results to be falsified by sending them to take the exams in Houston or Los Angeles, where he had bribed test administrators. He described the students as believing they were taking the tests legitimately, but said that his test proctor would correct their answers afterward. Mr. Singer said he would tell the proctor the score he wanted the student to get, and he would achieve that score exactly....
Mr. McGlashan’s son was unaware of the scheme, according to court documents....
Mr. Singer told Mr. Caplan that his daughter would not know that her standardized test scores had been faked.
“Nobody knows what happens,” Mr. Singer said, according to the transcript of the call. “She feels great about herself.”
Some students may have been directly slipped test answers, but more of them just were given to understand that they'd succeeded in the test on their own, whether a confederate was changing their answers or simply retaking the test to replace their original scores; some participated in photo sessions where they were posed as star athletes, but they didn't necessarily know what the purpose of it was, and others were just entirely in the dark while their parents photoshopped their faces onto stock pictures of high school sports, but neither they nor the college administrations were aware that they were supposed to be star athletes, and nobody questioned why they didn't sign up for the soccer team or crew.
The parents were anxious not just to preserve the kids' self-esteem, but also their ethical innocence; they committed fraud on the kids' behalf, but didn't allow the kids to commit it for themselves. Somebody was saying on the radio that after the case broke yesterday some of them were getting attacked on social media and that was how they found out what their parents had done. I really do feel for them—they didn't deserve this.
The other thing that strikes me as important that nobody's talking about is that they almost certainly also hadn't "deserved" to be rejected by their fancy schools in the first place. I mean, their subsequent college experience didn't humiliate them or show their peers with real SAT scores and sports distinctions that they were unqualified, as far as we know, and I feel sure it would have been part of the reporting, if Mr. McGlashan's son or Mr. Caplan's daughter had been unable to cope with the work. Like Dumbo the little elephant with his magic feather, they sailed serenely through college life in the confidence that they were equipped to do it.
Which goes to show what a fraud the whole thing is. In reality, the kids who get into Stanford or USC aren't literally better than the kids who don't. And if these coddled kids who couldn't get in in spite of economic advantage and endless tutoring are in fact just as good, it's likely that the economically disadvantaged who don't have a chance are in fact just as good too—as Mr. Pierce says (quoted by Steve M).
We've known for a long time, in fact, that SAT or ACT scores aren't a particularly good predictor of college success, in comparison to high school grades anyway. College admissions testing is an industry that has no good reason to exist except that people are willing to pay for it. It makes the work of the college admissions department a good deal more efficient, I guess, but only at the price of introducing more arbitrariness into a system that is dangerously arbitrary from the start, and more opportunity for the privileged to reinforce their privilege with money (spending on tutoring and exam retakes and as we now see on criminal fraud, by the hundreds of thousands of dollars).
The parents were anxious not just to preserve the kids' self-esteem, but also their ethical innocence; they committed fraud on the kids' behalf, but didn't allow the kids to commit it for themselves. Somebody was saying on the radio that after the case broke yesterday some of them were getting attacked on social media and that was how they found out what their parents had done. I really do feel for them—they didn't deserve this.
The other thing that strikes me as important that nobody's talking about is that they almost certainly also hadn't "deserved" to be rejected by their fancy schools in the first place. I mean, their subsequent college experience didn't humiliate them or show their peers with real SAT scores and sports distinctions that they were unqualified, as far as we know, and I feel sure it would have been part of the reporting, if Mr. McGlashan's son or Mr. Caplan's daughter had been unable to cope with the work. Like Dumbo the little elephant with his magic feather, they sailed serenely through college life in the confidence that they were equipped to do it.
Which goes to show what a fraud the whole thing is. In reality, the kids who get into Stanford or USC aren't literally better than the kids who don't. And if these coddled kids who couldn't get in in spite of economic advantage and endless tutoring are in fact just as good, it's likely that the economically disadvantaged who don't have a chance are in fact just as good too—as Mr. Pierce says (quoted by Steve M).
The only small diamond amid the sewage is that it makes all those people who went to court arguing that their Caucasianism had been discriminated against through affirmative action look completely ridiculous.
We've known for a long time, in fact, that SAT or ACT scores aren't a particularly good predictor of college success, in comparison to high school grades anyway. College admissions testing is an industry that has no good reason to exist except that people are willing to pay for it. It makes the work of the college admissions department a good deal more efficient, I guess, but only at the price of introducing more arbitrariness into a system that is dangerously arbitrary from the start, and more opportunity for the privileged to reinforce their privilege with money (spending on tutoring and exam retakes and as we now see on criminal fraud, by the hundreds of thousands of dollars).
Moreover it increasingly strikes me that if the famous schools you commit crimes to get into really are objectively much better than Podunk State or St. Ethelberta's, or even if they're merely so much better at being famous that their magic names on your diploma give you a permanent head start, it is really so deeply unfair as to be intolerable. What's important about this new scandal isn't so much the light it throws on the crazed behavior of millionaires, unfair as that may be, as the craziness of the system in general.
I don't know what to do about it, but I'd like to start by just throwing out the idea of "meritocracy" for tertiary education (as opposed to the civil service, which is what it was designed for in the Han dynasty or wherever you want to trace it to) in favor of an idea like that in Marx's formula—"from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." That is, the question of what you "deserve" should be applied to the demands society makes on you, your job, as socially useful as your talents permit, and the question of what you "get" to what society offers by way of meeting human needs, like your education, which could be devoted to learning and fleshing out what your needs really are. That's what everybody deserves, and very few under the current system get.
Please read this thread, too, about the same Mr. McGlashan:
(This post benefited from a conversation with old Thornton, nowadays tweeting as @HenryPorters.)The juiciest, most revealing fact in the college-bribery story isn't the Hollywood celebrities. It's a guy named Bill, whose alleged involvement tells us everything we need to know about our age. https://t.co/VzXhDRvrJz— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) March 12, 2019
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