On March 12, thirty-three parents were indicted for participating in a bribery and fraud scheme to win admission for their children to selective colleges for which they were not qualified. Parents paid a con man to bribe college athletic coaches who then certified that the child was a recruit for a sports team, even though the child had never even played that sport. The coaches’ endorsements then gained them admission to the college. The other scheme was to get the child certified as disabled and therefore allowed extra time to take the SAT or ACT college admission test. Disabled children are allowed to take the test in a room alone, to reduce noise and distractions that affect them more than other students. The con man then bribed test officials to allow the test to be supervised by an associate of the con man who then either took the test for the students or erased wrong answers and replaced them with correct ones.
Indictments of the parents, the con man and his associates, and the coaches who took bribes, revealed more than a widening circle of crooks. The scheme was possible only because of the corrupt but legal ways in which college admissions operate in the US. Certainly many, probably a majority of students are admitted because of their high test scores and accomplishments in advanced high school courses. However, private colleges and some public ones as well offer various back and side doors to admissions. Children of alumni are much more likely to be admitted, all else being equal, than children with no familial connection to a college. Parents who make large donations to a college can ensure their child’s admission. For example Charles Kushner donated $2.5 million to Harvard a few months before his son Jared was admitted. Teachers at Jared’s high school were astounded that he had been admitted when a number of more accomplished student were rejected. Kushner’s maneuver was not unique; many wealthy parents do the same and as long as there is no direct promise or quid pro quo then the implicit deal cannot be charged as bribery.
Athletes gain an enormous advantage in the admissions process, far more than is accorded to minority students. However, at elite colleges most of the admitted athletes do not participate in popular sports such as basketball or football. Rather, they engage in expensive sports such as sailing, crew, squash or badminton. Thus, athletic favoritism benefits wealthy whites far more than the less common but far more visible African American football or basketball players.
America’s complex and unfair college admissions system has its origins in early twentieth century anti-Semitism. As Jerome Karabel shows in his 2005 book, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, those three colleges based admission on a test of knowledge that was heavily focused on the classics, including the ability to read and write Latin and Greek. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries those subjects were taught only at private day and boarding high schools attended by wealthy white Anglo Saxon Protestants (the WASPs). However, a number of competitive public schools began to teach those subjects and poorer students, disproportionately Jewish, began to pass those tests and gain admission to Harvard, Yale and Princeton.
The administrators, faculty and alumni of Harvard and the other Ivy League colleges were disgusted at the thought of Jews attending their schools in large numbers. Columbia imposed a Jewish quota, but the other schools developed a more devious and clever way to exclude Jews. They interviewed students and evaluated applicants’ “character” and “leadership” qualities. Such subjective factors, along with special consideration for athletes, children of alumni, and students from small rural states, all combined to restore WASP dominance at those colleges and reduced Jewish and Catholic students to small minorities.
Beginning in the 1960s the Ivy League rejected overt anti-Semitism, although similar prejudices against Asian-American applicants remain to this day. However, the system Harvard developed in the 1920s to exclude Jews became the model for admissions at all selective American colleges. Lesser colleges were not motivated by anti-Semitism but instead merely sought to emulate Harvard, the most prestigious university in the US. Thus, once mediocre backwater universities like USC and Wake Forest, which are at the center of this scandal, are able to present themselves as selective by aping the Harvard admission system. As a result, athletes, student “leaders” and children of big contributors and alumni crowd out academically gifted and hardworking students. This sort of regular corruption, the American equivalent of the Old Corruption of eighteenth century England, remains hidden for the most part, known by insiders and cognoscenti of the admissions process but a mystery to most Americans.
Graduates of elite colleges enjoy a disproportionate presence at the apex of US politics and capitalism. All nine Supreme Court Justices attended Harvard or Yale, while software and Internet titans Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos attended Harvard and Princeton. This gives the impression that all graduates of those schools are geniuses, which in turn creates the illusion that admission to those schools is on merit. This scandal poses a potential challenge to the meritocratic myth. It remains to be seen if the accused are convicted and if their convictions are taken as just the crimes of a few unethical second tier actors and businessmen or if this instead is more accurately understood as illegal extremes in what is an overall corrupt system.
One sector after another has become increasingly corrupt in the US over the past forty years. Donald Trump’s 2016 pledge to “drain the swamp” of course was fraudulent as his administration is turning out to be the most corrupt in American history. Scandals in Washington, in the business world, and now in universities could end up making most Americans cynical and despairing of the possibility of reform. However, all these scandals have a similar cause: the ability of the very wealthy to distort organizations in all sectors to their benefit. Those, like Bernie Sanders, who denounce the power of the wealthy, have a coherent analysis of the true sources of corruption. Whether they will be believed, and their plans to undo the influence of money enacted, is high uncertain. If they fail, we can guarantee there will be more scandals and that the most admired institutions in the U.S. will have their claims to merit and virtue undermined.
