The Other
College Admissions Outrage
Yes,
Hollywood types and high powered lawyers got caught trying to buy their kids
into elite universities. They'll get theirs--maybe. Meanwhile, other students
get accepted by too many schools, denying urgently needed scholarship money to
others.
Executive director, Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation
and Tech Entrepreneurship, Illinois Institute of Technology
I realize that the film and TV
"stars" and other parental crooks who participated in and funded the
admission application scams, the test-taking manipulations, and the other
outright frauds in order to get their unqualified, but hugely entitled, kids into
highly-selective colleges such as USC and Yale were
immoral assholes and social cripples. By that I mean, they couldn't have cared
less about the well-qualified and far more deserving kids whose places at these
schools were taken by their precious and pampered children.
Hopefully these parents will all get the
comeuppance that they so richly deserve and be forever
estranged from their offspring who were allegedly, utterly (insert some
considerable skepticism here) unaware of their dear folks' heroic and
"behind-the-scenes" efforts to secure those fraudulent acceptances
and awesome test scores on their behalf. Maybe some of the kids really didn't
know. Hard to imagine, but stranger things have occurred.
While I'm sure some of the crooked parents may
technically escape punishment by claiming they were mere "donors"
like so many others, what is inescapable is the fact that they did the deeds
and tried to pull these cheats off. They may think their biggest mistake was
getting caught, but we know better. A lie may fool other people, but it tells
the truth about you.
I also understand that the legacy college
admission systems still in place at many other schools are just as fraught as
they are at USC and Yale. You know, the ones that have the special side doors
for jocks. Our elite colleges are rife with compromise and
challenges because it's basically a "money talks" game as well, but
that's an issue for another day and certainly doesn't excuse this bad behavior
in any case. Sadly though, it is just another really bad message for the kids:
that who you know is far more important than what you know.
And I think - speaking of the little darlings
- that it's fitting, regardless of their particular state of knowledge, for the
kids to be tarred (at least for a while) as well as their parents by the stench
and stigma of this latest demonstration that money doesn't care who makes it or
how it gets spent. The parents are clearly beyond salvation, but maybe the kids
and others tempted by similar scummy shortcuts will learn some modest lessons
about actually earning and deserving what you get instead of having it handed
to you. Or maybe not.
Honestly, it's all so very Gatsby-esque:
"They
were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and
then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it
was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had
made." (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby)
So, it's pretty easy to feel superior to these
people and to profess concern for the students they displaced and deprived of
the opportunity to attend some of these fine (but sloppy and negligent)
schools. However, in the end, the actual numbers of students involved in the
whole deal are pretty modest. Maybe the whole stinking scam took away a couple
of dozen seats in the incoming classes at a few high-visibility schools.
I see a much bigger, and neglected, concern
that continues to get worse each year. We're all complicit in a much
more pervasive and damaging problem, which annually impacts thousands of
deserving students across the country. And instead of condemning it or even
discussing it, we celebrate and encourage the bad behavior and ignore the
obvious impact.
I'm talking about the high school guidance
counselors and coaches who encourage their best and most needy students to
apply to zillions of schools and to seek the maximum amounts of scholarship
dollars possible from every one of them. For no good reason and for the worst
possible reasons. This fundamentally selfish process is then aided and abetted
by seasonal, ceaseless and stupid media coverage about individual students who
heedlessly run up the score and accumulate multiple levels of scholarship
offers from many colleges so that they and their high schools can brag about
the sheer dollar volumes of overtures that they have secured.
Frankly, it's just greed of another kind and
no one seems to care about the hundreds of other students who are not offered
any financial assistance because Bob or Betty has rolled up a few million
dollars (literally, millions of dollars) from many colleges and universities
they haven't the slightest intention of attending. This is just about bagging
the Benjamins.
Now you might think that it's not a zero sum
game or that once Bob and Betty pick their schools, all those sucked-up dollars
that they've been hanging on to will magically find their way back to the
students who were shut out initially. But that's not the way the world of
scholarships works. Because everything happens in real time and simultaneously.
It's true that almost every school puts out more scholarships than they expect
to be accepted by matriculating students (just like the airlines oversell
seats) and that there's a lot of discounting, predictive analysis and yield
management in the process. But, say what you will, grabbing for as much of the
gold as you can is gonna leave a lot of less fortunate students in the lurch.
Choices have to be made, sacrifices and
compromises abound, a lot of smart kids end up with their second or third
choices because of financial considerations - all so that the papers can run a
few stories about the number of schools that made so many offers for big dollars to a couple of hometown heroes. This
is nothing to brag about or write home to report. The recognition for a few
smart kids is nice, but the grasping this behavior encourages and the greed and
selfishness that surrounds it is simply sleazy.
I think this is just as important a lesson for
today as what we're learning from the admissions scams. Our kids need to know
when enough is enough, that just because you can doesn't always mean you
should, and that it's okay in almost every case to leave something on the table
for others.
PUBLISHED ON: JUL 2, 2019
