Settling scores

TWO CHEERS, OR MAYBE ONE, FOR FRAUD-RIDDLED U.S. HIGHER EDUCATION

When news broke this week about the FBI’s Operation Varsity Blues roundup of accused fraudsters, Canada was given an opportunity to enjoy its eternal pastime of having a chuckle at the expense of the United States. The chuckle is well justified. What could be more American than the spectacle of hundreds of rich parents clumsily faking athletic and cognitive credentials in order to sneak their dunderhead children into elite universities? Most of the world can well afford to laugh at the besetting pathologies of American higher education.

But Canada did catch a small splash of muck. Vancouver businessman and former football player David Sidoo was caught in the Varsity Blues net for allegedly having paid a bright Florida youngster at least $200,000 to travel with fake identity documents and write aptitude tests on behalf of two of his sons. The hired ringer is said to have written the SAT for each of Sidoo’s boys, restraining his brainpower for the older one (who had already taken the SAT and obtained mediocre scores).

Mark Riddell is also accused of having substituted for Dylan Sidoo in the nonexistent “Canadian high school graduation exam” in 2012; the idea seems to be that he infiltrated a B.C. provincial exam for Grade 12 students. Dylan Sidoo was a student at the St. George’s independent school in Vancouver, whose representatives told the Province’s Nick Eagland that the school didn’t conduct provincials on the date mentioned in the indictment. But B.C. allowed students to take makeup exams more or less anywhere, and at the time did not insist on ID.

This all reflects on Canada in a complicated way. We congratulate ourselves as Canadians on not paying much attention to where grown men and women attended university. It matters within some professions — law or medicine or journalism — but only temporarily, upon entry, even in those fields. We just don’t have socially dominant or “elite” institutions of higher education, and pride ourselves on not wanting them.

We also don’t make much use of standardized testing in university admissions. We are departing somewhat from even the vestigial talent-testing elements of education that we do have: B.C. is simplifying those provincial tests and decoupling them from Grade 12 marks, and Alber ta has down - weighted its high school “diploma exams.”

But this may obviously leave people like David Sidoo looking elsewhere, i. e., south, for elite credentials and social networking benefits. If our native plutocracy abandons our institutions in favour of Berkeley or Georgetown, there is an obvious danger that those educations will become preferred status signifiers here. It is already the case that any Canadian who went to Harvard or Stanford will let you know of it pretty quickly.

There’s also an obvious problem with the aversion to standardized aptitude filters like the SAT. If universities cannot sort students by performance on a standardized test of cognition or knowledge, what are they left with? They might emphasize extracurricular creden- tials, which is what led to the hilarious fakery and wirepulling described in the Varsity Blues indictment. They might look at grades, which would reward rich parents who can intimidate or bribe teachers.

That may not be easy in a public school, since these places are known to be run exclusively by saints, but rich parents have alternatives. “Independent schools,” maybe, such as St. George’s. And, of course, the identity of an applicant’s school may itself come into the admissions equation. We don’t have elite universities in Canada, but I am told some provinces have posh, exclusive, famous private secondary schools.

The thing to be said for America is that at least there were real tests for those parents to arrange to have their kids evade. It was pretty expensive for the fraudsters to compromise ACT and SAT proctors, and the companies that administer those tests have an enormous, genuine incentive to protect their reputations. The SAT and ACT gateways are not “meritocratic,” even though this scandal has inspired loads of goofy discussion of that word. But you can ace the SAT without being white, or rich, or socially connected, or popular with teachers. It predicts academic success too well to be a lottery, but if it were merely a lottery it would still have the feature of being socially egalitarian.

American universities are, it seems, aggressively recruiting youth to a social elite situ- ated in far-flung places like USC and Yale and Austin and Wake Forest. In this process, the wealthy enjoy a myriad of idiotic, unfair “side doors.” But a side door does imply the existence of a front door. Would it be better to have a social elite that ... doesn’t recruit? An elite that resided only in government, business and high society rather than education? An elite that consisted of wealthy folk in one region only, rather than at outposts where the smart kids have a crack at mixing with the rich dimwits? Perhaps such questions are of no interest or pertinence to Canada. We giggle playfully at the Americans, and avoid mirrors ...

WE DON’T HAVE ELITE UNIVERSITIES IN CANADA. — COLBY COSH

GERRY KAHRMANN / POSTMEDIA NEWS FILES Dylan, left, and Jordan Sidoo, whose father, former football player David Sidoo, was among those caught up in the U.S. Operation Varsity Blues over an alleged payment to a person to write aptitude tests for his sons.