Ivy League wheels need grease to keep turning
When I was at university in the US, it was general knowledge that some number of one’s fellow students had received a boost in the admissions process from a donation by their family. You never quite knew which ones and how many or how much, but the principle that the admissions office looked kindly on big cheques was well established.
This is what makes the latest scandal to hit US universities so perverse. This week, a collection of consultants, college employees and 33 parents either pleaded guilty or were indicted for allegedly trying to grease their little darlings’ way into university using their chequebooks. What seems to have landed
the parents in trouble is not that they tried to use money to subvert a meritocracy, but that they avoided the official channels and went about it like cheapskates.
It is, after all, expensive. An ongoing court case against Harvard University over its admissions procedures recently revealed the cost a parent might need to consider. Allegedly, it’s around $1million (£763,000), an art collection, a building, plus the prospect of future donations coming Harvard’s way to provide the sort of ultra-lux grease that might get the wheels turning at an Ivy League. Lesser institutions targeted by parents in the current scandal must be a bit cheaper, but that’s off an intimidating benchmark.
That is presumably why the parents now in trouble decided on a different approach. The US attorney’s office alleges that these parents paid amounts ranging from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to have middlemen or university officials fabricate higher exam results and athletic achievements to get their kids in. One couple are even accused of having their daughters pose for photos on rowing machines to make it all look more realistic.
The “victims” of these alleged frauds, of course, are the universities. Instead of bagging millions in legacy “donations”, the money went elsewhere.
The system might seem perverse, but there is some sense in it. The healthy finances of the US’S top universities allow them to admit the vast majority of their students, based on merit, at discounted rates. This is paid for using endowments, built up over the years in part through precisely the sorts of “fundraising” schemes practised by their admissions offices.
Even though there is a crucial legal distinction, it seems hard on the parents now being prosecuted to judge them as much more morally corrupt than the ones buying places lawfully. The prosecuted parents’ worst crime was to try to play in a league for which they weren’t rich enough.