Angry about the cheating? Wait till you read the court documents

The college admissions cheating scandal is a moral issue we should all worry about.

If you think you’re angry now, wait till you read the court documents. The story offered a perfect storm of outrage: the wealthy, well-known and well-connected gaming the system, lying, fixing tests and paying bribes to get their kids into prestigious colleges. Two of those arrested were famous actors: Felicity Huffman of “Desperate Housewives” fame and Lori Loughlin, who played Aunt Becky in that masterwork of saccharine banality, “Full House.”

But there’s something about the tawdry details found in the affidavit by FBI agent Laura Smith that’s truly infuriating. In its 204 pages, you get William “Rick” Singer, the scam’s mastermind, coaching his clients on lies they can tell to get a different ACT or SAT test site or some accommodation the testing services reserve for kids with learning disabilities. You get him soothing parents whose kids entered school as purported athletic standouts and now worry their kids will have to actually play the sport. You get him scheming with parents who want their kids to think they did well on tests, when in fact one of Singer’s confederates secretly substituted correct answers for the students’ wrong ones.

And you get attorney Gordon Caplan captured on an FBI wiretap fretting about what might happen if his daughter gets caught. “To be honest,” he says, “I’m not worried about the moral issue here.”

Ahem.

I am an alumnus of the University of Southern California, one of the schools — Harvard, Yale and Georgetown are among the others — Singer helped people like Caplan cheat their children into. Me, I got in because my mom and my counselor, Mr. Isaacs, moved heaven and earth and everything in between to get my application approved and my tuition paid.

So forgive me if I am unable to dismiss “the moral issue here” as airily as Caplan does. I find these people and their scheme disgusting. But there’s a lesson here beyond disgust.

We live in a nation where equality is the official creed, but hardly the lived reality. People are jailed here because they cannot afford justice, ignorant here because they cannot afford learning, hungry here because they cannot afford food, dead here because they cannot afford health.

Worst of all, we accept that as somehow preordained, beyond our capacity to fix. Meantime, Forbes reported last year that the average CEO is paid 361 times more than his workers. In the 1950s, he earned “only” about 20 times more. How well do you live on your salary? How well could you live on your salary, times 20? Or times 361?

Yet when people demand enough pay to simply sustain themselves — $15 an hour — it’s regarded as radical and an existential threat. As perhaps it must be in a nation where poverty is structural, where the routes out are increasingly constricted and workers are kept distracted from their own plight by fights over race, religion and sexuality.

This should be a wake-up call. While poor people fight internecine wars, while they choose between lights and food, while their services are cut and their industries disappear, rich people — some, at least — are writing large checks to lie their children into college. Every advantage in the world, and they take more.

If that’s not a moral issue we all should worry about, I don’t know what is.