Big fixes are needed, experts say

Scandal grew out of donation, legacy history

NEW HAVEN — Operation Varsity Blues did more than expose the illegal means that rich parents, some of them famous, used to get their children admitted to Yale University, the University of Southern California and other elite colleges.

According to those who closely watch the American higher-education complex, the scandal that broke Tuesday was really the tried-and-true system of greasing applicants’ entry into top universities taken to a logical, if illegal, extreme.

They say the college admissions system itself, especially at highly selective schools such as Yale, Stanford and the University of

Southern California, reinforces and celebrates a racially and economically stratified society and major changes are needed to create a student body that is more egalitarian and diverse.

“A lot of people are feeling very uncertain about whether the process is fair,” said Nadirah Farah Foley, a doctoral student at Harvard University studying how “culture and inequality [are] grounded within the sociology of education.” She previously worked as an admissions officer at the University of Pennsylvania for a year.

“I think it’s unsettling but that’s a productive question to be asking because I think the whole system is broken,” she said.

It was a Boston-area executive being investigated for securities fraud in April 2018 who turned the FBI’s attention to Yale women’s soccer coach Rudolph “Rudy” Meredith, who then helped them put Operation Varsity Blues into action.

In all, 33 parents, 10 coaches, CEO William Rick Singer and two employees of the Edge College and Career Network, known as the Key, plus three involved in cheating on standardized tests and the president of a Houston tennis academy were charged in the scheme. No students have been charged and Yale and other universities have said they were victims in the scheme.

It didn’t matter that one Southern California applicant to Yale “did not play competitive soccer,” according to the charges brought by U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling in Boston. Her parents paid Singer $1.2 million, including a $900,000 charitable, tax-deductible donation to his nonprofit Key Worldwide Foundation.

In return for receiving $400,000 of that donation from Singer, Meredith, a resident of Madison, was willing to recruit her to Yale’s varsity team. She was admitted to Yale about Jan. 1, 2018, according to the court documents. Meredith, who resigned from Yale in November, will plead guilty to wire fraud, authorities have said. He has not been reachable for comment.

On Friday, Yale President Peter Salovey said he would launch an investigation into Yale’s athletics recruitment and admission practices, as well as develop a code of conduct and increase training about procedures.

The problem, say critics of the nation’s college-admission system, is that the student may have had a good chance of getting into Yale, whether or not her application met its proudly stated high standards, if her parents had made a $1.2 million legal charitable donation to the university.

To Lloyd Thacker, executive director of The Education Conservancy in Portland, Oregon, the issue is one of public trust. “Colleges first have to recognize that [and] try to align their admission practice with this public interest mission,” he said. But instead, because of the byzantine, opaque way universities decide who they will admit, they fail in that mission, Thacker said.

Colleges and universities are “self-proclaimed providers and trainers of knowledge and ethical behavior,” he said. “If we can’t trust them to do the right thing, then who can we trust?” In turn, students are “learning to lie and cheat and be distrustful of institutions,” Thacker said. “The least trustful of officials in these colleges are the college admissions officers themselves.”

Philanthropy is just one of the obvious ways in which wealthy, overwhelmingly white parents help their children gain an advantage in getting into one of the nation’s elite universities — just 4.26 percent of this year’s record 36,829 applicants to Yale will be accepted. Another is the legacy preference, given to children of alumni, who either are major donors or who are assumed will become grateful givers once their child is a student.

Athletic scholarships, which Yale and other Ivy League schools do not grant, and racial preferences are other well-known ways that universities distinguish one applicant from another, although the racial checkoff on college applications is used mostly now to increase diversity of the student body.

Money talks

But while big donations, legacies and other preferences are legal, “from the perspective of families and students there isn’t much of a difference” between those methods and the payoffs given to improve an applicant’s test score or to be added to a coach’s recruiting roster, according to Joel Butterly, CEO of InGenius Prep, an international college-preparation service based in New Haven.

“I think that you’re basically stealing from the school,” he said. “If you cheat your way in, you deprive the school of that ability” to admit deserving students.

Butterly said he can see a positive aspect to philanthropy, even if the motive isn’t altruistic. “It enriches the school and allows the school to spend money on students who can’t afford it. … It’s not super-common but it does happen every year.”

On the other hand, Butterly said, “I think the legacy policy doesn’t make sense and is too unjust. … It is unjust for legacies to get such a significant leg up in the admissions policies. It has nothing to do with merit.”

Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a 100-year-old think tank, said universities should not consider donations or legacies in deciding whom to admit, largely because they perpetuate the image of elitism in American society. “The legacy preferences and the donor preferences disproportionately screen out students of color and low-income students, so that’s another reason to want to curtail [them],” he said.

Kahlenberg testified in the recent lawsuit brought against Harvard alleging that the school discriminates against Asian-American applicants.

“Legacy preferences are virtually unknown in the rest of the world,” he said. Oxford, Cambridge — they don’t give legacy preferences and they seem to survive.” In fact, the two English universities don’t allow a student to apply to both in the same year.

“The whole idea of an aristocratic privilege is deeply un-American and yet at the same time legacy preferences are uniquely American,” Kahlenberg said. “They grew up as a way to exclude Jewish students and immigrant students, so the legacy preferences have a dark history.”

According to the “2018 Survey of College and University Admissions Directors” published by Inside Higher Ed, 42 percent of private colleges and 6 percent of public colleges take legacies into account when considering applicants.

According to an article on NPR.org, Texas A&M and the universities of California and Georgia ended legacy preferences at the same time they stopped considering race as a factor in admissions.

In U.S. News’ 2019 rankings, Yale is tied for third with three other schools, with Harvard and Princeton universities ranked No. 1 and 2, making Yale one of the top six universities, according to the magazine.