New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Major changes sought in college admissions
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-andtrue 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 collegepreparation 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.
Edward Blum, president of Students for Fair Admission, the anti-affirmative action group that sued Harvard, said racial preferences are closely tied to those that wealthy families take advantage of.
“There are things that can be done that remove those kinds of preferences for well-to-do persons that eliminate the need for race-based affirmative action,” Blum said.
“Schools should not admit a lesser-qualified student because that student’s parents or grandparents were benefactors of that school,” he said. “That is not illegal, and it doesn’t violate any of our nation’s civil rights statutes, but it is unseemly and most people will agree with that.”
During the trial in October 2018, Ruth Simmons, former president of Brown University and now president of Prairie View A&M University in Texas, defended preferences for children of Ivy League alumni. “It is entirely appropriate for them to believe that it would be wonderful if their children could also enjoy the same benefits that they enjoyed as students,” Simmons testified, according to the Harvard Crimson. “We’ve been made stronger by benefit of that [alumni] involvement, ... one way for us to signal how important that is to us is that we consider their children in the context of our admissions process.”
Simmons did admit she thought fewer people would donate to Harvard if legacies were discontinued. But while she said it would be “highly unethical to admit students who you don’t believe will thrive,” emails were introduced during the trial that appeared to show that underqualified legacy applicants were admitted, the Crimson reported.
Yale is not the bastion of wealthy white males (and females since 1969) that it once was. According to its 2018-19 Common Data Set, less than half — 42 percent — of undergraduates were white and non-Hispanic, and 52.7 percent receive financial aid. Yale says it meets the “full demonstrated need” of every undergraduate, including international students.
But Yale, like all internationally renowned universities, is a meritocracy, with 95 percent of its first-year students coming from the top 10 percent of their high school graduating class (and 99 percent in the top quarter).
The Common Data Set, filled out by most colleges and universities, is used by the College Board, which administers the SAT, as well as Peterson’s Guides and U.S. News & World Report, both of which rank universities. That in itself is a problem for Thacker, who criticized how heavily weighted the SAT is by admissions officers and sees the rankings of U.S. News & World Report as contributing to an artificial perception of quality.
“You need to not publish your admit/deny rates, you need to not cooperate with U.S. News & World Report,” he said. In 2007, 61 presidents of mostly small colleges signed a letter by the Education Conservancy committing themselves not to cooperate with the magazine. Its rankings “imply a false precision and authority that is not warranted by the data they use” and “obscure important differences in educational mission in aligning institutions on a single scale,” among other reasons, the letter read. Yale, which did not sign the letter, did hold a conference on alternative ways to rank colleges that year.
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.
Thacker advocates that colleges “get rid of the SAT because the SAT patently discriminates against underserved kids.” He said admissions officers, if they use the test, should do so “according to its proven educational value.” He said schools should do a “validity study” to determine the test’s worth at their institution.
According to “Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities” by William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos and Michael S. McPherson, grade point average is a far better predictor of graduation rates than the SAT or its competitor, the ACT.
A lottery to choose students
In a January 2018 article for the Pacific Standard, Nadirah Farah Foley said the SAT “stands out as perhaps the most obvious metric that has outlived its usefulness” because it is skewed toward those from wealthier backgrounds. It also serves as a crutch for admissions officers to rank students without looking at more relevant factors. She also called for more diversity among those admissions officers.
But Foley would go further. Rather than colleges seeking out the smartest, most talented students, she would advocate looking at colleges’ mission as developing the untapped talents and skills of their students. “Our educational system is designed to sort and stratify people” through grades and test scores, she said. “Our higher-education system is incredibly stratified. … Built into the ideology of meritocracy is an acceptance of inequality.”
The reason parents want their children to go to Yale, Harvard and UCLA is not just the education their students will receive. It’s also the status and connections that go with being a graduate. “The very fact that we still have elite institutions that confer such outside benefits … I think that itself is a problem,” Foley said.
She said she would consider instituting a lottery system to select applicants. “It would say we believe there is talent everywhere, and we believe our goal as a university is to build people up, to educate them and to help them to find ways to contribute to our society,” she said. She suggests “thinking about how could we restructure our society so that getting into Harvard didn’t matter so much.”
Foley finds irony in Americans’ fixation on elite universities. “In countries that are more unequal, the faith in meritocracy is deeper,” she said. With such large gaps between rich and poor in this country, “people are investing their faith increasingly in a way to move up the ladder,” she said. “I think we should be asking, can we dismantle the ladder?”
The admissions scandal involved a small number of schools and students and yet it generated an immense amount of outrage. “It touches on this core value of meritocracy, that it is deeply valued in the American imagination,” she said. “That meritocracy was sidestepped here. … It’s enraging and it’s terrifying to think that this system is so unfair.”
Students who filed a classaction lawsuit Wednesday in San Francisco are not among those who failed to get into an elite university. The two named plaintiffs, Erica Olsen and Kalea Woods, both go to Stanford. But they feel they have been injured because Stanford was one of the schools named in the scandal.
“At the time [Olsen] applied, she was never informed that the process of admission was an unfair, rigged process, in which rich parents could buy their way into the university through bribery,” the suit states. “Had she known that the system at Yale University was warped and rigged by fraud, she would not have spent the money to apply to the school. She also did not receive what she paid for — a fair admissions consideration process.
“Olsen has also been damaged because she is a student at Stanford University, another one of the universities plagued by the fraud scandal. Her degree is now not worth as much as it was before, because prospective employers may now question whether she was admitted to the university on her own merits, versus having parents who were willing to bribe school officials.”
Tax elite universities, donations
Ralph Baker said he predicted a scandal like Varsity Blues in his 2012 book “Shock Exchange: How Inner-City Kids from Brooklyn Predicted the Great Recession and the Pain Ahead.” The book was about a traveling amateur basketball team, the New York Shock Exchange, and Baker’s work to teach them financial literacy.
He said he saw how “the colleges with the biggest endowments, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, they are selling these kids bling, filet mignon three times a day. … One of the colleges had a manservant by a heated pool. That’s what they were selling.” Smaller schools were forced to spend on such amenities as well, he said, driving up tuition.
Baker’s solution is to treat the prestigious schools as for-profit businesses. “If you tax these wealthy colleges, the behavior will stop. They’re acting in a for-profit manner,” he said.
Baker also said he advocated taxing donations to colleges “when their kids are at the school,” a concept proposed by U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, R-Oregon, on Wednesday. Wyden’s bill would end deductions to college before or while a donor’s child is enrolled at the school. “Middle-class families don’t have access to this back door for their children,” Wyden said, according to The Hill. “If the wealthy want to grease the skids, they shouldn’t be able to do so at the expense of American taxpayers.”