What Explains the Outrage in the University Admissions Scandal

Stephen Kershnar

The University Admissions Scandal

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

April 1, 2019

The recent admissions scandal involved at least 50 people paying admissions guru Rick Singer more than $25 million dollars to get their children into elite colleges. Singer pled guilty to numerous felonies.    

Singer used two methods. First, he helped parents cheat on the SAT and ACT tests by paying people to take the test for their kids or paying a proctor to change their answers. Second, he bribed athletic coaches and staff to label kids as accomplished athletes when they were not.

Athletic staff can greenlight athletes’ applications even when academically weaker than other applicants. Singer allegedly bribed Georgetown’s tennis coach ($950,000), Stanford’s sailing coach ($270,000), USC’s women’s soccer coaches and athletic director ($1.3 million), UCLA’s men’s soccer coaches, University of Texas men’s tennis coach ($100,000), Wake Forest’s volleyball coach, and Yale’s women’s soccer coach ($400,000).

Among the celebrities ensnared in the scandal were C-list celebrities such as Full House’s Lori Loughlin and Desperate Housewives’ Felicity Huffman along with a number of CEOs, investors, and elite professionals. The scandal’s tentacles reached into A-list schools such as Berkeley, Georgetown, Harvard, Northwestern, Stanford, UCLA, and Yale.

It’s hard to see why people are so outraged by the shenanigans. The outrage might be explained by theft of the university’s money, sympathy for students who were excluded or by the fact that, once again, the elites gamed the system or turned out to hypocrites.

The parents stealing from the universities’ overflowing coffers can’t explain the outrage. Far more money is wasted on silly things like diversity fiefdoms.

The university admissions system has long focused on things other than academic ability (or, perhaps, aptitude). Many students who have much less academic ability than other applicants are let in via affirmative action, athletics, legacy (a parent went to the school), or donation. At the big three military academies, students get admitted in part via dubious congressional nominations or after attending the academies’ even more dubious preparatory high schools. At West Point, students even get an admissions break if their parents won various medals. Despite all of this being well-known, most people didn’t get their panties in a twist over it. This was true even when the Ivies engaged in naked race discrimination against Asian-Americans.   

           

Writing in The New Republic, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker points out that no more than 10% of Harvard’s entering class is chosen on purely academic grounds. There is no evidence that I can find that shows that non-academic admissions categories, other than grit, are better than academic categories at predicting success at the university or later in life. Since IQ scores correlate noticeably with academic and career success, it would be surprising if there were such evidence.

Nor does outrage at the elites gaming the system explain the outrage. It is well-known that these schools favor legacy and children of bigtime donors. They also favor students who are elite in rich-kid sports such as crew, polo, sailing, and squash. Why does anyone care whether Stanford gets the best high school sailors or rather pretend sailors? On a side note, I don’t see why schools that focus on knowledge-based excellence spend on these sports any more than they would spend on bowling, jiu-jitsu, and rodeo teams.

Americans couldn’t have been surprised that some, and perhaps many, of the elites are hypocrites about their children’s education. The recently exposed Russia hoax involved numerous felonies, corruption, and coordinated misinformation campaigns by leading figures in the CIA, DOJ, FBI, NSA, and media. Why would anyone be surprised that this class included people who would bribe, cheat, and lie to get what’s best for their children? This is the same class of people who are hell bent for leather to flood the country with poor and uneducated illegal aliens while making sure that their precious children do not go to school with, live near, or socialize with aliens’ children. In any case, hypocrisy is a minor sin and not confined to the elites.

What’s likely going on here is that people are fed up with this country’s elites and this is just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Consider, for example, the corruption that characterized the housing bubble, Russia Hoax, Uranium One, weapons of mass destruction, etc. The powerful seem immune to the rules that apply to the rest of us.    

The criteria that universities should use to admit students should depend on their purpose. State universities should promote their citizens’ aggregate interest and this is best achieved by focusing on, and only on, academic merit. This is because such factors predict success in college and afterward better than the smorgasbord of other factors, whether considered individually or together. State legislators should require flagship schools such as Berkeley, UCLA, and the University of Texas to admit students solely on the basis of academic ability. This is likely best achieved by ranking students on the basis of a score that is no more than a weighted sum of their high school GPA and standardized test score (IQ, SAT, or ACT). Perhaps the score should also incorporate two other factors: grit (willingness to work hard and stay focused) and achievement (for example, advanced placement scores). Factors such as activities, college essays, diversity, hardship, interviews, leadership, recommendations, sports, and volunteer work should be dropped and most of the admissions staff should be replaced with a computer program.

Elite private universities should be free to admit students on whatever basis they want. However, if they continue to use affirmative action, athletics, donation, legacy, and other intangibles in deciding whom to let in, the government should disentangle itself from them in the same way that it should do so with regard to religious schools and private country clubs. This can be done by ceasing to fund or regulate them. The scientific research they do is valuable, but it can be kept separate from the education they provide to students or transferred to private industries or universities with respectable practices.