The College Admissions Scandal Says Much More About Parents Than Kids

The admissions scandal rocking American universities says much more about parental angst and insecurities than it does about educational dreams of their children. From my days as a student working in the admissions office of an Ivy League university and then as what they call an ‘alumni interviewer’ the biggest challenge was satisfying the parents’ lofty goals.

Most parents insisted on being in the room when their son or daughter was being interviewed. They would constantly pull out dusty documents referring to the kid’s skill in kindergarten or success in a grammar school pageant as evidence of underlying genius and high potential as a Nobel Prize candidate. Every time the candidate tried to get a word in edgewise the parents would jump in. ‘Oh, he’s so shy he won’t say anything about himself.’ No worries there. The parents will fill that gap.

This snowflake has clear Nobel Laureate potential

            But more worrying than their desperate promotion was their complete ignorance about the reality of American higher education or its importance in later life. In answer to a question about what attracted the student to this particular university the parents would quickly intervene. ‘It’s in the Ivy League,’ as if nothing else mattered. I would gently try to remind them that while the Ivy League universities are indeed excellent there are hundreds of other universities scattered across the United States that are at least as good if not better than the eight (more if you include Stanford, Duke and MIT) Ivy League universities. One of the things the Ivy League has done extremely well, I would mention, is to market itself as the destination of tomorrow’s movers and shakers. ‘There certainly are other choices,’ an Ivy League admissions officer would intone with a look of slight disbelief at his own words, ‘But . . .’ The unspoken implication was that any other university might just leave your kid working the night shift at McDonald’s.

             It ain’t necessarily so. From a size, location, curriculum point of view any one of these other universities might be better suited to their child. The kid would look hopeful, but the parents would give me a look that would shrivel a cactus. ‘What? Are you crazy? How do I tell anyone at the Greenwich Country Club that my kid barely made it into something like the local Community College?’

Harvard may not be the best choice

Savvy families without piles of cash to throw around play the game much smarter. Their kids might just attend that local community college for a couple of years and then transfer to their state university often living at home to save money. The upshot is that the kid graduates without being buried under a pile of student debt.

            Anxious parents are also missing the larger point about the alleged importance of an elite university. While the choice of undergraduate university may mean a lot for the parents it plays  a smaller role in any student’s future success. Throughout my career I have seen countless successful people whose road to the top did not include a stop in the Ivy League. Hard work, raw talent and bit of luck still count regardless of the pedigree of the university.

            Then would come the inevitable question about money. ‘Alright,’ the parents would ask, ‘enough of these test scores and grades. What’s the bottom line? Just how much of a donation is it going to take to get my kid into a decent school?’ In my naïveté I would say that donations don’t really figure in the admissions decision. How wrong I was. The parents were absolutely right. Unless their kid had trouble writing his own name a large donation usually helped a great deal – especially if the kid was a good athlete. But there’s a humorous side to this policy. I once heard an outraged parent complain loudly that he had donated a few million dollars only to find that the university had put his name on a boiler room two levels underground.  

            But the real scandal giving such a huge advantage to wealthy students is the spiralling cost of university education. A friend struggling with two – soon to be three – children in university had an interesting observation. In 1985, when he was in university, the median household income in the U.S. was $29,000. Tuition at an Ivy League school was about $10,000. Room and board amounted to another $5,000. Altogether about 50% of household median income. Today that figure has exploded. In 2017 average household median income was $59,000. Tuition, room and board at an Ivy League school (as he is painfully aware) is more than $70,000 – 119% of median household income! And he said the schools have the incredible chutzpah to solicit donations on top of that! When he told an official from what the universities grandly call the ‘Advancement’ office (fund raising to most of us) he would think about a donation as soon as the school got serious about reducing costs the official scuttled away, never to be heard from again.

            Easy access to federal student loans has helped fuel this leap in costs. But universities themselves have done very little to check runaway cost increases. As they succumb to what the military calls ‘mission creep’ they have strayed very far from the basic academic purpose of training young minds.

            If the upshot of this current admissions/bribery scandal is some brief embarrassment for rich parents who should know better an opportunity will have been lost. If, however, it prompts universities to do some serious soul-searching about real, radical cost cutting then some good might come out of it.

There are some radical ideas for reducing the expense of higher education while improving the educational experience. But I’ll save them for another post.