The college admissions process has become so competitive families are
increasingly trying to game the system.
You've probably heard about the Varsity
Blues scandal.
Two famous actresses caught up in what prosecutors are
calling the largest college admissions scam ever.
They stand accused of paying
millions in bribes to get their kids into elite colleges.
Even staging photos
for students who never even play the sport.
But that's just one example.
There were also the college counselors who were bullied to the point of quitting,
and the wealthy parents who schemed to get their kids financial aid.
So they're giving up guardianship of their kids in declaring them legally independent.
Giving them a better shot at qualifying for need-based financial aid.
Why is there so much hysteria around these few institutions and what can be done about it?
The Ivy League epitomizes elitism.
Why are we so obsessed with it anyway?
America has a way of idealizing and idolizing these institutions that are
kind of hallmarks of success. Probably a poor barometer but a barometer
nonetheless is looking at movies throughout history where people are
going to Harvard or Princeton or Yale.
Hollywood has long portrayed Ivy League
schools in a golden light.
So has the president. "Then they said, 'well they went to Ivy League college.' So did I go to Ivy League college."
Most of Congress and all of these kind of
very elite spaces a lot of graduates of Harvard and Yale and Princeton are there
No one is certain exactly where the term Ivy League comes from. Ivy may refer to
the Roman numeral for four when four of the original colleges formed a sports league.
Today the league consists of eight schools that boast historical
significance with seven of them founded before the American Revolution.
These schools cultivate selectivity and a reputation of prestige that people want
to be a part of.
Each year it seems that they break a record for the number of applications
that they've gotten but they've maintained the same amount of seats.
As the demand increases the gall with which people will will go to some of these
underhanded methods to get their children into these colleges has only increased.
Take the curious case of Sidwell Friends—a top school in DC.
School officials repeatedly warned parents to stop all kinds of bad
behavior: verbally assaulting college counselors, recording their conversations,
and calling them from blocked numbers, even circulating rumors about students.
Two out of three of the college counselors left their jobs this year.
I think the people who are most likely to do this are people who are overly
stressed and and and believe delusionally that their kids
simply have to, not want to, but have to go to this college or that university
and if they believe that that the regular levers of power and of leverage
that they have aren't adequate then they start doing all sorts of things like
undermining other children or bribing proctor's.
To add to the stress of fierce
competition, higher education has become so unaffordable for millions of
Americans even the wealthy feel the pinch.
But low income people are hit the hardest.
Students from the the top quintile attend college at three times
the rate of students from the lowest quintile of earning families.
It's just a remarkable statistic, and it becomes even more insult to injury when you add on to
the fact that students or parents are either cheating their way into an
institution or trying to find ways to pay for an institution that were meant
for those students who have already had a hard enough time getting there.
Schools have not gotten ahead of this behavior so far.
A place like Harvard with 37 billion dollar endowment could stand to enroll a few more students to
kind of cut back on some of that selectivity.
As long as highly selective
institutions remain as selective as they are people will try to scam to get into them.
There could also be less focus on
getting in and more on actually graduating.
One of the issues with the
hysteria around the college admissions process is that it treats the entry into
college as success rather than the back end of college as success so if we're
thinking more about completion and graduation rates than we are about
admissions that's probably the way that we kind of reframed this whole conversation.
Parents could also try to dampen their fascination with these institutions.
Elite colleges aren't the only pathway into elite careers.
That's not to say that a student can't be successful if they go to Texas State
University where LBJ went to school. It's not to say that students can't be
successful if they attend University of Houston like Elizabeth Warren did.
Society probably shouldn't be looking at higher education as much as a zero-sum
game as the stepping stone.
I don't want them to think that the most important
outcome of high school is where you go to college. I want them to have the
approach that the most important outcome of high school and adolescents is really
crafting developing nurturing the brain that you're gonna have for the rest of you're life.
Hey it's Adam. I'm a staff writer at the Atlantic. Thank you so much
for watching this video if you liked what you saw subscribe to our YouTube
channel and also my Twitter @AdamHSays.