Everyone Games Admissions

By now, everyone’s heard about the admissions cheating scandal where wealthy people are bribing their kids’ way into elite colleges and also USC.

The biggest attention grabber has been parents bribing coaches to report to the admissions officers that a student was being recruited by the team, which would then cause admissions to overlook any shortcomings on the kid’s application. Then the kid just never actually plays for the team, which may even be for a sport the kid’s never played in their life. That’s the sexy story because the con is somewhat interesting, and lots of people already hate college athletics. As we all know, university tennis teams are a drain on resources (spoiler: D1 football teams aren’t wasting roster space on no-shows, but don’t expect anyone to actually make that distinction).

But, the bribes to the coaches are like a patient on House vomiting a fountain of blood. It’s the exciting stuff that grabs your attention, but it’s nowhere as serious as the cancer that’s metastasized to every organ in the body.

Another interesting sort of bribe to come to light has been SAT and ACT proctors being paid off to correct students’ work, or to look the other way when an adult who’s obviously not the applicant shows up on exam day. Often the student will get a disability accommodation (think ADD), which entitles them to take the exam in a different space, free from distractions, including anyone who’d notice the obvious cheating. The disability accommodation is easy enough to get, and just arrange for them to be proctored by someone who’s been bought off and viola, 1600 on the SAT.

And yet, it gets worse. You don’t even need to bribe the proctors. Simply getting a disability accommodation and the 50% extra time it comes with is enough to see a massive score improvement. Accommodation requests have reportedly doubled over the last few years, and they’re almost always approved. Since the SAT and ACT are primarily speed tests, any amount of extra time is a huge advantage, and getting a 50% bonus basically means you’re no longer in the same competition.

And still, it’s worse than all that. If Little Johnnie still can’t crack 1100 even after hours of expensive tutoring and a 50% time extension, he can just opt to not take the tests at all and apply to one of the many test-optional schools which no longer require the SAT or ACT. Among the universities going test optional are: Almost all of them. Harvard, Duke, Cal Tech, Princeton, Brown, Stanford, Michigan, Hoffstra, Wake Forest, GWU, JMU, Chicago, and the list goes on (to something like a thousand universities — who knew there even were so many to begin with).

But, Lil’ Johnnie Sub-1200 still needs a good high school GPA to get into a test-optional college. If only high schools hadn’t figured that out long ago and just instituted widespread grade inflation. And when grade inflation isn’t enough, we can move right on to outright grade fraud. Failing senior math? Just get withdrawn from the class, moved into Remedial Math, skip two full months of your senior year, and magically get a B at the end of the semester.

A generation ago, the scandal was students who ought to have been failing just been shuffled along to the next grade until they eventually graduated or were old enough to drop out. Then those kids would go work at McDonald’s, dig ditches, or wind up in prison. Now a lot of those same kids are applying to colleges, and with universities implementing near-open admissions policies, they’re getting in. (With their freshman classes being taught largely by contingent faculty whose livelihood depends on passing students and getting good evaluations, they’re continued to be passed up the academic ladder.)

Now we’ve also got the wave of students from The People’s Republic of “There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat” who are only marginally conversational in English coming to the US for a year to bypass TOEFL, and the private high schools willing to take them because they’ll pay sticker price on tuition.

And there’s the online high schools where you can simply hire a private tutor to sit with you during a test, if they’re not just taking it themselves.

And your admissions essays and personal statements can be written by your tutor, parent, admissions councilor, or whoever else has the time and motivation.

The bleeding stomach and projectile-vomited blood might make for a good TV cold open, but it’s a distraction. The cancer’s throughout the entire body.

This may seem rather dramatic and overblown. Surely, while cheating happens a lot, it’s not the norm. These are extreme cases and far more common than they should be, but they’re outliers, right? Probably not.

We might think of the celebrity spending $100,000 to bribe an admissions officer as a rare occurrence, but it’s now the norm. Just with upper-middle class families, not celebrities. Universities have big appetites, and there just aren’t enough celebrities around to feed them, no matter how big the payoffs.

On average, college students only pay about half of sticker price, getting grants, scholarships, or other tuition discounts. Think of that as being the “true” price of college. The average private university tuition is $35,000 a year, with a true price closer to $17,500. When a student applies with a mediocre GPA, no SAT, and a FAFSA that shows they can pay full freight, their application basically comes with a $70,000 kicker to the school. It’s not a fencing coach being bribed, but rather an admissions officer collecting envelops of cash on behalf of the university President’s 10 year growth plan.

The rich, powerful, and famous dropping piles of cash on universities will always get the headline, but the whole system is one where the lower your grades are the more you have to pay. That sounds a whole lot like under-performing kids bribing their way in. But, the faculty, admins, and media that wring their hands over the oh-so-shameful coaches won’t mention the barely literate kids paying sticker price. Everybody lies.