Musings on the US College Admissions Scandal

I have actually been planning to write about the recent scandal – in which a number of wealthy (and quasi-famous, although I hadn’t heard of most of them) parents used various illegitimate methods to ensure their children went to college – for some time, but a combination of health issues and a desire to say something that hadn’t been said about the affair stayed my keyboard. Obviously, not everyone is going to agree with me here, but I think these are valid points. Feel free to comment below if you disagree.

I wasn’t particularly surprised by the affair, but I was angered. Any complex system – and college admissions is both insanely complex and largely opaque – can be gamed by people with money and connections. It isn’t that hard to get special treatment for your children, by having them declared dyslexic or autistic or something … a maddening fact to those of us who do have learning disabilities. In a sense, the admissions scandal is maddening to just about everyone in the civilised world. One could not have asked for a better demonstration of just how the system is rigged … and just how badly the system is rigged. If one has to have an elite composed of cheating bastards, it is too much to ask that they are competent cheating bastards?

There are, I feel, two aspects of the situation that have gone largely unmentioned. One of them is an issue that most people would regard as completely illegitimate, not without reason; the other has more to do with how the American educational establishment managed to get itself into this mess in the first place. It may be accurate, and I suspect that most people would agree with me, but it is not politically correct. Unfortunately, any system largely isolated from the outside world – and academia is often isolated from the rest of the US, let alone the rest of the world – is prone to allowing political correctness to override common sense. One cannot tackle a problem without a careful examination of the causes and a workable plan to deal with them. Allowing oneself to become deluded about the true cause ensures nothing, but failure and (eventual) humiliation.

First, the weakness of the elites.

There are two basic truths throughout human history. First, all societies larger than a mid-sized village will inevitably develop an elite. The combination of concentrated wealth, social complexity and the desire to pass an established position down to one’s children makes sure of it. Second, elites find it difficult to combine the need to keep the power within the family – so to speak – while bringing new blood into the system. As the elites grow stronger, they draw lines between themselves and the lower classes. It therefore becomes harder for talented commoners to marry into the elites, bringing with them new ideas and a solid grasp of the real world.

The first generation of aristocrats, therefore, might be very capable indeed – the first kings were pretty much lucky warlords – but later generations, not having experienced the struggle to establish themselves, are often less capable. A cursory study of monarchy within Britain, for example, reveals a series of competent and very capable kings being followed by incompetent and incapable successors. This happens, at least in part, because the later generations have a tendency to assume that their inheritance – their privilege, as modern-day academia would probably put it – is theirs by right. They didn’t have to earn it and, therefore, they rarely grasp that they have to maintain it. They are therefore unprepared for trouble, rarely capable of dealing with it … and, because they are disconnected from the real world, they have a nasty tendency to listen to people who tell them what they want to hear. This is at least partly why Hilary Clinton lost in 2016.

The ideal of America – the American Dream – is that a man can start poor and work his way up to the very top. In the past, it happened. Most of America’s best leaders and industrialists came from hardy, but poor stock. Democracy served as a way to ensure that the leaders did not lose contact with the commoners, as the leaders who did tended to lose power. This wasn’t a problem as long as the system worked, as long as newcomers could keep rising to the top. However, the concentration of wealth and power ensured that the elites became more isolated from the commoners. They lost touch.

What is truly maddening about the whole admissions affair is that the elites are not even following their own self-interests any longer. It is clearly in their interest for elite colleges (Yale, Harvard, etc) to work properly, ensuring that talented newcomers are inducted into the elites while also preparing the children of the elites to take their place amongst the powerful when their parents pass on. There has to be at least a pretence of fairness for the system to work. Everyone who gets into Harvard while clearly being unqualified, be they legacy or affirmative action admissions, clearly weakens the system. If a Harvard degree is worth less than a piece of toilet paper, what does that say about the students who go to Harvard?

The scandal has deeper repercussions than one might expect. One of the purposes of elite colleges, as I noted above, is to allow the well-born to mingle with talented commoners. (A good fictional example of such a system is the Slug Club from Harry Potter.) There is little pretence that a wealthy man’s son genuinely earned his place, although he might have done. Rubbing shoulders with the established aristocracy, however defined, is the point! But if talented commoners are being pushed out by elitist parents rigging the system, what does that say about them? Those parents are not even capable of preparing their children for the modern world. Indeed, they are actively harming the best interests of their social class.

In one sense, this is a reflection of a greater disease sweeping the West. There is a pronounced tendency to mistake a symbol for the thing itself. Thus, we are told that a treaty with Iran is a good idea even though it is a profoundly bad treaty … and Iran didn’t bother to keep it anyway. In academia (and writing, I admit) one can draw up all sorts of theories and imaginary worlds, without ever actually testing them. It’s easy for people to believe nonsense when they are never asked to actually prove their theories. Therefore, the ‘acceptable’ opinion is not the objectively right opinion, but the politically acceptable opinion. There is no room for questioning orthodoxy. This ensures that universities are increasingly held in contempt by outsiders, who comprise the vast majority of the American population. This is a recipe for trouble.

One can understand a ‘damn you, I’ve got mine’ attitude from the elites. It isn’t pleasant, but it has been a battlecry of the elites throughout history. But what is one to make of an elitist system that is literally eating itself?

The second aspect is more controversial, politically speaking. And, if you don’t mind, I’m going to start with an anecdote.

My primary schooling was a failure, even after I was (eventually) diagnosed with dyslexia. I spent four years at a hellish boarding school, where I was probably the most academically successful student during the school’s final years. And then I spent my last two years of secondary education at a mundane school, where I discovered – to my horror – that I was probably a C-student at best. There were so many gaps in my education, so many things I that hadn’t mastered, that I was dangerously behind my peers. I had hoped to take so many classes the hellhole hadn’t offered, only to be told I hadn’t made the grade. My career ambitions had been dashed long before I’d even formed them. I considered becoming a lawyer, for example, but by the time I discovered what the requirements actually were it was far too late to try to meet them. My hopes and dreams had been squashed before I had ever come to realise that I might have a future.

(There is another problem that is rarely acknowledged. If you remove a legal – i.e. arbitrary – barrier between any given group and a profession, it still takes some time for a newcomer to qualify to practice. There will be a lag between the members of the group being allowed to train and actually graduating. This inevitably irks those who want immediate results.)

In some ways, I was lucky. My parents were determined to help me. They never sneered at the idea of learning. And my near-complete social isolation probably kept me from embracing my peers and forgoing my education, although – as it was a bad school – it probably wouldn’t have made any difference to the final outcome. But it didn’t matter. I had so many gaps in my education, so many things I hadn’t been allowed to master before being rushed on to the next thing, that I looked doomed. I suppose I should be grateful they weren’t trying to teach me how to write <grin>.

Education – particularly STEM education – requires a solid grasp of the basics before moving on to advanced studied. Students must be able to read and write, to comprehend, contextualise and compose … it simply isn’t easy, as I found out, to catch up when you’ve been left behind. A gap in your knowledge from when you’re a child may ensure that you never catch up, particularly if your teacher is unaware of your lack and/or unwilling to help you. If you start your education in a poor school, you will be hampered for life.

Schools aren’t the only problem. If you grow up in a deprived inner city, for example, you will face social exclusion yourself if you try to study hard. Your peers will condemn you for trying to better yourself. (This is true even in racially-homogenous districts.) Your teachers will be poor, either because decent teachers shun such assignments or because they’re hampered by absurd rules handed down by political elitists who don’t know the reality on the ground or simply don’t care. It is hard to study, it is hard to better yourself, when you have no father (or mother), crime is rife, drugs are freely available … indeed, it is far easier to blame outside forces for your problems than look to yourselves. A student who grows up in such an environment is unlikely to match, academically speaking, someone who has both the drive and the resources to make use of it.

This creates a nasty little problem. A student from a deprived area is unlikely – by any objective measure – to make the grade to enter college. They simply haven’t had the advantages enjoyed by students from better areas, everything from better teachers to parents and peers who are actively encouraging. However, as many deprived students in the US are either black (or minority-majority), this looks like racism to subjective outsiders, to whom the absence of non-whites is prima facie evidence of racism. To ward off challenges, colleges therefore use affirmative action and lower the entry requirements for selected minority groups. This is, as I noted above, a belief that problems can be solved by making things look better. The fact that the real issue is still allowed to fester is neither here nor there.

Unsurprisingly, this causes resentment. Parents and students who think other students have an unfair advantage start muttering darkly – “if she only had to meet two-thirds of the requirements to get in, is she only two-thirds as good?” – and they get angry. Why should they not? The recent lawsuits challenging Harvard’s admissions of Asian-Americans are only the tip of the iceberg. Why should Asians have to jump through more hoops – most of which are painfully subjective – when they did nothing to deserve it? It gets more poisonous if the AA students genuinely are unprepared for college. They look bad, which – because they’re often the only lower-class students the elitist kids will meet – tends to taint elitist attitudes to their peers.

The admissions scandal intersects with this in several different ways. The more complex a system becomes, the easier it is for corrupt staff and students to ‘game’ it. It is relatively simple to boost a student’s prospective standing, particularly when one understands how the game is really played. Everything from learning disabilities to racial origin and sporting skills can be used … the student, as we have learned, doesn’t even have to play sports to qualify. In short, the complexity provides an unfair advantage to wealthier parents … one that, unlike making massive donations to the college, doesn’t even offer advantages to the entire institution. Why should people not be angry about this?

It is, in many ways, worse than I suggest above. People do not get angry, by and large, about a third (or whatever) of college slots going to legacy admissions. They go to college to meet legacy admissions. But the admissions scandal actually limits the number of places open to everyone else, whatever their colour or creed. Of course it does. If an AA slot can be claimed by someone who cannot, in any real sense of the word, be described as ‘deprived,’ what does this mean for someone who genuinely is deprived?

The core of the problem is two-fold. First, many students (and not just those from deprived areas) do not meet the objective academic requirements to enter higher education. In a just world, there would be no debate; if a student cannot pass the entrance exam, they shouldn’t be allowed to go to college. However, this contrasts with both the practical need to keep legacy admissions (and the donations they bring) and kowtow to the social justice zealots. There is no easy way to deal with the problem, thus enforcing a complex admissions system … and therefore encouraging both racial and class resentment.

But the deeper problem is that primary education (in both Britain and America) is largely unsuited to purpose. Kids who fall behind – and many of them do – rarely have a chance to catch up. Instead, they find themselves hopelessly unprepared, either for college/university or the real world. Fixing education would, I think, fix many of the problems facing us today. It would not, however, be an easy task. It would require a degree of long-term thinking that is alien to our modern-day elites. It would also require a cold, unemotional examination of the facts, one that discarded political correctness for objective correctness.

And that might be the hardest thing of all.