Summary: Nothing reveals the moral rot at the heart of Donald Trump’s America quite is much as the ongoing college admissions scandal, in which well-off, well-connected, sophisticated parents of aspiring, college-bound teenagers sought through criminal means to game the college admissions system for their children. Not only will this impose upon those children a lifelong, emotionally stunting, and at least somewhat deserved, stigma, but it will also lead to “reforms” that will inevitably fall the hardest upon students whose families are not white, well-off, or well-connected. As is often said in workplaces around the country, shit flows downhill; expect the proletariat to be punished for the peccadilloes of the princes.
--------------------------------
Cathedral City, March 26, 2019 – The moral rot at the heart of Donald Trump’s America was never more starkly exemplified or revealed then it has been by the ongoing college admissions scandal. The outlines of the scandal are tolerably well known to most of the American public. A not insubstantial number of individuals, many of them household names in the entertainment industry, sought to game the college admissions system to ensure that their children could secure places at what the charging documents in the scandal refer to as “selective” or “highly selective” institutions of higher learning such as USC, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, or any of a number of institutions that have historically served as the default education factories for the so-called best and brightest among us.
Some of the institutions in question, such as scandal plagued USC, which just today brought on board a new president, have long had reputations for being little more than football factories with a few academic departments attached to its athletic apparatus. Throughout Southern California, USC students have historically had a reputation for hubris, and USC alumni have garnered a similar reputation for feeling deeply entitled. The disdain in which USC is held, even by alumni of not dissimilar institutions, including Vanderbilt, from which I graduated, is commonly expressed in the question and answer form of “who is your favorite college football team?” To which the answer is “anybody who’s playing USC.”
Nevertheless, despite the scandals swirling about its campus, USC continues to remain one of the premier higher educational institutions in Southern California. And in many ways, USC, together with its crosstown rival UCLA, symbolizes the meritocratic paradigm that has come to symbolize America’s omnipresent, but poorly disguised, class system. In theory, possession of a degree from a prestigious university, UCLA, USC, the Ivies, or even, God help us, Vanderbilt (if you happen to live below the Mason-Dixon line) has been a ticket to upward mobility in American society. Go to college, do well, and you can expect to write your own ticket. Certainly, there are more options available to someone from Cal, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, UT Austin, Northwestern, or the University of Chicago then are usually available to the graduates of the local community college or state college. Though groundbreaking work of great genius may come from single mother’s undergraduate child attending, say, Cal State Dominguez Hills, the fact remains that in general, the “selective” or “highly selective” institutions of higher education in this country tend to be the beneficiaries of a self-sustaining chain reaction, as it were, which attracts the “best and brightest” because it has always attracted the “best and brightest.”
Therefore it should not be surprising that admission to such institutions should be highly sought after, and that the process of securing shortcuts or preferences in that admissions process should ineluctably become monetized. Now, it is no secret that the college admissions process in this country has become dysfunctional; the playing field has become unequal.
Time was, during that long ago period when I myself was navigating the badly charted waters of the college admissions process, that aspiring students were evaluated on what amounted to a triad of factors. One of these, admittedly not always the most important, was one’s academic performance. The second factor was one’s performance on standardized tests. I have no doubt that my very superior performance on the verbal component of the SAT went a long way toward compensating for my somewhat indifferent academic record. A 780 verbal, even from an Irishman of the Hibernian diaspora who had followed in the footsteps of James Joyce and made the tongue of the conqueror entirely his own, undoubtably covered a multitude of secondary academic sins. The final set of data points evaluated by college admissions staff was the applicant’s extracurricular activities. Obviously, being on the high school football team was, pace Joe Biden, “a big fuckin’ deal,” but other extracurricular activities were also scrutinized.
However, in the nearly 40 years since I navigated the jungles of the college admissions process, that process has become more and more skewed in favor of the white, the well-off, and well-connected. When I was a high school senior, a 4.0 grade point average was considered the highest attainable. Today, grade inflation has resulted in GPAs of 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, and similar nonsensical numbers. Applicants with a “mere” 4.0 should abandon all hope of entering an “elite” school. Similarly, standardized test scores have undergone similar inflation. Today, a student with less than a 1470 on his or her SAT is at a significant disadvantage in the post-secondary admission process. When I was applying to college 38 years ago, an overall score of 1300 on the SAT was not only highly recommending, but it automatically placed one in the top 10% of the California state aggregate.
Extracurricular activities have also become similarly inflated. When I was applying to college, during the foggy days of the Reagan administration, extracurricular activities, as distinct from high school sports, might consist of something like the debate society, working on a political campaign, or the astronomy club. Now the scions of the well-off and the well-connected are expected to produce the kind of prodigies of leadership and entrepreneurship that my generation had tacitly conceded to people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. Now we find that anything short of, say, establishing a thriving hospital for legless lepers in Lesotho just doesn’t cut it with the admissions staff of a “highly selective” university.
It’s hardly surprising under such circumstances that not only would middle and working-class children feel deterred from even applying to a school that expects their applicants to have a 5.0 grade point average, a perfect 1600 SAT score, and to be the founder of that thriving hospital for legless lepers in Lesotho.
Even children of well-off, well-connected parents from the so-called Hollywood elite, to say nothing of their helicopter parents themselves, would necessarily feel a little bit insecure given the expectation of so many admissions offices that only the paragons of paragons are worthy of admission. After all, even the daughter of a movie star, or the athletically mediocre son of an influential political fixer might find somewhat daunting the prospect of trying to establish that health care provider for legless lepers in Lesotho.
So what do the helicopter parents of the political or entertainment demographics do to assuage their, and their children’s, insecurities about the prospects of obtaining that meritocratic education that may be the only thing standing between them and a host of “horrible” outcomes? For many well-off, well-connected, parents, the road to collegiate criminality tends to be paved with an aggregate consisting in equal parts of class insecurity and the clawing fear of looking back to see that their poorer past, their less famous past, their less influential past, is gaining on them.
In many ways, there is actually something almost admirable about the motivations of the parents involved in the scandal to cheat on behalf of their children. Among the Japanese population in Hawai’i, there is a phrase, kodomo no tame ni, “for the sake of the children,” which has become a shorthand to explain the fears and the motivations of the Nikkei of the 'āina for their children. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” St. John 15:13. To that extent, the parents caught up in this scandal are perhaps more to be pitied than censured.
The moral rot of the whole sorry episode inheres, however, in the casual acceptance of the notion that it is morally permissible to game the system to secure a preferential option for one’s own child at the expense, not only of other children, but of one’s own child’s autochthonous sense of self. In a meritocratic society, such as that which America theoretically is, self-knowledge, self-awareness, self-realization and self independence are critical components in the maturation process of any human being. How can these be present when our young adult’s first autonomous achievement, that second great rite of passage after receiving a driver’s license, is attained not on one’s own merits, but because of the illicit intervention of one’s parents, assisted by a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization working together in a criminal enterprise and conspiracy?
For parental intervention and other artifacts of gaming the system are often easily detected within a student body. When I was an undergraduate, the better part of forty years ago, we tended to divide the student body into two broad categories. Because I was an interdisciplinary East Asian studies major, I shorthanded these two categories as the “mandarins” and the “gentry.”
The mandarins, of which I was one, tended to flatter ourselves that we had perhaps secured admission to the institution on our own merits. We had had sufficiently impressive academic performance and extracurricular activities to pique the interest of the admissions office, and we had performed well enough on the high-stakes standardized tests that the admissions office had been willing to swallow hard and check the yes box on our applications.
In that regard, we were somewhat akin to the traditional Mandarin class of Imperial China, which was selected from among successful takers of the Chinese Imperial Civil Service Examinations. Like the mandarins of Imperial China, we had tested our way into the system, and unless we really screwed things up, we knew that a degree from the institution to which we had secured admission was almost inevitable.
The gentry, for whom we mandarins felt a certain measure of disdain, unless we were having sex with them, (for a bit of whoopee covers its own multitude of sins,) tended themselves to fall into three subcategories. The first were the legacies, those whose parents were themselves alumni of the institution, or, in some cases, whose parents were members of the faculty. The second were the jocks, the kids whose value added to the University inhered not in their brains, but in their brawn, and in the amount of revenue they could draw to the institution and its athletic programs. The third group of gentry consisted of the wealthy dimwits whose presence at the institution could only be explained by their parents having made substantial contributions to the institution itself, after the fashion of Fred Trump or Charles Kushner greasing the skids for Donald and Jared to the University of Pennsylvania or Harvard, respectively. We mandarins especially disdained this last category of advantaged dimwits; we despised them for much the same reason our faculty despised them, because they lowered the curve and cheapened the value of the Vanderbilt degree.
Now secrets travel with astonishing speed on a University campus. What is on Monday a closely held secret in the Chancellor’s or president’s office will be known to the reporters of the student newspaper by Wednesday, and may very well find itself published by Friday. WikiLeaks has nothing on the average college campus; student journalists are astonishingly good at rooting out what the administration and faculty do not want them to hear.
Consequently, universities are like sieves. There is no doubt, therefore, that in very short order the identities of the students whose parents committed the crimes charged in the indictments that are at the center of this scandal will become known to their peers all over campus. And when that happens, the effects will be terrible to behold. The children of this scandal can expect to find themselves targeted not only by the faculty and administration of their institutions, but also — and more damningly — by their peers. They may very well be shunned, called out publicly, or even run off the campus. At all events, they will be seen as tainted, unworthy, and beneath contempt. Thanks, mom and dad.
Yet as much as the children of scandal will themselves be damaged by the public exposure thereof, the true collateral damage will fall on those who have to apply to the next entering class of freshmen, as well as upon those displaced students whose meritorious places in a given freshman class were occupied by students who didn’t secure admission honestly, but who instead gained their places through dishonest, criminal means. In the grim, zero-sum game that is the academic admissions process, the admission of the unqualified student whose parents gamed the system on his or her behalf necessarily means that a more qualified student does not gain admission to the institution.
Because one of the inevitable outcomes of this scandal will be that the institutions affected, even if only to salvage their own damaged amour propre, will institute a series of so-called reforms, ostensibly designed to ensure against cheating and trying to game the admissions system. Unfortunately, as with so many so-called reforms, the "reforms" of the college admissions system will fall most heavily upon middle and lower income families.
Indeed, it is virtually inevitable that lower and middle income families will be hardest hit by any “reforms” set in train to salvage the wounded amour propre of embarrassed institutions. The unintended consequence of any of these foreseeable “reforms” will play into the already classist nature of the existing college admissions process. The playing field will continue to be skewed because middle and lower income families cannot usually be expected to possess the wherewithal, either in terms of the means or the sophistication, to be able to game the system as effectively as their better-off, better-connected competitors in the admissions process. After all, who is better capable of gaming the system to a child’s advantage, the wealthy studio executive from Brentwood, or the single mother barista from Boyle Heights? Who is better qualified and better positioned to be victorious in the inevitable academic admissions “arms race” that will follow?
Of course, even those of us who were mandarins among our student bodies should not deceive ourselves. Even a studio executive’s child from Brentwood might very well have the academic chops and the test scores to be a Mandarin. After all, mandarin status also tended to be dependent, even 40 years ago, on attending the “right” high school. The industry kids, the college administrator’s child, or the Suffragan Bishop’s niece from Harvard-Westlake, the prestigious Los Angeles private high school which was my own secondary alma mater (class of ‘81) ineluctably stand a better chance of being able to navigate even a truly meritocratic system than do the barista’s child, the nurse’s kid, or the parish priest’s nephew from Boyle Heights’s Roosevelt High.
The demographic that can send its kids to Harvard-Westlake will tend inevitably to be better educated, better-off, better-connected, and more skilled at gaming the system, even in noncriminal ways, than will the demographic whose children attend Roosevelt High. And when the “victimized” institutions named in the charging documents institute their “reforms” to address the gaming of the admissions system, they will be attempting to return to the status quo as it existed before the scandal broke, a status quo that still advantages the white, the well-off, and the well-connected. Unfortunately, while they may not appreciably change the game for the graduate of Harvard-Westlake, the “reforms” can foreseeably be expected to make the college admissions process even more difficult for that barista’s child, that nurse’s kid, or that parish priest’s nephew coming out of Roosevelt High.
The college admissions system has become so dysfunctional, so weighted in favor of the white, the well-off, and the well-connected that it has started to resemble a Democratic Party caucus mobbed by supporters of Bernard Sanders. As much as caucuses themselves are racist, classist enterprises that tend to advantage of the white, the well-off, and the well-connected, and will continue to do so, until caucuses are replaced by truly democratic closed primaries in which every member of a given party may vote, but only members of the party may vote, the college admissions process can be expected to continue as an enterprise that advantages the children of the white, the well-off, and the well-connected, who attend the “right” high schools, live in the “right” neighborhoods, and undertake the “right” kind of extracurricular activities.
The instant scandal has done nothing but expose the moral rot at the heart of Trump’s America, the ravening insecurities of the parents who tried to game the system, and how they were emboldened by the Gilded Age ethical lapses of Trump, the Republican Party, and the administration, and the venality of so many people throughout the college admissions industrial complex. Every time in this country that we confront an educational crisis, the haves and the have mores find soft landings, while the proletariat are invariably punished for the peccadilloes of the princes.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand, Esq. grew up in Los Angeles, where his status as the son of a public arts administrator and a university official, together with his domicile in the Hollywood Hills and his Zelig-like neighborhood propinquity to Superior Court judges, well-known entertainment industry personnel and recording artists was enough to help get him admitted to the prestigious private high school now known as Harvard-Westlake. That, together with what was then considered a recommending score on the SAT, was enough to get him into Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee, from which he graduated in three years as part of the class of 1984. He cheerfully admits to having been one of the mandarins. The views set forth herein are his own, not those of any institution with which he may have been affiliated, or of the Episcopal Church in the diocese of Los Angeles, and are not to be construed as legal advice.
