By Derek Newton
Reposted from Forbes, with permission
Two high-profile universities recently settled a legal challenge alleging that several elite schools colluded on financial aid offerings and other admissions activities. The short version is not very sexy – coordination among schools was allowed, but the authorization expired, and some schools kept coordinating anyway.
What drew attention was not the case, but tangential documents from the court proceedings revealing that at many of the implicated schools, donations, potential donations, and family connections tipped the admissions scales. In a few places, wealth and influence outright subverted them – admitting favored applicants who otherwise did not meet the competitive admissions criteria.
Even so, it’s important to understand the details of what is happening, as well as to be clear about whether it matters. Spoiler alert: it probably doesn’t.
One detail is that the number of people in the wealthy express lane at these schools is rather small.
According to the news coverage, at one school, 1,747 students from its privileged list enrolled – over 28 years. That’s 62 per year, out of an average freshmen class of more than 1,600 – or about 3.8%. It’s not clear how many of these 1,747 students would have been rejected if not for favored consideration. Certainly, some would have. But others would probably have been admitted anyway, because their applications and accomplishments were exceptional – family money and connections have a funny and highly predictable way of improving the merit of college applications. So, however many students were admitted from this school’s list of rich and connected applicants, despite not being otherwise qualified, it’s probably less than 3%.
Another school outed in the media coverage admitted 163 applicants from its super-special list in 2012. In this case, we know that 38 of those would not have qualified for admission without the boost of privilege. It is not clear how many of those 38 went on to enroll. Assuming they all did, based on the school’s freshmen class, those 38 students represent 1.9% of the class.
Even with the most generous calculations, we’re talking about a quite small percentage of student enrollments per school per year – less than two, maybe three percent.
In uncovering the preferred admissions practices at many la-de-da schools, several news writers and commentators resurrected the “Varsity Blues” scandal of five years ago.
If you were fortunate enough to forget, in Varsity Blues, wealthy and connected parents paid a corrupt broker to fix the admissions systems in their favor. The broker and some parents faked test results, as well as prowess in esoteric sports, while paying off coaches to pretend to recruit the embellished students. This virtually guaranteed their admission to top-tier schools they would otherwise have had virtually zero chance of attending. Through the investigations, the Varsity Blues cases exposed similar practices to what we’re seeing again today – applicant lists with “VIP” marks noting sizeable donations, for example.
The Varsity Blues incidents are an important parallel to today’s revelations because they raise the inconvenient reality that, despite practices that clearly favored rich or chummy applicants, it’s not clear that anyone was hurt. In fact, it’s quite possible that even blatantly biased admissions processes, as unfair as they were, had no victims at all.
Then, federal prosecutors struggled to find anyone who was harmed. By struggled, I mean they could not do it. During the cases, a judge decided that because prosecutors could not find any victims, there were no financial losses related to the cases.
As it wound down, most of the guilty in the Varsity Blues cases were wrung up on charges of conspiracy and wire fraud, not anything to do with cheating college admissions. In other words, despite how clearly wrong the parents, coaches, and brokers acted in Varsity Blues, identified victims numbered zero.
That may seem odd since most people expect that if the child of a rich student is admitted because of the influence of money – whether in direct donations or through illicit payments to coaches and test fixers – that a deserving student somewhere is shut out. But in reality, that is nearly never true.
That’s because, even at highly competitive elite schools with small admissions classes and tens of thousands of rejected applicants every year, schools don’t have hard ceilings on class sizes. Schools can admit a student without having to decline one, a non-zero-sum game, as it’s known in game theory. In college admissions meetings, not having a cap means that a school can admit all the students they want based on merit or quality of application, and admit students based on favoritism related to wealth, without having to cross anyone off the list.
Complicating the admissions calculus further is that most schools don’t have hard admissions lines either. There is no set GPA or test score or number of community service hours that makes the single difference between getting in and being left out. Not only do the lines move year to year, they move student to student, depending on the student, the year, and who else is applying in a given pool. Loose lines mean that schools can admit applicants who may fall short of GPA or test score marks for nearly any reason – athletics, community service, economic disadvantage, a promising aptitude in science, family adversity, anything.
All of which means that in Varsity Blues – and more than likely in these newly revealed instances too – letting rich kids in through a side door probably did not hurt anyone. It is, in all likelihood, a victimless crime. In fact, using money to shape college admissions decisions, or admitting a student because a school thinks it may be financially or politically advantageous is not even a crime. It’s entirely legal.
At the end of the day, when elite families bypass the lines to buy their kids access to elite colleges, it’s offensive, but also largely free of actual consequences for everyone, except the student and the institution.
