By Gwynne Dulaney, Staff Editor
On March 12, a scandal broke out that was somehow both surprising yet expected: 50 people, including high-profile celebrities, had been charged with spending up to $1.2 million dollars in a huge college admissions scam. Exceedingly wealthy parents willingly paid millions of dollars to a college preparatory service in California known as “The Key” to quietly fabricate their children’s test scores and accomplishments in order to secure them a place at elite universities including Yale, Stanford, and Georgetown. Services included paying off proctors to fix their SAT and ACT scores and giving capable students accommodations during testing.
The service was also responsible for bribing university coaches into recruiting students for college teams regardless of whether the student had ever played before or their intention to play once enrolled. Students could also be given fake credentials on their applications, such as being captain of a prestigious soccer team, in order to make them more appealing to recruiters. The service (and the parents) even went as far as to Photoshop students’ faces onto pictures of other athletes in an attempt to make their lies seem more believable.
“The real victims of the case are the hardworking students,” said US District attorney Andrew E. Lelling in a press conference last week. Now, dozens of spots at elite universities have been stolen from students who have worked all of their lives to earn their places there. Students with accommodations, such as myself, feel especially put out as we not only have had to work twice as hard for our spots at universities, but we are also living with a new sense of dread: if the system that we need to be seen as equal to our peers is being used by people without learning accommodations, will college admissions even consider us?
This entire scandal undermines a deeply rooted issue in the way America sees and values college education today. The college admissions process has never been more cutthroat than it is right now, making even the brightest and most hard-working students uncertain about whether they will be able to gain a spot at a “good” college. Receiving a quality higher education should not be something that families must spend thousands of dollars in testing prep and private school education on in order to better their child’s chances of getting into a “top” institution.
College should not even be a concern until at least sophomore year of high school. Yet, it seems that now parents begin grooming their children for college at the age of five and do not stop until their acceptance letter from Princeton has arrived. Although this scandal does shine a light upon the power of people with money, we should focus more on how flawed the college system is and what we need to do to change it. Otherwise, the people who bribe and cheat will continue to unfairly take the spots of more deserving students.
Image credit: Yale University, courtesy of the Robb Report
