What the elite college scandal reveals about inequality in higher education

Last week, federal prosecutors charged 50 people in a scheme to get the children of extremely wealthy families into elite colleges across the United States. The scheme has been going on since at least 2011 and has been under investigation by the Justice Department and FBI for over a year. Actresses like Lori Laughlin and Felicity Huffman, as well as prominent CEOs and wealthy investors, paid a total of $25 million in bribes and other payments to get their kids into college. The largest reported payment was $6.5 million dollars.

William Singer, the founder of The Edge College & Career Network, was the mastermind behind the scheme to help wealthy children enter elite universities through what he called “the side door.” While the back door, according to Singer, essentially involves a direct donation to the school, this “side door” is a less expensive alternative. It involved two different options for parents to effectively pay their child’s way into schools. First, the parent’s child could take their ACT or SAT at an exam -site at which Singer had bribed the proctors to correct the test taker’s incorrect answers. The other option was bribing coaches to recruit clients’ children as athletes, even if they had no athletic background, in order to skirt the requirements for grades and test scores.

These revelations have prompted a public discussion of the many ways inequality is perpetuated in higher education. Students from wealthy backgrounds are given many systemic advantages in the college admissions process, even without the help of elaborate scams like Singer’s. These very legal, structural advantages range from parents being able to afford to live in a good public school district, to spending thousands of dollars on tuition for elite private schools, to extensive test prep classes and college counseling.

The fruits of these systemic advantages are clearly documented. Take, for example, standardized testing, which admissions officials have long argued is a meritocratic approach to college admissions. Skeptics, on the other hand, have argued that tests like the SAT and ACT are inherently classist in that they benefit students of higher socioeconomic status who have better access to test prep and counseling. The College Board’s own data shows a clear correlation between socioeconomic status and test scores on the SAT: the average score for students from families with an annual income of $200,000 is a combined score of 1,714, but the students from families within annual incomes below $20,000 a year have an average combined score of 1,326.

Similar issues arise along racial lines, according to the same College Board data. White and Asian students tend to perform the highest of all racial groups on the SATs; Asian students have an average of a combined score of 1,645 and white people average a combined score of 1,576. Black students, on the other hand, report an average combined score of 1,278 — the lowest average of all recorded racial groups.

The effects of these systemic advantages are evident in the over-representation of extremely privileged and wealthy students at elite schools. According to one 2014 New York Times report, for example, there are 38 colleges that have a student body in which a higher percentage of students are from families in the top 1 percent than those in the bottom 60 percent. Among these are elite schools like the University of Pennsylvania and Yale, both of which were implicated in the recent college scandal.

Though the colleges at the heart of this scandal are currently focused on handling the damage of the situation, including firing implicated coaches or placing them on administrative leave, the focus may, and should, soon shift to the myriad other ways in which the college admissions process favors the rich. Some schools have started to address these issues — like taking a test-optional approach to the admissions process to mitigate the inequalities of testing and maintain a holistic review process. Hopefully, this recent scandal will spark new conversations about how to best move forward to a more equal process.