In an action that harnessed the dual fury of anti-elite conservatives and egalitarian, rich-bashing liberals, the Justice Department announced last month the indictment of a man named Rick Singer and almost fifty others for effectively gaming the college admissions system, using fraud and bribery to falsify credentials and facilitate the admittance of unqualified students into some of America’s most prestigious colleges. The transcripts read like Bernie Sanders’ night-terrors, with some of the country’s richest and most connected families taped gleefully laughing about the felonies that they were about to commit. It was a crime that emphasized the easiest stereotypes imaginable: the glitzy actress with a daughter who was, described charitably, dull, a major partner at an international law firm cheerfully breaking racketeering laws, and of course, the corrupt crew team. This racket, with its high-profile indictments, lurid details, and broad moral implications is the case that has launched a thousand op-eds.
So how do we remedy a problem that seems, well, institutional? Part of fixing this problem lies in the fact that some aspects don’t necessarily need to be fixed, at least with the entrenched models of education and philanthropy currently in place. Institutional giving, although a well-worn comedic device, is a practice that is a necessary evil. Although this back-door is complex and not exactly optimal, it pivots on the hypothetical amputation of the toe to save the leg. The impact that a handful of institutional donors can make on an institution goes beyond the much-joked-about donated library, and largely outweighs the minor hit to a class’ academic profile. Program-creation, scholarship funding and limiting tuition hikes, or a moral victory? Colleges and universities must weigh these options and ultimately decide their priorities. Equality across the board, or limited inequity that ultimately fosters more equity?
But this cultural event reveals a problem that is ultimately more ingrained than even those who considered themselves in-the-know ever realized. Dartmouth was seemingly not prey to this specific nefariousness, but it might as well have been. Dartmouth owns the dubious honor of having more students from the top 1% of household incomes than the bottom 60%. Elite education has been tailor-made for the rich for centuries, harkening back to the very beginnings of pedagogy in the United States. Even if Dartmouth was never implicated in this particular scandal, its existence is proof of a similar culture that sustains Dartmouth itself. Dartmouth the institution, as we know it, simply cannot exist without it. For every student helped by Rick Singer, there are 10 students shepherded by well-meaning parents into the legal equivalent, the juggernaut of private education, enrichment, and college counseling that begins in some American households before preschool. The resulting product is marketable, intelligent, hard-working, eminently qualified, and generally bereft of any unique life perspectives.
We cannot fault parents for wanting their children to have the best, nor can we fault the children who will be the beneficiaries. The sad reality of the situation is that the benefits of elite education, as supported by academic studies, are largely squandered on children who come from affluent, connected, and well-educated communities. Studies have shown that children who are set up to succeed will do so regardless of whether they attend SUNY Binghamton or Columbia, Princeton or Rutgers. The infinite promise of the Ivy League and its sibling institutions does exist. These schools truly promote mobility, but the comprehensive, transformational effects promised on the admissions brochure and emphasized by the national sentiment is really only for those on the lower rungs of the ladder, to which the educational enrichment and network creation unique to elite schools may truly change their lives.
Equality of opportunity is the American gospel, and the esteemed Ivy League is the shining symbol of the supposed fulfilment of that principle. If Americans are truly tired of systems that explicitly benefit the wealthy and well-connected, we must adjust the machinery that creates those outcomes. Colleges like Dartmouth have provided wonderful resources to help students pay for school, but not to get into them. What egalitarian-minded Americans need to support is an affirmative action system that compensates along economic lines, rather than strict racial ones.
This is an issue that motivates me and fills me with some sort of ferocious populist drive, admittedly from a place of noblesse oblige. I belong to the top decile, and was born to educated parents, a doctor with an Ivy League degree and a Spanish teacher. I have lived my whole life without economic worry. I recognize my privilege for the purpose of highlighting the lack of it that surrounded me. I grew up in a little contradiction of a town, one of the few surviving islands of what was once an archipelago of prosperity that stretched across Upstate New York. Most of those islands have been swallowed up, and the water levels are rising. Within 10 minutes of historic stone mansions, a craft distillery, and shiny Audis, there are 4 separate trailer parks. It is not an uncommon sight on the backroads to see a well-manicured country house, and only a few doors down, a mobile home starting to rot from the foundation, often accompanied with a Confederate flag or a Trump/Pence sign. I paint this picture not to add to the ever-expanding pile of Trump apologetics that populated high-brow magazines and bookstores following the election of 2016 (and achieved varying levels of success). (The sad irony of the popularity of Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance, perhaps the prototype of the kind, was that the plight of the impoverished Appalachians was only validated by the educated American public when it was told by Vance, himself a Yale graduate.) I simply want to explain why this issue matters so much to me. I won’t attempt to hint at some mortal flaw that is draining America’s hinterlands. But because my convictions are shaped by the choice that my parents made, it is worth explaining why they made that choice.
Burned out by endless on-call shifts and Boston commutes, and unnerved by the prospect of living in a Boston suburb where summer vacation meant intensive math camp and not pick-up wiffle ball, my parents chose Cooperstown, NY, a historic village with a well-reputed hospital. They chose a school system that ranked among the best north of Westchester County. They chose Cooperstown. But nobody chooses Schenevus, Waterville, or Ilion. They don’t have the privilege of school-shopping in Madison County.
Where my mom teaches in Edmeston, elite education is a pipe dream. After helping one of her best and most promising students through the testing and application process (school counseling in rural, impoverished schools is laughable), she was crushed when she found that the low-income valedictorian with good SATs was rejected from every selective private school that he applied to. Even her alma mater, Connecticut College, to which she had written an impassioned letter, responded with a flat denial. Any Dartmouth student remembers how hard they worked to cultivate all the right extracurriculars, fine-tune their essays, and ensure that they were the candidate that Lee Coffin could never reject. Imagine doing this without a competent college counselor, a parent who went through the same process, or even a quiz team/debate team/ model U.N./school newspaper. Good outcomes are rare, and that is the result of blatant negligence that the institutions that explicitly and implicitly shape the fabric of our country have shown to underserved, rural populations decimated by post-NAFTA, post-big agriculture blight. In fact, negligence might be the wrong word. I’m not sure that Ivy League admissions offices even realize that these people exist.
Colleges preach the importance of diversity, and studies back up the learning benefits of a multi-cultural campus populations. Dartmouth has worked especially hard to incorporate more and more racial perspectives, an effort that should be applauded and encouraged, especially for the college known as the whitest in a league of overwhelmingly homogenous schools. But more important for a school that is becoming increasingly culturally varied is diversity in socioeconomic perspectives. I tell the stories of people I know in conversation and in the classroom because they are not on the campus to tell them. Although that may sound like hokey Lorax-speech, it is functionally true. And as aware as I might be, I can only relay the experience of growing up on a family dairy farm pressured by the increasing scale of corporate agriculture, or losing your job at the Remington plant that had stood for almost 150 years. I simply don’t know how it feels. But at a school where we learn the complex interplay between economics, history, and government policy that creates the cultures we grow up in, I have to explain one that’s not necessarily mine, because If I don’t, nobody will.
A system that replaced racial preference with admissions considerations for low-income students would have consequences. Had one of those systems been in place when I applied for college, I may have had to go to a slightly inferior state school instead of earning a spot at Dartmouth. But with the level of parental and economic support, I’m not entirely sure I would find any difference. Moving forward, that exact situation could impact my kids. As long as my children got a good education and was academically challenged, I would cheer the new system, despite my wishes to see them clad in Dartmouth green. Another legitimate concern with my proposed system would be a possible decrease in diversity apparent at the college. Hypothetically, ridding admissions of traditional affirmative action could create a vacuum of racial diversity, as has happened in the University of California system. However, this claim remains unfounded. Long-term studies done at universities who have experimented with economic-derived admissions preferences found no significant reductions in racial diversity. But what they found was that their process had favored a new group of impoverished students of all backgrounds, who having gained acceptance to a quality university, were well on their way up the meritocratic ladder to economic security and favorable future prospects.
Elite institutions in the United States risk becoming their own worst enemies, transforming themselves into the out-of-touch caricatures peddled as ammunition in the culture wars. But there is a way out, and that is by providing promising young students, irrespective of their cultural background, a way out and a way up.
Admissions is fuzzy at best at elite colleges. My son was turned down at Dartmouth. He is Hispanic, had 1580 SAT, 100+ average, and is a National merit Finalist. Maybe Dartmouth in the fuzziness was right. They accepted a legacy from his high school who got reunited with his older sibling. My son would have wanted his classmate to be back with his sister. He would want to earn the right to be at Dartmouth and not have it handed to him being Hispanic. He was accepted at a top engineering school and perhaps in the grand scheme of things it works out the way it should.