At first glance, it is so absurd as to be comical. Parents used fraudulent SAT scores and phony “recruiting” profiles and bribes to coaches for help in getting their kids into prestigious colleges.
The comical part? Maybe it’s that a coach altered a student’s application to say she had been in China’s junior national soccer program — even though she didn’t play competitive soccer. Or maybe it’s that stock photos of a pole vaulter were doctored to show a prospective student’s face on a real pole vaulter’s body. Which might or might not lead me to Photoshop my son’s head onto LeBron James’ physique.
All of these are only allegations, of course. But they are enough to land indictments for some 50 people, ranging from parents to coaches to college administrators to the guy who coordinated the conspiracy. And they are enough to ensnare universities such as Yale and Stanford and Southern California.
But while the comedy is evident, so is the impetus for outrage. That is the reaction when the U.S. Attorney in Boston announces that parents spent anywhere from $200,000 to $6.5 million to fraudulently get their kids into a certain school; that is the reaction when you receive additional confirmation of the United States’ great lie — that it is a meritocracy that strives for equality.
Sure, we like to believe that. We like to believe that anybody can improve their lot if they are smart and work hard. We even like to believe it — well, some people do — when a presidential candidate says: “It has not been easy for me, it has not been easy for me. And you know I started off in Brooklyn, my father gave me a small loan of a million dollars.” Yeah, sounds rough.
But as late-night comedian Stephen Colbert said in the wake of last week’s college admissions scandal: “You know how the conspiracy theorists say, ‘Everything is rigged for the wealthy and famous’? Well, as a wealthy and famous person, let me just respond by saying: You’re absolutely right.” Colbert, by the way, was two years ahead of me at Northwestern University. I can’t speak for him, but I’m pretty sure my parents didn’t pay $500,000 to get me into school. Not while they were driving an orange 1973 AMC Hornet hatchback.
And yet, I digress. The whole point of this exercise is to suggest that American meritocracy is mirage. That it’s not what you know but who you know. And that those who most vociferously trumpet the notion of meritocracy are those who desire to maintain the current power structure.
As Christine Emba wrote for The Washington Post in 2016: “Though we laud the occasional individual who has clearly risen through hard work and visible intelligence, the vast majority of those who succeed rely on much more than pure merit. Rather than pulling up the best from all ranks, our meritocracy rewards those who are already ahead.”
The result is that people come to believe a reality TV star has some special qualities simply because he is famous. Or that his son-in-law’s admission to Harvard had nothing to do with the family’s $2.5 million donation to the school.
It is that fallacy — and society’s reinforcement of it — that leads parents to allegedly commit fraud so their kids can get into a particular college. And it is that fallacy that has allowed our nation to creep from a democracy to an oligarchy to its current status as a kleptocracy/kakistrocacy.
This is not news. And yet the confluence of wealth and privilege that arrived last week in the form of something people can relate to — college admissions — should serve as a wakeup call. It should serve as a reason to question why the Republican tax cuts of 2017 mostly benefitted the wealthy; why the average CEO is paid 361 times more than the median salary at their company; why some think a $15 minimum wage is outrageously expensive; and why there is opposition to something as simple as a capital gains tax on money made from wealth rather than toil.
And it should lead us to work toward making the United States a true meritocracy.
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