Last week the American education system was rocked when the scandal of famous and wealthy parents paying hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to cheat their children into elite colleges broke to the public.
It is ridiculous that parents paid someone to fake test scores and athletic abilities just to get their children into a specific college, but this is not the worst thing about the college admissions system in America.
Realistically, the higher education system has always been about money and was created to serve the wealthiest Americans. It is a game of money and wealth over true intelligence for many universities.
Just last year secret files in a lawsuit against Harvard University went public, proving there are special admissions preferences and backdoors for specific applicants. Documents in the case brought to light the little-known dean and director’s interest lists — lists of applicants connected to top donors or other people of interest to the university.
It is pretty common knowledge that someone who can pay tuition in full takes priority over other students due to their elite status, but the fact that there are actual lists to keep track of this is just another indicator of how broken the system is.
In fact, children from the top 1 percent are 77 times more likely to attend elite colleges than children from the bottom 20 percent.
Beyond the actual admissions decision by the school is the broken system of standardized tests. Colleges can say they consider a variety of things beyond standardized testing, but it is still a significant measurement of whether a student will get into a college or not.
These standardized tests do not measure intelligence so much as they measure the ability to take an exam or pay for a tutor to teach you how to take an exam. I had a tutor, and without him, I would not have done nearly as well on the exam because he taught me the techniques to take the test.
These tutors and SAT classes are also ridiculously expensive and widely unavailable to many American students. It is a game of whoever can afford to learn how to take the test to then be prioritized by colleges because they can afford the school and make potential donations.
The upper-class children of America can get into most colleges they want to when their parents make a donation, also known as buying their way in. This is a very common practice in the education system.
Affirmative action has been criticized on the basis that minority students might not actually deserve the admission offers they recieve, but when rich kids buy their way in, no one bats an eye. This is because money runs the admission process, and those born into wealth are inherently valued more.
The root of this problem is the emphasis placed on higher education and elite institutions. Community college is viewed as shameful or less than because it is not $70,000 a year like some of the most elite universities.
Children are pressured into attending a four-year university regardless of what they really want, and the pressure is so extreme it has pushed parents to spend millions donating or cheating their child’s admission into a school.
There has to be a change in the way we look at higher education. If we are going to place so much emphasis on a college degree, then it must be more available to everyone. Higher education shouldn’t be an easy game that can be won by the wealth of rich families while the rest of the country’s children are left behind.
