Though news of the college admissions bribery scandal—where extremely wealthy people and celebrities including Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman paid exorbitant sums so their academically underperforming children could get into elite universities—broke more than two years ago, its cultural legacy is more relevant now than ever.
Part of what makes this scandal so appalling is that these children had every single educational advantage possible from before they even started kindergarten, and yet their families still felt like they had to cheat to get ahead.
The Netflix documentary Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal, released in mid-March, outlines the events of the bribery conspiracy. Mossimo Giannulli, Loughlin’s husband, was just released early from his five-month prison sentence, while Loughlin finished her two-month stint in late 2020.
During the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has shone a bright light on racial and socioeconomic inequality in the United States—in our systems governing health care, criminal justice, housing, and education. What was once an egregious display of wealth and entitlement to ridicule (“Can you believe what Aunt Becky from Full House did!?”), has become a visible example of the uphill battle that people of color and poor people have to fight daily to get a fraction of the opportunities that wealthy white people have been handed since birth.
Most wealthy white people don’t get involved in blatantly criminal bribery in order to get their kids into elite colleges; they don’t have to. Part of what makes this scandal so appalling is that these children had every single educational advantage possible from before they even started kindergarten, and yet their families still felt like they had to cheat to get ahead.
Noliwe Rooks, a professor at Cornell University and author of Cutting School: The Segrenomics of American Education, says there are two groups of children in this country with wildly different educational experiences.
“One set of kids gets to breathe some really rarefied educational air since the moment they begin school. Other kids are told to be resilient, to have grit, to get over these continual barriers that nobody sees,” Rooks tells The Progressive. “What makes you think this ground is equal? It’s not equal, period.”
Rick Singer, the college counselor at heart of the Operation Varsity Blues scandal, took millions of dollars from parents to bribe shady SAT proctors and university athletic directors to lie on behalf of these wealthy children so they could get into elite schools including the University of Southern California (11.4 percent acceptance rate) and Stanford University (4.3 percent acceptance rate). He referred to this cheating scheme as getting into schools through the “side door.”
This “side door” is an alternative to the “front door,” which requires that kids get into college on their own merit, and the “back door,” which involves parents paying even more money to donate a building to an elite college in order to secure their child’s admission. But all of these entryways into college are fraught with inequality.
The U.S. educational system has perpetuated inequity for decades. Exclusionary zoning has kept cities segregated by race and class, and the public schools in communities of color are largely underfunded. White students are much more likely to benefit from wealthier school districts that offer smaller class sizes and newer textbooks and technology, resulting in higher test scores and, ultimately, college admission.
“Some kids are just not able to meet the bar to be let into these schools. We don’t see the other side of that scandal and what unequal education really means.”
Private schools come with another set of problems. An essay by Caitlin Flanagan published in The Atlantic in March provides some jarring statistics: less than 2 percent of students in the United States attend private schools, but roughly a quarter of the population at most Ivy League universities was made up of private school students.
These private schools are predominantly white and wealthy, and as Flanagan notes in the essay, they “pass on the values of our ruling class” while insisting that they are inclusive and equitable.
“A $50,000-a-year school can’t be anything but a very expensive consumer product for the rich. If these schools really care about equity, all they need to do is get a chain and a padlock and close up shop,” Flanagan writes.
This inequitable schooling results in a cycle with generational effects: The socioeconomic disparities between white people and people of color greatly impacts the quality of their education, and the quality of their education influences the trajectory of the rest of their lives.
The COVID-19 pandemic further exposed these vulnerabilities. Pandemic-related learning loss will probably be greatest among low-income, Black, and Latinx students, as they’re less likely to have access to high-speed Internet to do schoolwork from home and a quiet space to do work, among other factors.
And people of color, specifically women of color, are disproportionately represented in the “essential worker” fields that were required to show up in-person for work throughout the pandemic, so they couldn’t easily stay at home to supervise their children’s education.
Clara Totenberg Green, a former social and emotional learning specialist in the Atlanta Public Schools, wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times last July about how pandemic-era “learning pods” will widen the racial education gap. These learning pods were created after schools went online to allow some kids to continue socializing and learning in groups, sometimes with a professional teacher in charge.
“Kids are going to go back to school at extremely different levels,” Green tells The Progressive. “The kids who had parents who were at home helping them or had pod teachers are just going to be at a different level than the kids who didn’t have access to these resources, but it will be impossible to quantify exactly what that advantage was.”
One of the most interesting parts of the Operation Varsity Blues documentary is the detour it takes to interview college admissions directors and SAT tutors to hear about some of the legal and “ethical” ways wealthy white families can use the proverbial “front door.”
“All standardized testing automatically advantages the people who are already advantaged,” Jon Reider, a former Stanford admissions officer, is quoted in the film as saying.
Independent college counselors—the ones that don’t accept bribes—can charge hundreds of dollars an hour. An SAT practice class through The Princeton Review, “guaranteeing” to help students achieve a score of at least 1,400 on the test, costs almost $1,400. That is money that most people just don’t have.
“Some kids are just not able to meet the bar to be let into these schools. We don’t see the other side of that scandal and what unequal education really means,” Rooks says, adding that those kids are the ones who would actually benefit from this kind of education. “For some kids, having access to elite education will change their lives generationally. It’s not changing these wealthy white kids’ entire trajectory to go to USC.”
Rooks believes documentaries about the college admissions scandal are entertaining, and hopefully enlightening, but they don’t fix the problem.
“These documentaries make a spectacle out of inequality,” she says. “Everybody in their right mind knows that poverty and inequality is real. We need to be having more conversations beyond the fluff. It would be great if we had people in education policy actually listening to the complexities of what people in communities are saying. That’s whose responsibility it is.”