Anand Giridharadas, the author of the best-seller Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World and an outspoken critic of the wealthy and privileged in America, has been on a tear in the wake of this week’s college-admissions scandal. There is perhaps no better argument for his thesis than the alleged scheme by dozens of high-net-worth individuals to buy a place for their progeny at America’s elite colleges. In numerous appearances on MSNBC and in his Twitter feed, he’s made no secret of his view that the mess is just another example of the rich getting their way at the expense of nearly everyone else. “The college bribery scam is not a college bribery scam,” he tweeted Wednesday. “It is a master class in how America—governed by a cheater, ruled by rule breakers, managed by a class that confuses its privilege for merit—functions.”
The scandal has touched a raw nerve, even among those who have benefited from it. A day or so after the news broke, a friend who lives on Park Avenue called me. “There’s a national freakout going on,” he said. He wanted to share a dispiriting story about a “wealthy” Manhattan attorney he knows, and his “grandee” and “socially competitive” wife who expected their daughter to get into his alma mater, an elite New England liberal-arts college. “She’s a bulldozer,” he said of the mother.
But as the prospects for getting his daughter into the school were fading—and not wanting to be denied, of course—the lawyer explained to my friend “with great smugness and delight” that the family would be using its considerable financial and social muscle to instead get the daughter into a less elite, but otherwise socially acceptable school. “We’re just bypassing the admissions office,” the lawyer announced. Rather than jump through the usual hoops, they would be working through a friend who was a member of the school’s board of trustees. “Does she play squash?” the trustee asked with a smile. (The school has a competitive team.) “Why, yes, she does,” came the lawyer’s reply, according to my friend, with both a smile and a wink. The daughter was admitted. She has not played for a second on the squash team. “Only the suckers go through the admissions office,” the lawyer told my friend.
As will surprise exactly no one, this story is not atypical. According to an online commenter who claims to have worked for William “Rick” Singer, the college “counselor” at the center of the alleged scam, the college-sports “side door” was a widely employed one, especially at schools, such as those in the Ivy League, that don’t offer sports scholarships, but that nonetheless recruit students to fill out various teams. “As the complaint makes clear,” the alleged former employee wrote, “once they get in, they just join the general student body, attend the regular student—that is, the non-athlete—orientation etc. No one, apparently, is going to come hunt you down and ask you to play—particularly if the coach was in on the scam of admitting you. When a parent would inquire about whether this would raise any suspicions, Singer would simply tell them to claim that the student had been injured.”
But we may be reaching a tipping point. Enough may finally be enough. “Outright fraud, lying, faking test results is horrible and should be severely prosecuted,” one senior Wall Street banker, who certainly knows the good life, e-mailed me. “That appears to be at the heart of the scandal. No tolerance for that—period. Using contacts, donating money, hiring tutors, putting your kids in the best college feeder schools, taking advantage of legacy status, arranging résumé-building internships—those are the consequences of inequality compounding and amplifying over time, from one generation to another. Does it dilute the pure concept of meritocracy, the level playing field where everyone has an equal shot? Of course.”
He is not convinced, however, that this behavior is exclusive to the privileged. “It happens at every socio-economic level,” the banker continued. “The cop in [an upstate town favored by weekenders from New York City] gives you a ticket, but lets a neighbor slide for the same infraction. Weekenders subsidize the property taxes of locals. Joe the plumber charges you twice what he charges the local diner owner. Is that a level playing field? No. But it’s not scandalous.” Life, he argued, is unfair for a multiplicity of reasons—with the uneven distribution of wealth and privilege being just one factor among many.
“Your children have an advantage over the average American child by virtue of having gone to great New York schools and being brought up in a home environment that encourages learning, curiosity, and critical thinking,” the banker pointed out. “They take advantage and convert it into a college opportunity, and then a career opportunity. They have a built-in edge over the average American child. Does that mean the system is rigged? No. Does that mean that meritocracy in its purest form is undermined? Maybe. But personally, I don’t think so. Each human evolves in a different way, influenced by genes, nature, and environment. Differential outcomes occur. They create inequalities. But not in a ‘rigged’ way.”
So what are the merely privileged to do, now that their little scam has been uncovered? They can’t follow the still-sacrosanct path tread by the super-rich, who don’t have to bother with side doors when they are paying for the erection of edifices with their names slapped on the front. Let’s face it, a mere $500,000 may buy you Rick Singer’s services, but it’s not going to get you naming rights to the academic wing and student center at Harvard Law. (Those perquisites have already been taken, anyway, by the likes of the Wasserstein and Caspersen families.) And yet they still want the best for their little darlings. And they won’t give up without a fight.
That leaves the once-tried-and-true strategies of grit, hard work, and determination. Of dusting yourself off again after you get knocked down, and persevering. O.K., so that formula is a little clichéd, even hackneyed, let alone time-consuming. But once upon a time, it worked. If that’s not up your alley, you can always try to get yourself aboard the yacht of the billionaire chairman of U.S.C.’s board of trustees while it’s sailing away in the Bahamas on spring break. That seemed to work for Lori Loughlin’s daughter, anyway, right up until the moment it didn’t.
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