In the 1980s, the performing arts school I led in Detroit conducted a benefit wine auction each year. It was, at the time, one of the largest wine auctions in the United States. It was lucrative, for a good cause, and ridiculous. A notable bottle, like a Château Lafite Rothschild, would fetch thousands of dollars.
On one occasion we arranged a “blind tasting,” placing half a dozen bottles in brown paper bags at each table. Guests sampled from each bottle and then ranked the wines. The room was full of wine collectors from around the country, as well as a few of us who thought a great wine was anything with a cork.
Five of the six bottles were very expensive French or California wines. The sixth, as an irreverent prank, was a $4.99 Chilean wine.
The $4.99 bottle was the winner, albeit by a small margin, evoking a rumble of embarrassed laughter.
This memory arose when reading about the admissions scandal rocking the higher education world. Investigators uncovered a sordid scam wherein wealthy parents, unethical coaches and admissions consultants created phony athletic profiles for rich kids, enabled cheating on SAT and ACT tests, and got underqualified applicants into highly selective colleges.
The outcry has been intense and predictable.
The scandal has been properly cited as only the sharp tip of an iceberg of privilege. Money has always talked in college admissions, whether through legacies, major donations used to buy admission, or through the capacity of some parents to buy experiences — SAT prep, essay coaching, summer trips — that burnish applications and increase the chance of success.
As the recently retired 19-year head of a Manhattan private school, I’ve seen it all. Although my school resisted as much of this nonsense as possible, we weren’t immune. I recall one senior who was surprised by an acceptance letter from a college her mother had applied to without the daughter’s knowledge.
In every news story and opinion piece that followed the revelations, these elements are tacitly stipulated to: Selective colleges are very special prizes and cheating to take a coveted spot is outrageous. The scandal violates the meritocratic system that promises the brass ring to students who work hard and do well.
To those who subscribe to this myth of meritocracy, cheating by the wealthy is an odd bedfellow to affirmative action. In their view, both are plots to subvert fairness. This is a glaring false equivalence. The former is a scheme to cheat even when starting with all the chips and the latter is a justifiable mechanism to compensate for several centuries of accumulated disadvantage.
But in reality, the prize may not be all that special.
The whole “selective college” chase is a silly game. Take the U.S News & World Report rankings (please!) for example.
Each year, millions of students, parents, college counselors and university PR folks check in to see who’s on top, moving up or sliding down. Schools are divided into tiers. Dropping to the second tier from the first or to the third from the second is an institutional crisis. As the rankings shift, the applicant pool shifts with it. As the applicant pool shifts, the rankings shift too. As everyone in the game knows, a prime metric used to rank colleges is the number of applicants (more is good) and the number of acceptances (less is good). The best way to improve your ranking is to entice far more applicants than necessary and shatter as many young dreams as possible. For example, Dartmouth College accepted about 10 percent and enrolled about 5 percent of the applicants to its Class of 2022.
You also have to do well in a popularity poll with other educators. It is a bit like the homecoming queen and her court voting for each other. These ratings require little actual familiarity with the school or what happens in its classrooms. It’s all about reputation.
SAT and ACT scores and GPAs of incoming freshmen also play a significant part in the rankings. By self-fulfilling definition, a school is “good” because the accepted students gamed the system brilliantly, often by way of thousands of dollars of SAT prep and as many AP courses as possible.
Alumni giving and faculty compensation are important too. These factors are all connected, as the wealthiest schools have the best reputations, which attract the most alumni support, which builds the largest endowments, which fund higher salaries, which improve the rankings, which burnishes reputations, thereby attracting more applicants, allowing the college to reject more kids — and on it goes in a merry circle.
Where in this exercise does one find the quality of the actual education?
This does not mean that the winners are bad schools. They may be wonderful, at least in some ways, but the rankings and the criteria in the rankings have almost nothing to do with educational quality. Many top-ranked schools are notorious for large undergraduate lecture classes and for the use of graduate assistants acting as surrogates for public intellectual professors who teach graduate students and appear on cable television. Many so-called lower tier colleges have equally fine faculty members, small, engaging classes, and close student-faculty relationships that inspire and motivate.
Yes, let’s excoriate the cheats and expose the scandal. But let’s also be honest about the absurd game. I could name several dozen small colleges that I’d recommend over most of the Ivies.
Put colleges in brown paper bags and see how many delicious options exist without having to steal a Château Lafite Rothschild.
Steve Nelson lives in Boulder, Colo., and Sharon. He can be reached at stevehutnelson@gmail.com.