Bleeding Meritocracy: Responding to the Admissions Scandal as Outrage Fades

As it enters week 3, the promising new series Operation Varsity Blues is running out of gas. The story of wealthy white folks bribing their kids’ way into college debuted to huge numbers. But the writers are losing the story line, so it might help to make at least two root causes explicit.

The series has been a blast – it offered the pleasure of seeing rich crooks getting caught looking stupid, in this case by bribing their privileged kids into privileged colleges with dumbbell plans. $50,000 bought strategy like the fake water polo star above. Scam maestro William Singer went with this strategy more than once: “I’ll photoshop his face on a kicker,” he said to William McGlashan, the impact fund manager, Friend of Bono, and backer of gig-economy paragons Uber and Spotify, while wired by the FBI, referring to the face of McGlashan's son, suggesting that such a picture would convince the USC football empire that the son played football. That pious bully, the College Board, turned out to have proctors on the take. Early reviews called the FBI’s 200 page script a probing look into the way we live now, one worthy if not of Dickens then Tom Wolfe or the David E. Kelley of Big Little Lies.

There was also widespread rage at American plutocracy. Most people are pissed at institutions that were to make society fairer and now do the opposite. Universities are on that list. 50 years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, racial inequality is pervasive and deep, and all levels of schooling reflect this through resegregation and racially disparate outcomes at all levels. Neoliberal economic policy, a duet sung by both major parties, has reversed the limited economic equality that emerged from the Cold War project of showing off a large, white middle class. For forty years, the country’s big national project has been to strengthen business by weakening the public systems that, though flawed, are to allocate roughly similar resources to everyone. Equality stopped being a goal, and a pathetic symptom is the assumption that getting into UCLA will protect your life while going to UC Irvine will not. The previous theory was that there should be no quality cliff as you moved from district or campus to another, and the population could stop spending every day jockeying for position, since most of the positions would be good.

Meritocracy not only didn’t keep plutocracy from happening: it collaborated with it. It was supposed to signal reward for effort and accomplishment (more than for innate “ability”). But it became another system to be gamed. Proof of its decline in public opinion is that every commentator in scandal week 1 claimed that admissions scams were not the exception but the rule. The instant New York Times editorial was sarcastically entitled, “Turns Out There’s a Proper Way to Buy Your Kid a College Slot.” In other words, “until yesterday, we thought there were no limits to the power of money over universities.” It wasn’t only that Singer’s scams proved again that the needs and insecurities of rich people define American culture and society today. Even elite outlets agreed that private wealth doesn’t violate meritocracy because meritocracy is structured to serve private wealth.

As Operation Varsity Blues made white privilege index a rotten democracy, the governor of California was asked on a Sunday talk show about the admissions bribery changes "What about the legal bribery that exists in higher education?" he replied. “What about the folks writing the $20-million dollar check, putting their name on that building? Connect the dots to the folks they quietly called for admission, or wrote a letter of recommendation.”

What about the legal bribery? I’m glad Newsom mentioned it, since that gets to the first root cause—long-term shortages of non-private ed money that have restructured public universities. Since he has long sat on the Board of Regents of the University of California, he knows perfectly well that “legal bribery” is “philanthropy,” and philanthropy is a cornerstone of the strategy of "multiple revenue streams," and that in turn is a response to repeated public funding cuts (which used to be eased by eager tuition increases, but never mind that for the moment). UC started obsessing about fundraising in the wake of the 1992-95 state cuts, and began to show the Board of Regents fundraising growth charts in the mid-1990s. Every campus has its own large development operation and some kind of endowment campaign. Fundraising duties have been pushed down to deans and department chairs and even individual faculty. Fundraising has also changed the culture of public universities, shifting affective relations toward research while empowering departments and people with market and donor potential over basic research or teaching people and departments. Fundraising has strengthened the pecuniary dimensions of higher ed overall, which distorts public understanding of its total effects. Fundraising's virtues are articles of faith—no one can rise in academic administration without pledging tacit allegiance to continuous fundraising. One need not be a philanthropy abolitionist to marvel at the lack of public discussion of philanthropy's effects, which was nonexistent until a hedge fund titan gave $400 million to Harvard in 2015. OVB is another milestone, but it remains to be seen whether colleges will examine philanthropy's vices, which include increasing exactly the inequality within and between universities that the OVB outrage denounced (an example). There is certainly research that could be pondered: mine has focused on fundraising's leveraging of public resources and its insufficiency at a public scale; Anand Giridharadas's widely noted work, in Winners Take All and elsewhere, describes it as a straightforward tool of tax avoidance and political control. These problems are easily described, and yet university leaders still feel they have no choice—they must show unflinching loyalty to the practice if only because, in public universities, they are constantly, permanently short of money.

Now that he is governor, Newsom could in fact downsize legal bribery, precisely by rebuilding public funding. It would take a few annual state funding increases of 15-20 percent. How serious is he about shrinking fundraising until he can drown it in the bathtub? He was upset, but that will pass. Proposals need to come from universities.

Ironically, private colleges have seen their financial models weakened by the philanthropy they depend on. OVB broke in the wake of the biggest previous national higher ed story, which was the mindboggling news that the governing board and president of renowned Hampshire College were trying to put the college up for sale. The most likely source of their panic was that an anniversary capital campaign hadn’t been going well. Why would that lead to bankruptcy? Because like all private college boards, Hampshire’s could not see a solvency strategy that didn’t involve philanthropy.

This is why Macalester College president Brian C. Rosenberg wrote, “The Only Surprising Thing in the Admissions Scandal is that Anyone is Surprised."

I see nothing wrong with soliciting wealthy parents after their children have been fairly admitted. I do it with some regularity and with no sense of guilt. Most colleges, moreover, are "need aware" in admissions, making it more likely that an applicant coming from wealth will gain admission to more colleges than one without means.

What is maddening, though, is that the colleges most likely to be given large gifts in return for an offer of admission are the ones that are most prestigious, selective, and wealthy — in other words, the ones that need the money least. I would actually be pretty sympathetic if a struggling college were tempted by such an offer, but those offers tend not to be forthcoming.

Tuition has hit a ceiling for all but the superbrands, so if fundraising isn’t working, the model says sell off, shut down. And they are: at least 22 liberal arts college have closed since 2016.

The second root cause of OVB is that college admissions is a conceptual mess. It has two separate projects—supporting racial and economic democracy on the one hand, and forming a master class on the other. The latter, since Jefferson, Adams, and Emerson, has meant finding a “natural aristocracy.” For all our discussion of diversity, we're only slightly less essentialist about ability than our ancient forebears. To identify the greatest talents, we are supposed to use standardized tests and grades. Ross Douthat’s recent attempt to question meritocracy still equates test scores with academic merit. The SAT and ACT have been repeatedly debunked as a racial and political project of highly restricted validity and that has traditionally sought to measure a probably nonexistent entity (general aptitude and/or context-free achievement) (Lemann, Kohn, Guinier, Douglass, etc.). And yet standardized tests are still widely treated as though they captured natural ability. All attacks on race-based affirmative action invoke standardized tests as the gold standard of measurable achievement. And as Jerome Karabel and others have shown, holistic admissions has a history of reflecting the university's anti-semitic and racist biases, against which test scores seemed the main countermeasure.

Admissions continues to use exams that people don’t trust but are intimidated by, and at the same time, acknowledges their badness with incompatible gold standard #2 - this same holistic admissions.

In the 1978 Bakke case, involving a white plaintiff who sued UC Davis's medical school on the grounds that race-based affirmative action had wrongly trumped his color-blind merit, Justice Lewis Powell saved a reduced version of affirmative action by invoking Harvard's "holistic" admissions practices. These used race only as a “plus factor” –not as a claim to compensation for past or present discrimination—and threw in a bunch of other stuff, including sports and family ties to the college. It seems very nuanced and humanistic, since it cares about the whole person and not mainly test results. It always looks better than the test-score absolutists. That’s before you look at it too closely.

We did get a closer look at Harvard’s practice last fall, when a suit brought by anti-affirmative action zealot Edward Blum against Harvard went to trial. His group, Students for Fair Admissions, argued that Asian Americans were being rejected in favor of preferred minorities by being given a lower “personal rating” than are other groups. I have always been a strong supporter of affirmative action and think that Blum’s position is racist (all hardships can be introduced in admissions except race-based ones) and irresponsible (“He said he couldn’t comment on exactly what barring admissions officials from considering race would mean for applicants — that is, whether it would bar them from mentioning their race in applications”). But Harvard’s admissions people had a hard time explaining how they defined the factors they used on top of academic achievement—athletics, extracurricular, personal, overall—or how they interacted. The attitude about their careful sifting of a “wealth of information” was weakened by reports that application files at elite colleges may not get more than eight minutes of a reader’s time, and by the basic fact that a committee of 40 people is reading 40,000 applications (p 3, p 7). Harvard's witnesses didn’t really explain why Asian Americans do get lower personality scores, or the problems flagged by their own previous investigation (plaintiff’s analysis pp 11-20).

In my reading, Harvard won the narrow question: they are compliant with Grutter and related decisions by staying “flexible enough to ensure that each applicant is evaluated as an individual and not in a way that makes an applicant’s race or ethnicity the defining feature of his or her application” (p 24). But Harvard ignored the broader question, which is precisely whether all this flexibility in choosing is legitimate in the first place. Hostility to race as a criterion is the venerable right-wing issue, and 4/5ths of whites continue to oppose it. The related issue under plutocracy, for a broad slice of the public, is whether elite preferences are really better than invalid standardized tests. During their trial, Harvard made holistic admissions look like a secret formula that elites use to come up with whatever kind of class they want—which is always the class that will keep Harvard on top.

Neither test-based nor holistic admissions is convincing. Each needs the other—many people pointed out that test scores helped Jews overcome earlier admissions bias, as they help Chinese Americans now. And yet their mash up is internally contradictory, has confused everybody for decades, and aggravated white racial backlash. The results also aren’t great: elective admissions has had 50 years to fix racial disparities and it has not. With a more diverse student body than ever, selectivity has only managed to increase rates of rejection at the most selective schools while increasing inequality in the overall system.

What are we supposed to do about OVB’s root causes? Nicholas Lemann is right that the solution is not reforming admissions, and so is Ian Bogost that it's "pathetic" to be reverting to the admissions status quo. It's crucial not to let the superbrands orbit their own planet while controlling the definitions of intelligence (test scores), merit (you’re one of us), and the value of college (pecuniary gain, social mobility) on ours.

 Lemann writes, “a recent Pew survey showed that the only admissions criterion that gets majority support from the public is grades, and there are far more students with perfect transcripts than there are places in the most selective colleges, so that won’t work.”

Here I don't agree. What will work is growing the system so there are enough really good seats for all the perfect transcripts, and the other transcripts as well. The point would be to replace selectivity with scale, and today's highly unequal with generally equivalent quality.

To do that, the white middle and upper classes will need to reverse their entire Reagan-era private welfare strategy—tax cuts, public cuts, austerity, private school, restricted public quality, selectivity, fixation on monetary outcomes, and dependence on prestige. Undoing this culture will mean moving a lot of private money back into the public realm. And it would make America smart again.