The Admissions Scandal Is About Parental Narcissism--and the Schools' Complicity

(I find it interesting that in all the mdm coverage, we only hear about laughlin and huffman and see pics of laughlin and her daughters. where are the names of the men involved,and the sons involved in this mess?

as a matter of curiosity, have the people expressing outrage over this scandal been equally outraged about unqualified athletes getting full-ride scholarships, solely because of their abilities in sports????)



The Admissions Scandal Is About Parental Narcissism—and the Schools’ Complicity


This is what college looks like for entitled parents who don’t care about education, and whose children don’t care either.
By Katha PollittTwitter


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Actress Lori Loughlin and her daughters are at the center of a scheme in which wealthy parents bribed college coaches and other insiders to get their children into some of the most elite schools in the country. (AP Images / Chris Pizzello)


Stanford has a sailing team. The University of Southern California has a water-polo team. And people will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to fake their unqualified kids’ way into top schools. These were just a few of the many things I learned from FBI agent Laura Smith’s affidavit in the college-admissions scandal that has ensnared 33 rich parents, fascinated millions of significantly less-rich parents, and provided full employment for the nation’s op-ed writers, pundits, and tweeters. The story, much like its protagonists, wants for nothing. It has celebrities: Actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, along with the latter’s fashion-designer husband, Mossimo Giannulli, have been arrested for scheming on their children’s behalf. It features obnoxious bigwigs like lawyer Gordon Caplan (who said, “To be honest, I’m not worried about the moral issue here”) and finance executive Manuel Henriquez, whose wife and daughter “gloated” about successfully cheating on the SAT. There’s also a mastermind, William “Rick” Singer, who earned from $200,000 to $6.5 million per client arranging doctored SAT scores and falsified athletic credentials. He did this while funneling the parents’ payments into his fake foundation, which allegedly helped “disadvantaged youth.” Parents were even able to deduct the bribes on their taxes.


Agent Smith’s dry prose doubles as a savage critique of higher education in this country. Rich schools welcome wealthy but academically mediocre applicants—did you know that two-thirds of sports scholarships go to well-off white kids?—while tuition soars and teaching is consigned to adjunct professors and graduate students. This is what college looks like for entitled parents who don’t care about education, and whose children don’t care either. Before she “got into” USC, Olivia Jade Giannulli, Loughlin and Giannulli’s daughter, was a beauty vlogger and “influencer” with 2 million YouTube followers and her own makeup line at Sephora. “I do want the experience of game days, partying,” she told her followers. “I don’t really care about school.” When news broke of her parents’ arrest, she was hanging out with friends on the yacht owned by Rick Caruso, chairman of the USC board of trustees.

Many have noted that this is a story about all-consuming inequality: Instead of leveling class differences, education reinforces them. But it’s also about parental narcissism and status-seeking disguised as love. These kids were obviously so academically weak that even a big donation to an elite college wouldn’t pry open the door. Why couldn’t these parents, like millions of others, accept that school was not their child’s strong suit? The fact is that you can get an excellent education at hundreds of American colleges, many of which have fine reputations and are easier to get into. Take Bard, for instance, which accepts 49 percent of its applicants; Sarah Lawrence, whose acceptance rate is 43 percent; or the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which admits more than half of all students who apply. These excellent schools are not called Yale or Georgetown, though, and they don’t look as good on your sweatshirt or your BMW. Thus the Henriquezes had their daughter play dumb so she could qualify as learning-disabled and take the SAT alone with a “proctor,” who would then feed her the answers or redo the test himself. (Never mind that these parents are probably outraged when they hear stories about poor people who fake their kids’ learning disabilities—to get government assistance to support their families.)

How do we fix this mess? First, the kids must go—all of them. They took spots from more qualified students, and they should give them back. It’s true that college admissions are already absurdly skewed toward middle-class and upper-class applicants, but it would be wrong to let cynicism about legal corruption diminish what actually happened here: cheating, fraud, and tax fraud.


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Conservatives love to tell black and Latino kids to attend less demanding colleges where they’ll fit in better academically. That would have been excellent advice for Singer’s clients, because life isn’t Instagram. You can’t stage photos and add filters and fabricate a whole other super-smart, star-athlete self. If you can’t get into Yale without committing fraud, you probably won’t do too well once you’re there. You’ll have to buy term papers and pay impostors to take your tests, and your parents will have to bully your professors into raising your grades. Embarrassing!

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https://www.thenation.com/article/admissions-scandal-huffman-influencer/