By Nick Yi (PO ’22)
Last month, Netflix premiered its documentary on the 2019 college admissions bribery scandal, Operation Varsity Blues. The FBI investigation made headlines when it charged 50 people with paying money to bribe coaches, falsify athletic records, and fake test scores in order to secure spots for their children in some of America’s top universities. Operation Varsity Blues recruits actors to dramatically reenact the illicit phone calls that took place between parents and Rick Singer, the “college counselor” that organized this operation. Dramatic wide shots capture parents restlessly pacing back and forth across their lavish patios, cellphones pressed to their ears as they discuss the cost of faking a test score or photoshopping proof of athletic merit.
The topic at hand is a sore spot for many Americans. For some of the most competitive schools, admission rates have decreased by 40-80% since 2006, sending them dipping into the single-digit range. It’s no wonder that college admissions has become a subject of profound anxiety and emotion. The Netflix documentary juxtaposes these parents’ moments of extraordinary fraudulence with self-published YouTube clips of teenagers openly weeping over their college rejections. “It’s just really shitty to feel like this,” one student in the film laments, before qualifying: “And I know that people that got in are super deserving.”
The documentary cuts to Olivia Jade—YouTube influencer and daughter of Lori Laughlin, who is accused of paying $500,000 to get her daughters recruited to the University of Southern California (USC) —doing a makeup tutorial for her popular YouTube channel. (There is, undoubtedly, a gendered dimension to the public fixation on the high-profile women involved in this scandal.) Beyond the actual fraud and bribery, the implicit crime here is that she, her parents, and their upper-class conspirators have taken spots from other more deserving applicants. The documentary features a clip from a former fan who angrily asks, “She goes and cheats to get into school? And takes a spot from possibly one of her own fans?” The logic is clear: college admissions is a zero-sum game, and when one person wins, another loses.
Operation Varsity Blues is a story about excess and entitlement, but it’s also one of loss and uncertainty. This is true not only for the students that were rejected, but also for the wealthy parents who felt bribery was the only way to secure status in the increasingly competitive admissions process at selective schools. Under the glibness of these parents’ reenacted dialogue (“And then you need to get him into USC. And then I need you to cure cancer and [make peace] in the Middle East.”) is a palpable undercurrent of anxiety. Journalist Nicole LaPorte describes it as the “deep-seated fear that [White, upper-class parents] are no longer winning at the game of college admissions, a system that long favored their ilk.” Parents fear, despite knowing the statistics that suggest otherwise, that the recruitment of first-generation, low-income, and minority students is depriving the White upper class of their entitled seats.
In order to understand this phenomenon, I bring in Cheryl Harris’ seminal work on “Whiteness as Property.” In particular, I focus on Harris’ analysis of Regents of University of California v. Bakke, the 1978 case that rejected the use of racial quotas in college admissions. Although the Bakke case itself did not outlaw affirmative action in California, Harris identifies it as part of a larger attack on affirmative action policies built on underlying expectations that the privileges of Whiteness should be both undisturbed and protected by law. That is, the right to racial privilege could be imagined as analogous to the right to property.
Alan Bakke contended that, as a White man with higher test scores and GPA than other Black, Latino, and Asian students admitted to the University of California’s medical school, he had been a victim of “reverse discrimination.” The Supreme Court found that the University’s program of reserving seats of students of color was unfair to White applicants, as it denied them the opportunity to compete for all one hundred seats in the class. Harris goes on to illustrate how Bakke could not have competed for all one hundred seats anyways—five seats were reserved for students of the wealthiest donors, and at other schools, Bakke had been rejected because of his age—but it was Bakke’s identification with Whiteness that allowed him to articulate feelings of exclusion and discrimination.
It’s no secret that race, class, and education are deeply intertwined, nor that these interactions have significant influence on life outcomes. For wealthy White parents in particular, there lies an uncomfortable tension between the fashionably liberal desires for diversity and equality, and the uncomfortable reality that justice might entail some kind of loss for the most privileged. Ironically, the promise of social and economic reproduction that admission into a selective college brings is all the more validated by its scarcity. It is the right of the wealthy to have what the many do not—and what is more discriminating than an admission rate so low that a university does not bother publishing it?
Others have suggested solutions to the conundrum of the vastly unequal, extremely competitive world of college admissions. Malcolm Gladwell, among others, has suggested increasing the number of admitted students—less scarcity, less competition. Others have critiqued schools’ exclusionary notions of “merit,” while UT Austin has implemented policies to automatically admit Texas students in the top 6% of their class, regardless of standardized test scores; and others still have suggested rejecting the legitimacy of these schools’ prestige altogether.
Suggestions come in varying levels of feasibility. Many of the underrepresented students admitted through UT Austin’s top percent program have successfully adapted to the university’s rigor. Meanwhile, the recent scandal and its reception have highlighted just how coveted markers of an elite education are, making the idea of rejecting them seem far more difficult. Certain schools additionally pride themselves on the learning environments made possible by a smaller student body, further driving their selectivity. The Claremont Colleges are among these. In moves towards equity, Pitzer adopted a test-optional policy in 2003, while Claremont McKenna and Pomona have both extended test-optional policies adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This year, test-optional pandemic policies have opened doors for first-generation and underrepresented students, all while simultaneously sending elite families on plane rides to far-off SAT testing centers across the globe. As is the case in many other institutions, the turmoil of a global pandemic has highlighted just how unevenly resources are distributed to our country’s students. It’s apparent that the usual zero-sum game of admissions, as it stands today, is untenable for a society interested in justice. We might hope that the unusual times of COVID provide us not only a path back to “normal,” but to a more just, equitable education system in the future.
