Rick Singer, mastermind of a scheme to help wealthy parents find a "side door" into elite colleges, was recently sentenced to prison for his activities. Singer was brought down by the 2019 "Varsity Blues" FBI sting, which also busted dozens of parents for bribery, fabricating application materials, and cheating the college admissions process.
Well, a new survey of college students and recent grads by Intelligent.com suggests that the targets of that FBI sting weren’t doing anything all that unusual. The survey, of more than 1,600 current 4-year college students and recent graduates, finds that over 60 percent of college students say they lied on their applications.
Forty percent of respondents say they included volunteer hours they hadn’t actually completed; 39 percent listed fake job experiences, 38 percent fake extracurricular activities, 32 percent fake internship experiences, and 30 percent falsified letters of recommendation. Also, 39 percent say they misrepresented their race or ethnicity and 22 percent their disability status.
Oh, and when it came to admissions essays, a third of college-goers say they made up stories, 24 percent had someone else pen them, and 18 percent engaged in plagiarism.
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More than three-in-five respondents think that lying on their application helped them get into college. In a nation wrestling with concerns about self-dealing elites, socioeconomic stratification, the costs of college, and the legality of race-based affirmative, these results should raise red flags about the entire enterprise of selective college admissions.
After all, much rides on admission into the nation’s couple of hundred selective colleges. These institutions offer access to good jobs, graduate schools, and networks of influential alumni. There’s an underlying assumption that, whatever their imperfections, these selective institutions are doing a reasonably responsible job of ensuring that access to these opportunities is a matter of merit and earned success.
What if that’s not the case? What if the college admissions process is so compromised, due to problems in the admissions offices or the malfeasance of applicants, that these opportunities are being distributed in ways that reward corrupt or crooked behavior?
After all, the 2019 Varsity Blues investigation involved a massive, long-running admissions scheme that involved illicit activity across a host of colleges, with campus officials selling admission slots or otherwise failing to perform even basic due diligence. And then, of course, there is the troubling campus conduct surfaced both by Varsity Blues and recent affirmative litigation involving Harvard and the University of North Carolina, in which campus officials focus on family wealth and connections when discussing which applicants to admit.
Some might say, "Students may cheat their way into these selective colleges but they’ll soon get weeded out." There’s little evidence of that. Instead, grade inflation has exploded at selective colleges in recent decades (Harvard’s average GPA climbed from 3.0 in 1967 to 3.8 in 2022). In fact, one of the very few selective colleges to address grade inflation—Princeton University—gave up in 2014, for fear of adding "a large element of stress to students’ lives."
Look, if selective colleges are going to be in the business of allocating opportunity, they need to do so fairly and responsibly. That holds double for public institutions (like state flagship universities) and also all those private colleges which enroll students who rely on publicly-provided grants and loans.
Yet, it’s pretty clear colleges can’t be trusted with that role. Indeed, not only did 70 percent of students say all of their lies passed unnoticed or uncommented upon during the admissions process but, when one or more lies were flagged, more than a third of students said there were no consequences.
If college officials can’t or won’t detect misconduct or police integrity, then they should not be playing a publicly-subsidized role in allocating opportunity.
There are remedies worth pursuing.
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Publicly-subsidized colleges should be required to demonstrate they’ve adopted appropriate measures to guard against admissions fraud. States and the U.S. Department of Education ought to regularly audit these systems.
Meanwhile, if they’re going to focus recruitment on certain colleges or favor applicants from those, employers should insist that colleges show their admissions processes are valid.
Alternatively, lawmakers should insist that publicly-subsidized institutions cease using criteria which can be easily manipulated (like student essays or letters of recommendation) and instead focus on those, like ACT and SAT scores, which can be obtained more securely. This would, of course, require a sharp course correction for many colleges.
At a bare minimum, the public ought to expect that higher education’s selection processes are honest and reliable, especially when colleges are enrolling students supported by public funds.
