SHAM ADMISSIONS AND THE SHAM MERITOCRACY
In all of the hoopla about a fake meritocracy, illegal shenanigans for college admissions, legacy and other legal but questionable methods of getting in, and all the other things swirling around the internet this past week since a bunch of rich folk were busted for buying college entrance for their kids, one thing has been forgotten: The whole process of college admissions is a sham that has very little to do with the education the students might earn.
Almost any of the students involved in the scams that came to light last week can succeed at almost any American college. Admission criteria don’t keep out students who can’t make it in college, whatever college. Instead, they weed out those the college doesn’t think will reflect well on them after graduation. That’s why the children of the wealthy and of alumni are given special treatment: They are more likely to stay rich or match their parents’ accomplishments than students from more mundane backgrounds. Critically, they are more likely to give money later than will students from hoi polloi backgrounds.
There are, of course, many college students needing special support to succeed. The reasons are various: Poor high schools and trauma may be the two most common but other factors, such as learning disabilities and physical disabilities, also place students in awkward positions when they try to compete with their peers. But even these students can succeed in earning legitimate college degrees, emerging with just as much knowledge as their peers at Stanford and Yale.
I teach at an urban public university where the challenges faced by my students are quite different from those facing kids destined for selective colleges. Not only are the high schools they come out of mostly substandard “factories” processing students through to graduation based on very little accomplishment, but my students haven’t had, before college, much in the way of effective outside tutoring or test-prep. Not only that, but their parents, few of whom have graduated from college or even attended, cannot offer the support taken for granted by luckier and wealthier students. Oh yes, I should add that half of my students don’t speak English as their first language–many of their parents hardly speak it at all.
And then there’s the trauma. I had a student some years ago who walked for five days through floods in Pakistan to reach a place where he could get a bus to Islamabad and then a flight back to New York for school. Many of my male students have been arrested or, at least, stopped and frisked, and some have spent a night or two (sometimes more) in jail. Some of them come from broken homes rife with abuse or CONTINUE READING: Sham Admissions and the Sham Meritocracy | One Flew East