The Real College Entrance Scandal Is The Social Value of A Degree
Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty
Lost in the outrage about the college bribery scandal is a simple question: Why did these parents pay so much money—and commit federal crimes—to get their kids into elite schools? The answer is that college degrees have wildly different values to different classes of people. Policymakers and politicians love to point out that community college or professional certificates (HVAC, welding, coding, etc.) can offer just as much financial benefit in real terms as a four-year degree. But there’s a very real reason rich kids go to top-tier schools, and it’s all too often not the same reason poor kids want to go to top-tier schools. In a word, vanity.
But first, let’s back up a bit to the year 1938. The Great Depression had chewed up the United States for a decade, and we hadn’t yet invested in the heavy military spending that over the next few years would start to pull us out of it. After a second recession in 1937, the unemployment rate, which had dropped steadily, was shooting back up again to where it would soon top out at nineteen percent. President Franklin Roosevelt, fearing political risk, would pass no more New Deal legislation. But my grandfather, Howard Sollenberger, had managed to get into college. At the end of 1938, however, having just turned 20, and seeing the world that lay around him, he decided to drop out.
He’d later remark that he “just felt it didn’t make sense to sit in school at that particular time.”
About 65 years later, I’d do the same—at a college that my grandfather’s investment in my education almost singlehandedly paid for. (To be fair to myself, I did earn a partial academic scholarship.)
The difference between my grandfather and me is that I left college because I didn’t fit in and wanted to pursue my music career. Leaving was a luxury, and I knew I could always return if I needed to. But for my grandfather, it was something else. He said he quit because “it seemed to me that the kids in college at that time were much too focused on their own problems, and were not aware that the world was on fire. From my point of view the world was on fire. In ‘38 the Japanese had invaded north China and the word that I got back from north China was that the Japanese had implemented a scorched earth policy in much of the area where I grew up. And, of course, things had happened in north Africa and began to happen in Europe. I just felt it didn’t make sense to sit in school at that particular time. So I tried to find a way to get back to China to see what I could do to help.”
A year later—at 20 years old, an age I was drinking Jim Beam and playing rock n roll in a basement somewhere in Northern Virginia—he’d be helping Chinese peasants, delivering money, medicine, and babies behind enemy lines while under pursuit from two different national armies, the Japanese having issued a $10,000 bounty on his head.
Neither of us had to drop out of school, but sometimes other things are more valuable. Over the course of the American Century that separated my experience from my grandfather’s, however, a lot had changed, including a general sense of what’s valuable in America. Chief among those values is a college education.
The recent college bribery scandal gets at the unspoken fundamental lie about college in this country: The real value of a degree. The truth is that an actual education is all too often less important for people who can easily access it than for those who can’t. The scandal is a disgusting but also (so far) relatively narrow crime, but it reveals so much about what is broadly wrong with not just our education policy, but ideology generally. We need to be honest about what an education is in this country, about who needs one, why, and what we’re willing to do to make it possible for everyone to access what they need.
Look: When it comes down to it, we’re not willing to do a lot. The bribery scandal shamed elites, and the headline-grabbing names were all Hollywood. (Democrats and Republicans were among the indicted.) This is ready-made right-wing outrage: The rich, entitled snobs who preach equality publicly actually game the system in their favor. And yes, that’s exactly the correct outrage to have. Except now pull back a step: That’s how millions of underprivileged American kids feel about their education prospects every day in this country.
And it would sort of make more sense if the indictees were middle-class parents who took on a second job or took out a second mortgage in order to afford a Ivy League bribe. College education makes a huge difference for them, in terms of opportunity and salary. These parents, though? Millionaires. It makes practically no difference which school their kids go to, outside perhaps their own egos. These crimes are all the more revolting when you realize it’s all done for vanity. There’s nothing to be gained, and these kids take the spots of kids who really do need a leg up.
But what the scandal makes clear is what we don’t say out loud: For millions of well-off Americans, the implicit value of a college degree isn’t in the economic opportunity we all give lip-service to—there’s also a very real intrinsic social value, and this value increases with the prestige of the institution. Privileged kids do face an incredible amount of pressure to attend elite schools for precisely this reason, and they and their parents are as—and often more—competitive about getting accepted for social reasons as their less well-off peers are for economic reasons. This, again, is not part of the debate, because it would force us to examine the much more complicated and possibly unresolvable issue at the heart of the American education crisis: Turning a blind eye to the fact that privilege and vanity have displaced opportunity and necessity.
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