The college admissions scandal exposed by federal prosecutors Tuesday is at once shocking and unsurprising.
Shocking because of the dollar amounts involved, the lengths to which parents and the professional riggers went, and the brazenness of it all. Unsurprising because everyone suspected that the wealthy have a way of rigging the system and playing by a different set of rules from the rest of us.
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Donald Trump is our president, and Bernie Sanders is the Democrats’ rock star right now, precisely because average Americans are furious at what seems like a tilted playing field. This sort of thing only heightens that widely held perception.
Look closely enough, and you’ll see another shocking yet unsurprising lesson of this all: College education isn’t all that valuable. Think about what was involved here. The most brazen cheating here involved wealthy parents getting smarter kids to take their own children’s SATs, or else bribing proctors to correct the tests after they were completed.
[Also read: Obama family tennis coach charged in college admissions scheme]
This undermines, without negating, a common critique of the SATs: that they don’t really test intelligence but instead simply reward the kids whose parents can afford the best tutors or most expensive prep courses. Shelling out for those tutors and prep courses would have been much cheaper and much more legal. But even then, maybe the SAT is a bit too objective for that.
One counterargument is that SAT scores don’t predict college performance very well. Maybe that tells you less about the SAT’s validity than it does about American academia’s lack of rigor.
Our current scandal reflects this dynamic: The parents paying millions to get their kids into elite schools weren’t worried that their kids would fail out despite being unqualified. In other words, college can be a lot harder to get into than it is to pass. One of the students admitted to USC through her mother’s cheating had made it clear that her goals at college mostly involved partying. It goes to show that you often don’t have to learn much to graduate college.
Thousands of students drop out of college, of course, but that doesn’t seem to have much to do with academic ability or intelligence. Students who drop out tend to be kids who have trouble keeping up tuition payments and time away from home and work because of family or financial problems. Yet, finishing college is correlated with higher wages and better life outcomes — more marriages, fewer out of wedlock births, fewer divorces, fewer drugs, less unemployment, and longer lifespans.
Correlation is not causation. And in fact, college’s evident lack of rigor suggests that this correlation has little to do with the classroom instruction itself. The type of kid who finishes college is the type of kid who will do well in life. Smart kids and privileged kids have an easier time getting into college, and privileged kids have an easier time finishing college.
Then, there’s the signaling value of a college degree. Irrationally, employers value a college degree and snub those without one, although this tendency seems to be vanishing.
The most valuable thing kids learn in college is probably the “soft skills” acquired by adult(ish) members of a tight-knit community in a common pursuit. Better than in high school, and with lower stakes than in the real world, college students can learn how to work out differences, question their own assumptions, take leadership roles, and simply be adult members of a civil society.
But even this is being undermined today. The repressive political correctness rooted in ideas of intersectionality and driven by a vocal and angry minority of students who intimidate administrators has suffocated the pro-social effects of college. Everything must now be litigated and legislated. Taboos are multiplied, and debates are squelched.
It’s no longer shocking to learn the system is rigged. The useful lesson in the current scandal is how useless most of the lessons in college really are.
