Just two months after the FBI exposed officials at the University of Southern California, Yale University, and other prestigious colleges and universities for accepting bribes from wealthy parents for admissions, a new report suggests the scandal might not be over.
For years, our nation’s top colleges have allowed donors to endow coaching positions, funding the salary of the coach or other costs for perpetuity in their various athletic programs to the tune of $2 million at Yale University and up to $10 million at Purdue University, for example. This fundraising opportunity has been so successful that at Yale endowments fund the head coaching or director positions for 24 out of 33 of its athletics teams.
This questionable fundraising strategy could be paving the way to more admissions corruption. The Boston Globe reported Sunday that in at least six different cases at Yale University, the children of those who had endowed coaching positions or programs were accepted into the Ivy League school soon after, and even played on the teams.
[Related: Actress Felicity Huffman pleads guilty in college admissions scandal]
The Globe outlines several suspicious examples of the potential bribery.
A couple endowed the women’s soccer coaching position the same year their daughter successfully transferred from Georgetown University. By her sophomore year, she made the team.
Another couple who helped endow the men’s lacrosse coach had their son enrolled at Yale and playing on the lacrosse team just a few short years later.
On the golf team, a family who donated $100,000 to an endowment to cover certain costs had their son enrolled and swinging a club for the team not long after.
Yale University vehemently denies the corruption claims, saying that all of their students were admitted to the school based on their own merits. And while this might be true, perception is everything. Cases such as this suggest that families who are financial benefactors to Yale and other universities could be given a slight edge over others in the admissions process, and raises questions about ethics and equity in the system.
Kevin Fudge, director of advocacy at American Student Assistance, a Boston-based nonprofit organization that helps students with college financing and careers, suggested to the Globe that any reasonable person could see this as “quid pro quo.”
“We shouldn’t normalize this, and we should further expose how the business of higher education is run,” he added.
Since admissions data is confidential, the Globe was unable to see how the students compared against other applicants. However, the fact that so many children of athletics donors were accepted seems like more than a simple coincidence.
If academia ever wants to regain the trust of the public, it can start by taking a closer look at how it raises money. Until then, it has no business advocating for inequality fixes or so-called social justice.
Brendan Pringle (@BrendanPringle) is a writer from California. He is a National Journalism Center graduate and formerly served as a development officer for Young America’s Foundation at the Reagan Ranch.
