Showing posts with label Felicity Huffman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Felicity Huffman. Show all posts

Sunday, March 17, 2019

Rich parents paying bribes to get their kids into elite colleges: Why risk jail for kids to get a mediocre education?

I live in Louisiana, where the most heinous thing a person can do is buy Chinese crawfish.

So I shouldn't have been shocked by the reaction of my Louisiana friends to the college-admission scandal that is roiling the national media. Several Louisianians expressed surprise that it is illegal to bribe your way into an elite college.  After all, my friends pointed out, it is well known that wealthy people get their kids into Baton Rouge's exclusive private high schools by making big donations.

What's the difference, one chum asked me, between bribing a soccer coach to get admitted to Yale and making a $5,000 donation to Catholic High School to make sure one's child gets admitted?

Not much, I admit.

Nevertheless, why pay bribes to get your kid into an elite college? After all, it is not the end of the world if your child does not get into Yale, USC, or Georgetown. There are a lot of prestigious universities in this country, and a well-qualified high-school graduate has a shot at getting into one of them.

Moreover, today's elite colleges are not what they used to be. Grade inflation, identity politics, and an atmosphere of political correctness have watered down the curriculum at colleges that once maintained rigorous academic standards.  According to a Boston Globe article published 18 years ago, 91 percent of Harvard's students graduated summa, magna or cum laude in 2001. 

How could that be? According to the Globe writer, "It takes just a B-minus average in the major subject to earn cum laude -- no sweat at a school where 51 percent of the grades last year were A's and A- minuses."

Maybe Harvard tightened standards since that article was written in 2001. Or maybe not. According to a Harvard Crimson article published in 2017, "more than half of surveyed [Harvard]seniors reported a GPA of 3.7 or greater, which is higher than an average grade of A- for every course."

So what's my point? I suppose it is this. America's elite colleges are nothing special, and families shouldn't turn them selves inside out to get their children into these overpriced diploma factories. They shouldn't go into ruinous debt to pay tuition bills at these hot-air palaces, and they certainly shouldn't pay a bribe to get their kids into Yale.

I did not get my undergraduate degree from a prestigious university. I did, however, get a doctorate from Harvard Graduate School of Education; and it was nothing special.

I realized before I graduated that I had made a major mistake when I enrolled at Harvard. I feel very sorry for parents who took out Parent PLUS loans or co-signed their children's student loans in order to pay tuition at some overpriced, high-prestige university.

As for the parents who face criminal charges in the college-admission scandal, I do not think they should go to jail. Rather, their children should be forced to attend the colleges they bribed their way into, and parents should pay the full tuition cost. Four years later, when the parents see how their kids turned out after graduating from one of these elite schools, that will be punishment enough.

Felicity Huffman (photo credit: David McNew/ AFP/ Getty Images)