Column: Wealth inequality in the college admission process

“There has been an update to your application."

The fateful words we all received — colleges announcing that they had completed their review of our application to determine if we were worthy of acceptance. For us at UNC, we experienced the rush of joy when we read through our congratulatory acceptance. 

However, many of us were also deferred or rejected by other universities. Even those who did not receive any rejections can sympathize with the stress and anxiety the college application process brings.

Yet, for some of our nation's wealthy elite, this stress is minimized when they cheat the college application system. 

An FBI investigation found that wealthy parents paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for their children to be admitted to the nation's elite institutions. The mastermind behind the scheme, Rick Singer, was paid $25 million between 2011 and 2019 to bribe coaches and university administrators to designate their children as recruited athletes, which effectively ensured their admission.

Other parents paid between $15,000 and $75,000 to Singer’s company so their children could be assisted on standardized testing in one of three ways: someone else would take the SAT or ACT exams for the student, a person would serve as the proctor and guide the students to the right answers or someone would review and correct the students’ answers after the tests were taken.

This assistance would ensure top scores for students, allowing them to compete for admission into highly competitive schools.

The racketeering conspiracy case includes the parents of applicants; ACT and SAT administrators; a test proctor; and coaches at universities including Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, University of Southern California, the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Texas at Austin.

In total, 33 parents were charged in the case. Among those charged were CEOs of private and public companies, successful real estate developers and two well-known actors, Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin. The leading prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling, said at a press conference: "These parents are a catalog of wealth and privilege".

This scandal has come back to recent discussion following the release of a Netflix documentary, “Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal," this past week, detailing the scandal and subsequent FBI investigation.

The scandal has exposed the ultra-competitive nature of the college application process. In this process, it’s the wealthy that have a substantial advantage. They are the ones who have better access to private tutoring, the option to send their children to private school and generally don’t have to worry about tuition costs.

One study found that while most millionaires spend less than $1,000 to help a child get into college, 20 percent of younger millionaires (those 55 and under) spent over $50,000, in hopes it would help their kid land a spot at a college of their choice.

For low-income students, the disparity is often much worse. Many well-qualified, low-income students attend community colleges or four-year institutions closer to their homes. The students often are unaware of the amount of financial aid available, or simply do not consider a top college because they have never met someone who attended one.

This divide is empirically evident at our nation's top universities. For example, at Duke, as well as five other Ivy League schools, more students came from the top 1 percent of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60 percent.

On average, private colleges and top state universities are substantially more expensive than community colleges, even with financial aid. But some colleges, especially the most selective, offer enough aid to close or eliminate the gap for low-income students.

Take UNC, for example. Through the Carolina Covenant program, if students are from a family with a total income that is at or below 200 percent of the poverty guideline, they qualify for the Carolina Covenant, an aid program that provides an opportunity to attend and graduate from UNC debt-free.

It’s initiatives like Covenant that will help bridge the gap, allowing students to gain an education that they otherwise might not be able to afford. And it’s these students that we should want to help, allowing them to flourish to better themselves and fulfill their dreams.

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