Tear Down the Campus Wall

The allegations in the Operation Varsity Blues college admissions scandal outline a  seemingly unlimited trove of dishonesty that wealthy parents have been using to get their children into top universities. Bribery, special accommodations under false pretenses, and even entirely made up athletic or classroom achievements, are some of the ways parents have tried to get their children into elite schools.

Yet the admission process at elite schools doesn’t require such fraud to favor the rich. Even when not overtly incorporating legacy preference policies favoring wealthy alumni families, this process can be gamed by those with economic means even without outright cheating. Using fortunes that were themselves usually earned not through extraordinary intelligence, creativity, or hard work, but through a similar gaming of the political system via rent-seeking and corporate welfare, wealthy parents already have ways to ensure their children go to top schools. Meanwhile, graduates of more affordable community and public colleges are considered less worthy, even if they’ve worked harder and smarter to get identical grades as Ivy League graduates. The myth of meritocracy keeps poor people quiet.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow recounted how, in the late 19th century, Upton Sinclair:

…found that he was unable to raise the tuition money needed to attend college. Upon careful reading of the college catalogue, however, he found that if a student failed a course, he received no credit for the course, but was obliged to take another course in its place. The college did not charge the student for the second course, reasoning that he had already paid once for his credit. Sinclair took advantage of this policy and got a free education by deliberately failing all his courses.

In the 20th century, knowledge became increasingly universal through paperbacks, educational radio and television programs, and the release of complete lectures on home audio and video formats. In the 21st, anyone with an Internet connection can access complete academic materials from top classes via such online services as MIT’s OpenCourseWare.

Why has access to the means to learn at an academic level spread so far while not including academic credit? The End of College author Kevin Carey explains why:

The higher-education industry receives hundreds of billions of dollars every year in the form of direct appropriations, tax preferences … and subsidies for their customers in the form of government scholarships and guaranteed student loans. The only way to get that money is to be an accredited college. And the accreditation system is controlled by the existing colleges themselves, who set the standards for which organizations are eligible for public funds.

Public education is no equalizer: a Boston Globe report on Boston Public School valedictorians found recurrent poverty and even homelessness. As Matt Hern observed, increased funding will not change fundamentals, since “Schools and the state are inextricably linked and schools are both reflecting and reinforcing a vision of society. As institutions they reinforce the social disparities around them.”

By looking past college degrees to real qualifications, we can route around the federal accreditation monopoly and the power they confer on elite colleges. Their ivy-covered walls may be climbed by a few, but ultimately they can and should crumble.

The Center for a Stateless Society (www.c4ss.org) is a media center working to build awareness of the market anarchist alternative