The Inequity of College Admissions

Netflix’s new documentary, Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal, offers a glimpse into how fraught the application process is by delving into the long con of “college counselor” Rick Singer, who helped wealthy students fake athletic achievements to gain admission into selective schools like USC and Yale. While the documentary digs into the injustices of this particular scheme, its central thesis is that the college has become a commodity where exclusivity is overvalued because it makes selective schools seem even more desirable.

“Over the last three or four decades, higher education has increasingly become a commodity,” John Reider, a former Stanford admissions officer, says in the documentary. “It is something that you purchase, a product. It’s a goal in and of itself rather than the goal being to get an education.”

A key sign of the commodification of college is its price. The average cost of tuition, fees, and room and board for a private institution is around $43,000, and Business Insider reports that between the late 1980s and 2018 college tuition has increased by 213% at public schools and 129% at private schools. The Manhattan Institute found that these skyrocketing numbers were due in part to an increased demand by high school students interested in continuing their educations, in turn linked to the growing societal emphasis placed on the value of college.

Colleges’ ability to conceal financial aid numbers until after admission also allows for inflated tuition prices. “Knowing that students will have few alternatives by the time they actually see what they will pay, colleges have every incentive to be stingy with financial aid,” stated a Forbes analysis of the report.

Tuition isn’t the only fee in this process, however. Applying to school itself costs money; students must pay fees that range from $30 to $75 per college to simply submit an application, and must pay around $50 to take the SAT or ACT, which most colleges require for admission. The process also privileges students with access to resources to guide them through the process, such as individual counselors and SAT tutors, which can cost thousands.

The result is a system in which privilege has a large impact on the chances of getting accepted to a top school. In a piece on private schools for The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan explored how pricey private high schools offer easier ins to Ivies like Princeton. Flanagan notes that for a student at the elite boarding school Lawrenceville, “your chances of going to Princeton were almost seven times greater than if you went to Stuyvesant High School, an ultra-selective public school in New York City and itself a top Princeton feeder, where 45 percent of the kids qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. But compared with an average American public school? You don’t want to know.”

But as Flanagan explains, even getting into college from a private school is no easy feat. College admission rates have been falling, hitting all-time lows in 2021. The most selective school, Harvard, admitted only 3.4% of applicants. In Operation Varsity Blues, one admissions counselor notes that donations to schools will not guarantee acceptance if it’s under $10 million, meaning only the ultra wealthy can legally buy their way out of the admissions process.

This extreme competitiveness leads wealthy families to see elite institutions as a standard to be acquired by literally any means necessary, and to therefore use illegal services like Rick Singer’s. As child psychologist Robert Evans told Flanagan, wealthy parents “have a sense that their kids will be emerging into a bleaker landscape than they did.” While they’ve been “grandfathered in” to financial security, he added, “they fear that … even a good education might not secure [their children] a professional-class career.”

There is also an unquantifiable cost of higher education on young Americans: the toll it takes on their mental health. Operation Varsity Blues includes high school and college students who detail the ways in which their high school experiences were altered to be little more than a vehicle for college. One student, for example, mourned how their peers spent their high school years stricken with stress, giving up socializing for homework and studying.

Brennan Barnard, an educational reporter for Forbes, wrote that college admissions “has the cultural capital with which to shift the tides of isolation, anxiety and disconnection that can lead to suicidal thoughts and actions.”

Especially in the wake of the pandemic, it’s hard to blame teens for becoming disillusioned by the promises of higher education. The admissions process sells the lie that prestige equals quality education, which can be accessed for the steep price of your mental health and, for many students, thousands of dollars in student loan debt.

But it is possible to escape the vicious cycle of elite admission. “Forget USC. Go someplace else,” Reider says in the documentary. “You can get a good education almost anywhere if you want it.”