FROM Heather MacDonald:

The celebrity college-admissions cheating scandal has two clear takeaways:  an elite college degree has taken on wildly inflated importance in American society, and the sports-industrial complex enjoys wildly inflated power within universities. Thirty-three moguls and TV stars allegedly paid admissions fixer William Singer a total of $25 million from 2011 to 2018 to doctor their children’s high school resumes—sending students to private SAT and ACT testing sites through false disability claims, for example, where bought-off proctors would raise the students’ scores. Singer forged athletic records, complete with altered photos showing the student playing sports in which he or she had little experience or competence. Corrupt sports directors would then recommend the student for admission, all the while knowing that they had no intention of playing on the school’s team.

None of this could have happened if higher education had not itself become a corrupt institution, featuring low classroom demands, no core knowledge acquisition, low grading standards, fashionable (but society-destroying) left-wing activism, luxury-hotel amenities, endless partying, and huge expense. Students often learn virtually nothing during their college years, as University of California, Irvine, education school dean Richard Arum writes in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. They may even lose that pittance of knowledge with which they entered college. Seniors at Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Berkeley scored lower in an undemanding test of American history than they did as freshmen, according to a 2007 study commissioned by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. College is only desultorily about knowledge acquisition, at least outside of the STEM fields (and even those fields are under assault from identity politics).

— Comments —

Terry Morris writes:

This story of course came up on my news feed. My immediate reaction when I saw it was to roll my eyes as I thought “now there’s a shocker!” Ha, ha.

Many of us have been arguing for years that sending one’s kids to college is a lose-lose proposition in this God-forsaken country. I have a sister who has it in her head that her nine year-old son is going to be a star athlete and earn a scholarship to a major university on his athletic talents alone. Which might or might not be the case (not likely, but anyway), but I have argued with her and her husband till I’m blue in the face that this is not to be desired even if he turns out to be the star athlete they expect him to become. I just hope beyond hope that by the time the boy is of college age (and in the unlikely event he does become a great athlete) she and his dad will have come to learn the truth of what a “college education” is in actuality. If they don’t come to this knowledge, it certainly won’t be for lack of effort on my part.

Laura writes:

Youth sports are really affected.

They become ultra-competitive and nasty when parents are competing for those scholarships and deals, which are worth hundreds of thousands to them.

Mr. Morris writes:

Yeah, that’s right. I coach little league baseball and peewee football, so I see it and deal with it all the time.

One of my nieces plays high school softball. My wife and I straggled over to the field during one of her games last fall to visit with her mother in the stands. When I asked where her daughter was, she said she was in the dugout “warming the bench” because she isn’t good enough to play. I retorted that that was not a bad thing at all considering that her teammates on the field “look like androgynous freaks,” whereas our niece looks like a girl, even in her uniform. I wasn’t exaggerating; that’s what they looked like. My sister-in-law looked at me like I’d lost my mind, but didn’t say a word. Which is OK. I tell my kids that I say things like that when they are true to plant seeds, in hopes they will later grow into fruit.

Paul C. writes:

I am unsurprised by the so-called scandal, which is another example of the hypocrisy of the amoral propaganda system that is called the Democrat, liberal, mainstream, or dominant media.  These educated people knew the so-called scandalous behavior has been going on forever (just as they knew of Harvey Weinstein’s behavior).  Sports fans knew it.  I knew it based on personal experience though neither I nor my parents solicited, negotiated, or accepted the help that was available to me.

I am leery of the prosecutions of at least some of the scapegoated parents.  I expect some of the parents are good people under the mistaken belief that the elite schools were to be a big career benefit for their brainy or average children.  Brains and affirmative action are gifts just as much as inherited money or some  recommendations.  Affirmative action is legal bribery; the government pays schools and teachers to accept and to pass unqualified students.  Moreover, the rejected students will do just fine.  Here is an unbiased, reputable source that supports Ms. MacDonald.  School officials who received cash perhaps should be the only ones prosecuted, and the schools’ ruling parties should be fired for hypocrisy.

I hope we will find out what made the corrupt FBI interested in pursuing this.  I won’t be surprised if the investigation started with a corrupt purpose.  I wonder whether the FBI realized how their pursuit could illustrate the corruption of affirmative action and social promotions.  The media certainly won’t explain the corruption.

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