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Our entire higher education system is rigged to enable the rich to stay rich, to keep the poor from getting rich and to preserve inequality and class distinction in our society. Today's scandal is a subset of a subset of that system.
It however, reveals a fundamental truth of how the many such corrupted systems in our society work. There is almost always a path by which a super rich person can get away with doing something that would land someone with less (even if they too are rich) in jail.
The fact that Donald Trump and Jared Kushner, both dim bulbs of the dimmest order, got into Ivy League schools illustrates this. The most rich donate buildings and make big contributions and their kids get in. It's the way it has always been.
But that's just one aspect of the way the system is rigged. Well to do people can send their kids to private schools, pay for SAT and ACT tutors, hire coaches to help write college application essays, take their kids on tours of the schools.
If they have been successful they know people who know people who can pull strings. They are able to devote time and resources to train their kids from infancy to do the things (like taking standardized tests) that poorer kids sometimes find alien.
The system rewards the children of the successful with a better chance at success and penalizes the children of the less successful by stacking the odds against them. Does that mean that many poor and middle class students don't do very well?
Of course not. And there are many schools beyond the most exclusive that offer great educations. But getting into college is more competitive now (kids apply to 10-12 schools...those fees alone are a barrier to many) and so every advantage helps.
What's more, when they get out of school, the richer kids have parents who can subsidize them so they can do the unpaid or low paid internships that are often the gateway to glamor careers or who can pay for graduate school without burdening them with loans.
Our education system can be a springboard to a more equitable society. But, it has always been a barrier to entry to the top echelons of society as well...and not only has that not changed, it is getting worse.
Prosecuting the families involved in the scandal revealed today may be just based on the law. But it addresses only the tiniest fraction of the injustices that are part of the very fabric of our system of education in America. If it opens eyes to that and change comes...
...that would be a great step forward toward the kind of merit-based society we aspire to. (That would also require sweeping changes throughout society, of course.) But if it is just a stand-alone grand gesture (as it probably will be)...
...it will amount to little more than our other empty gestures in this regard, themselves part of the system it attacks, creating the appearance of a concern for fairness and equity when none really exists and thus seeming to legitimize the illegitimate.
