The College Admissions Scandal, a Week Later

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn.

On this episode of Future youe, A major admissions scandal rocks the world of higher education and moves college admissions to front page news. In the last couple weeks, there have been more than 50 indictments handed down related to cheating and bribery in college admissions. The accused parties include actresses, business leaders whose children attend or have attended elite institutions including Yale, Stanford, usc, Georgetown, and others. At the center of the scandal is William Singer, a college counseling consultant who helped families bribe coaches and test monitors, falsify exam scores and create fictional student profiles to secure admission to selective institutions. On this episode of Future you, it's going to be a special episode. I'm Michael Horne and I get to interview our very own Jeff Salingo, who's been deeply immersed in the world of college admissions this year as he prepares his book for 2020, the Choice. So this is going to be a different episode of Future youe. And excited to dig into this scandal that has really rocked not just the world of higher education, frankly, Jeff, but also it's caused higher education to get out of our own echo chamber. Right?

Money, Hollywood, hedge funds, law, elitism. I mean, it is like it takes on every single big issue right now and crosses it with the stars of Hollywood. You can't get any better.

Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. And everyone knows about it. Everyone who knows that you're in higher education who has nothing to do with it, they say, what do you think about it? Because obviously we're both very close to it, but you've literally been in the admissions offices at a few universities embedded in their process over the last several months. So just to start with, for those of us who haven't maybe been super following the story break down, exactly what are the charges and accusations?

So there's basically two parts. Right. So a Singer ran essentially what I can tell is a legitimate college advising office or counselor, private counselor, which, of course, there are thousands across the country doing this type of work. It seems to me that at some point when he had clients, maybe he would get to know them. Well, I'd love to know how this happened. And he would say, hey, you know what? We could actually do a little bit more to actually guarantee that we're going to get your child into one of these places. And of course, it will cost you a lot of money. Some cases tens of thousands of dollars, other cases hundreds of thousands, even over a million dollars. And he did that in one of two ways through the sat. And he would basically have these Children diagnosed so that, that they would be able to take the SAT on their own with a private proctor and they would either allow them to have a lot of extra time and that would then they basically, the proctor would then correct the tests or give them the answers. So that's one way of increasing their scores to get them into these places. The other way, which is just to me incredibly Braz, is that he paid off these coaches, athletic coaches at every place from Stanford, Yale, Georgetown and USC to get them on, to get them as essentially recruited athletes in these kind of minor sports, with the exception of women's soccer at Yale. And basically he would, you know, athletics has these slots at these universities and athletic recruiting works differently everywhere. But he would basically say, this person is a recruited athlete, let's let them in. And most of the cases, these students, this is what was brazen about they didn't play this sport. And so the fun part, I think, of the indictments last week, you know, they had them dress up, they photoshopped and doctored photos. Right, right. To pretend, to pretend that they were actually athletes. And then of course, they would get there and they would quit the team. They would have some sort of excuse to quit the team. So, you know, 33 parents indicted in this. And I actually think this is the tip of the iceberg. He had hundreds of clients, obviously some of them legitimate, but there probably is more of this to come.

So the attorney general has hinted at that, that there may be, I think up to 700 or something other people under investigation. How is this going to drop over the. And will it involve more institutions, do you think?

I have a feeling it will involve more institutions that are more than just a few elite institutions. And again, because he had such a large roster of well paying clients who clearly had incentive to try to get their kids into these schools. I don't think this is the end of it. And the fact that he was able to find coaches and athletic folks at these schools means that he probably found them other places as well. I mean, again, I'm just really shocked at, at how this has come about. It shows, I guess, that everybody could be bought off in some way.

So. So let's actually break that down in a few of the different categories you listed. Let's start with the athletics. What does this say about sports recruiting? What is the implications going to be? And frankly, I was shocked that there isn' audit process or some sort of check just to verify this in these schools where admissions is arguably the most important thing that they do.

And there Isn't So I'm following three schools for this book and two of them are Division 1. Davidson College in North Carolina and University of Washington. Emory has sports. They don't Compete at Division 1, but athletics recruiting works differently everywhere. But essentially the student is recruited as an athlete first and then a student, right? So coaches start identifying these students very early on in high school. They follow them at competitions and club sports or whatever.

And this is like freshman year of

high school, freshman year of high school. There's some rules about when they could make contact and things like that, but they're tracking them. Students, athletes email these coaches and say, hey, I want to be considered. Anyway, what happens is they're recruited by the coach who then as things start to get serious and as we get closer to the senior year of high school, starts to look at, you know, grades and test scores to see if they're admissible. Most coaches know kind of if they're admissible, but what they will do then when they get really serious is send over all their documentation to the admissions office at many of these places, which they do a pre read. And this is especially at selective colleges, right, where they don't. Where it's very difficult to get into. And the admissions office will do a pre read and basically say yes. You know, they'll say, green light, no problem. Yellow light. Yeah, yellow light. This is a problem. It's the red lights that cause the problem, right? So if the coach really wants somebody and it's a red light for admissions office, then there's where there's a lot of negotiation now at some of these

places actually pause for a second. So if you get a red light on a student that the coach really wants, that's not a guarantee is what you're saying.

It's not a guarantee that they're like, they still figure out a way, they still could figure out a way they could. Again, it differs by institution, but they could talk to, they could talk to the admissions dean. Some of these things go to the provost. Some of these things go to faculty admissions committees. Again, there is no such thing as an admissions system. Works differently every place. And at some of these places, and this was actually unclear to me until last week, is that they have these slots and in some places they seem a little bit more guaranteed, right? The coach at Georgetown had, you know, three slots this particular year where he tried to get these students in. Again, I'm not quite sure how much of a guarantee that is. The story seem to indicate it was a guarantee, but I think that There's a lot more negotiation going on between the admissions office and the coach. But here's the thing. The admissions office, when they're looking at these files, they're focused on the academics. They don't have any idea whether this kid actually plays or not. Right. They're not looking at video, they're not even looking up to see if this, you know, there was that one kid, I guess water polo at usc didn't even go to a high school that offered the sport. Right. And there were some questions about that, but the emissions. And I'm writing a piece for the Atlantic right now that makes this point. Admissions officers are not meant to be detectives. Right. In fact, on anything. Right. They have to take at face value. The whole system is built on trust and they have to take advantage. Value. Especially when a coach says, hey, you know, Michael Horn is a great tennis player. We want him and you know, we're going to. And you have to trust them on that.

Well, so. And presumably they would trust them because they think that those coaches are trying to build teams that are going to be winners in their league. Right. So that makes sense. But, but the, the flip side, I'm curious. How do you craft a whole application that makes it, you know, if you say I, I play tennis and I don't. I, I don't say, then presumably my recomm. My after school things and stuff like that are gonna reflect that in a holistic.

And that's. That, that's the part I don't quite get. I would love to see these students applications because to me, and again, I've been sitting with these readers, you would know if the person plays a sport, even if the coach didn't tell you. Right. It will appear obviously on their extracurricular activities, which I'm sure I'm hoping Rick Singer was able to at least remember to do that.

Right. Sure.

Create a listed on the extracurricular activities. But it's also going to come up in other things. Most of these athletes write about it in their essays, in their personal statements or their short answers, or it comes up in teacher or counselor recommendations. So that's when it's going to raise a red flag to me. If as a reader saying why is this kid a recruited athlete? And nowhere else in the application is he or she or teachers or counselors talking about this. That to me should have been a red flag.

Yeah. So. And presumably somehow captured it in there or falsified, maybe even those letters and letters of recommendation.

We again don't know how deep this goes. And I would be love to know. I wish they would be able to release these.

Sure.

The actual application files, because it would be interesting to see what actually was in there.

So here's my other question before we switch to the SAT strand, which is I'm surprised that colleges don't have an audit process for something so important as this. And maybe they just have assumed that the trust and honesty works because, of course, the coaches are motivated by winning teams. And remarkably, in the case of Yale, they actually went to the NCAA is down a roster spot because it was a student who did not, in fact, play women's soccer. But why not have some sort of check on the admissions process more generally through an audit, given that it's your highest risk, part of your operations?

Arguably it is. And again, I don't think anyone thought this could ever happen or that people would even try to do this. And part of the problem is that in the last five, six, seven years, in the last decade or so, we've just had this incredible surge of applications, especially at these selective colleges, right. You know, 10, you know, Emory, for example, one of the schools I'm following, you know, they had an increase of 10,000 applications in the last four years. It took them something like 100 years to even reach 10,000 applications from their founding, you know, until reaching 10,000. Right. So they just seen this incredible popularity. And so part of the thing that admissions deans have been telling me is it's just, it's very hard to manage this volume and to have some other system in place of checks and balances. And it seems that people did ask questions, right? We know at USC and at Stanford and other places, people down the road, whether it was in the athletics department or admissions or student, student success initiatives around, around athletics, said, hey, what happened to this student? But the problem is, you know, these students come and go, right? You know, first of all, not everybody who applies gets accepted. Not everybody who accepted actually comes, right. Then come and they say they're going to play a sport and they get injured, right? So I think people move in and out so much that this was never really tracked for thinking people were going to game the system.

So. Interesting. Okay, let's switch over to the SAT conversation about this then, because this is

where I think they really wasted their money.

Well, so, so, so, so talk more about that if, if they really wasted their money in the sat. What does that mean?

I mean, so more of these selective colleges, you know, University of Chicago went test optional last year. More of these selective Colleges, the SAT and act, their standardized test scores are really kind of a, what I call a check in at the very end of the process. Yes, they, they play a role, but they're increasingly playing a diminishing role in admissions. And so what they really want to know, the two biggest drivers of admissions decisions are high school curriculum and the rigor of the high school. Closely related. And grades.

High school grades and rigor of high school is based on other students that they've seen.

Yeah, other students they've seen. Percentage of, percentage of students. One of the measures is percentage of students who go on to college. They want to see the curriculum, so they don't count how many AP tests the student has taken, but they want to see how many AP courses are offered or does it offer an ib, International Baccalaureate curriculum, things like that. And most of the time they know these high schools because they're continual feeders to these colleges. So that's most important. If those grades and test scores are really high and they just seem out of whack, they'll look at the, you know, they'll see how it compares to the, to the SAT. But for most people, you know, 60%, I think of people have grades and test scores that are pretty comparable. 40%, they either have higher grades and lower test scores or higher test scores and lower grades. And so that's where that, that's where they really start to dig deeper on one or the other. And that's when really test scores come into being. So the question that I had in this, I think in some cases these test score were so low that they know that they wouldn't even consider them. But I've seen at Emory, for example, you know, somebody get accepted at least temporarily. I don't know, they haven't sent out their acceptances yet. But you know, who had like a 1200 on the SAT? And I've seen people get rejected with Almost a perfect 1600 on the SAT. Again, this is where I don't think the scores. There's not a cutoff at many of these places. And for them to pay so much to try to get to a certain score I thought was not necessarily a guarantee to get them in.

Super interesting. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, I'm going to ask Jeff a little bit more about the SAT and whether we should go to a lottery system for elite college admissions. We'll be right back on Future you.

This episode of Future youe was made possible with support from the Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership The Academy is a partnership between Arizona State University and Georgetown University and is the premier training ground for those who aspire to senior leadership positions in higher education and those who want to lead organizational change at colleges and universities in the future. This episode was also made possible with support from Entangled Solutions. If you want to shape the future of education, Entangled Solutions would like to hear from you. Entangled Solutions is hiring smart, mission driven team members interested in helping world class institutions solve their most vexing challenges in learning and education. Learn more at Entangled Solutions.

And we're back on Future youe talking about the college admissions scandal that has rocked the higher education world and made the front page news of the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and so forth with our resident expert Jeff Selengo. And Jeff, we were just talking about the importance of the SAT waning in recent years as college admissions look at a lot of other factors as they decide whether students should get in or not. I'm curious what's explained that decline of the SAT in importance and act presumably

as well, two things in particular in terms of their waning performance. One is whether the SAT actually predicts success in college. And there's a number of studies on this. Most of them say, okay, it might predict freshman year grades, but it really doesn't predict persistence, meaning staying in college, or graduation rates. And so many colleges have seen that actually rigor of curriculum in high school and high school grades over four years. There's a saying in admissions, four years means more than four hours, meaning the test taking time. And so that's one reason. The second reason is equity. So there's a big push now in in higher education, especially at these elite colleges, to enroll more low income first generation kids. And performance on the SAT is essentially equal to how you've grown up. If you come from wealthier families and went to better schools, you get higher test scores. There's a one to one comparison on this stuff. And so the schools know that if they want to try to diversify their class economically, that they're going to have to look at other factors beyond just SAT scores.

It's so interesting. I two quick thoughts on it. One is I'm struck by that fact because it just seems to open up the world to more grade inflation in these schools. And second, it seems to disadvantage students who attend schools that don't have particularly rich college preparatory or AP programs in their colleges. And which I imagine disproportionately impacts low income students for whom there's not a lot of students in their schools, applying to these elite colleges every year. And there's not quite that feeder system. So I would imagine that would have its downside as well.

It does. And I think this. The thing that, to me, as we think about the future of admissions, the thing that this scandal I think has opened up is what is the proper system to select students, Right? It's broken. There's no doubt about it. We've moved to this kind of holistic system of admissions. You know, I made this point last week back in 1950, University of California at Berkeley in Los Angeles basically said, if you take these courses and get these grades, you're in right now. If you look at their admission standards, they're like nine pages long. It's holistic admissions. They kind of tell you briefly kind of what they consider, but they don't tell you how much weight they put on any of them. This whole idea of holistic admissions basically gives colleges and universities why discretion? Why discretion? Which is. We talked about this before in future year, which is to me, really the basis of the Harvard lawsuit on Asian Americans and discrimination against them. Because to me, what that lawsuit says is that colleges and universities should not have that wide latitude to pick the class the way they want to, to shape the class they want to. So I think this, to me is really what happened last week leads to a real discussion in higher ed about what. When we have so many applications, right, we're overwhelmed with applications, especially at these selective schools. And that's a whole nother conversation about why and does it matter if you go to selective schools? But it's a fact of the life right now. You know, how do you pick a couple thousand out of 40,000 applications or 50 or 60,000?

And so one of the ideas that you've floated, and not just you, other people as well, has been to go to this lottery system, in effect, where it would be kind of like getting into a charter school on K12. There'd be some, I imagine, some minimum cutoffs and then random lottery. Do you get in or not? How would that actually work? Who would compel it? Would the elite colleges want to do this? How are we going to get from here to there?

So this is an idea that Eric Hoover at the Chronicle, who's covered admissions for much longer than anybody, I think, has taught. You know, he said this idea comes up every couple of months, right? Every time there is an admissions issue and there are issues with the lottery system, Right? So the idea is, how do you maintain diversity in that system? How do you get I mean, one of the issues with this scandal last week is how do you get enough pitchers for the baseball team and enough, you know, coxswains for the, the rowing team. Right. You, you need all of these things. And a lottery is not.

So long as you assume that sports should remain coupled with.

Which I guess is a whole nother.

Whole nother debate. But, yes, I just want to make sure.

Yeah, so. Yeah, so. So the lottery system creates problems. Creates problems there as well. You know, some people have talked about a matching system very similar to how medical school students are matched to their residencies. Right? So students say they list these top five schools, and schools list their top five. Others have talked about a clearinghouse where essentially everybody's information is public in this clearinghouse for any college to grab and say, I want these students, and they go after those students. I mean, part of the problem in the US Is that we have a very inefficient system when it comes to applying to colleges. I'm interviewing one of the kids for the book that I just saw yesterday who actually got into mit. Congratulations to him. But he applied. He was so nervous. He applied to 24 schools, right. And he didn't apply to 24 schools because he wanted 24 acceptances. I know there are some people out there that want that trophy, but he applied because he was just so nervous that he wouldn't get in. And this is happening all over the place. And so we have all these schools going after all these students. We have all these students going after all these schools. And it's an incredibly inefficient system, by the way, that also is controlled largely by private entities. The government really doesn't play any role in this like they do in other countries.

So that's one of the beauties, though, also of the American higher education system is that in other countries, Right. Choice. And in other countries, you know, in Korea, you either get above a certain score, which directly determines the college you will get into, which directly, frankly, determines your life outcomes. And it's a sort of either or bar. You're either above it or you're not. In the US There's a diversity of pathways, which is sort of the beauty of the system. But to your point, it creates a lot of inefficiencies and chaos and confusion and disadvantages certain populations who may not know the rules of the, the game in certain ways. Would private colleges themselves ever switch to the system? Because they're, they're, they, they, they obviously take federal funding, as you've written about, and and we could question whether they're private or public institutions in, in a funny kind of way, that way, but they are private. So what would it take to tip them into such a system?

So whatever reforms are going to come are, I think, are going to have to come from the inside. You know, all the reform movements in admissions over the last 20 years, you know, for example, the whole test optional and the pushback against the sat, even the SAT redesign, you know, came from places like the University of California and all the small laboratory colleges in New England that win test optional. So all of these things are going to have to come from the inside. I am not really confident that's going to happen. I mean, we've, you know, admissions deans have been against the US News and World Report rankings almost since the beginning, and they haven't been able to really sort that out. Right. Because they all want to play that game. Right? They're in competition with each other. Yes, they want to cooperate, they want to make sure that the system is trustworthy, but at the same time, they're also in competition with each other. And I can't imagine them coming up with any sort of system that advantages one and disadvantages another. And that is, at the end of the day, what's going to happen almost on any system is there are going to be winners and they're going to be losers. And at least now they kind of, they know the general rules of the game.

So. So two other questions. One, a lot of people, you've seen it on social media and so forth, have been asking, why not just write a big check rather than go through all these machinations? And then Jared Kushner's father and N comes up every single time with Harvard on this of, yeah, there was no affiliation with school, but wrote a big check as a donor, totally legal. Maybe not something we want to see encouraged from an equity standpoint, but this is a known thing that people try to do that. Why not just do that and play by the rules? Why go through all these machinations?

Well, so supposedly in the New York Times had this figure last week. I'm not sure to believe it, that the minimum going rate now for one of those donations is $10 million. And it doesn't even guarantee you anything how people really know that. I'm a cynic, but I'm not as cynical as I think some people out there that think every position at a university could be bought. Does it happen? Sure. There are development cases. I've seen it even in the colleges. I'm following where they pay attention to these things. But at the end of the day, just because you allow in a kid of a wealthy family doesn't mean that, by the way, other donations are going to follow. Sure. They give a donation. Does that mean that kid got in for that reason? In some ways, I think that that's more transparent, at least because their name gets on something somewhere than what has happened in this case where you didn't know these people were paying, paying bribes. So it happens. I know it happens. I don't think it happens to the extent that some people think it does in terms of donations, largely, again, because the amount of money, I think that would really get people to start to perk up and say, yes, we're going to let X in, I think is a big number.

Okay, last question. I promise. We haven't even touched legacy, which I'm actually curious about as well. But I'm curious, curious, you look into your crystal ball. What impact is this story going to actually have on higher education 1 year, 5 years, 10 years from now?

Unfortunately, I don't think much. I think people will talk about it because it has, you know, all these stars involved and things like that. I think legacy has been under fire for so long, and to me, that's a bigger problem than the donations problem we were just talking about. I think legacy has come up in every single affirmative action case. It has come up in this issue as well. Colleges and universities really like legacies. They want to build intergenerational love for the institution. They want to build an intergenerational support for that. Those kids tend to deposit and actually go to these places when they're admitted. So those things matter to universities. And at the end of the day, as I said earlier, and this is again at the heart of the Harvard case, is do we allow these universities to shape the class the way they want to? And right now they are given a lot of latitude as long as they follow the letter of the law, you know, as long as they don't outwardly discriminate. And because they're using this holistic admissions, there is a lot of room there. There's a lot of leeway that they're given. And I think whatever happens in this Harvard case I think will have much more impact in the long run, depending on how this goes, than this scandal last week. Although it's much juicier.

So much juicier. But let me. Sorry, I lied. One last question on this. The difference between admitting based on legacy and race is a question of a sort of constitutional right of where you can discriminate. Is that, is that the big issue?

Legacy is not a defined, it's not a defined class. Right. So you could, you can't, you know, you can't discriminate on, on these defined classes, race, gender and sexual orientation and other stuff like that.

Gotcha. Gotcha. Well, super helpful for demystifying the scandal.

Fun. And you know there's somebody sold a book on it already in four days, is that right? Yes. A writer for Fast Company who has worked for Variety and Hollywood Reporter already sold a book that 12 books bought on Friday. So what, four days after the scandal broke. So we'll be reading more about this. I'm sure that they're already the movie rights are being sold. I just want to know is Lori Laughlin and Felicia, do they get to play, do they get to play themselves? Yeah, I mean they get out of jail for that might be the way

that they make back some of that money. So the but you should all keep your eyes out for the choice coming out in 2020 because I.

A little too long. Probably a little too long.

But I suspect it's going to shed more light than the scandal itself on how admissions at elite higher ed actually works. And Jeff, thanks for your time today walking us through the scandal and its implications for the future of higher education. And thank you for tuning in to future you. If you like the show, please be sure to give us a five star rating on itunes or wherever you get your podcast. Podcast. And until next time, we'll see you soon.