AJE 301: Higher Education Admissions Scandal
An interview with Penn State’s Dr. Mindy Kornhaber and Rafael Alvarado hosted by Logan Rutten and Jeremy Anderson
Logan: From Penn State University, this is AJE 301, a production of the AJE Forum, a student-run editorial board affiliated with the American Journal of Education. I’m your host, Logan Rutten. I’m a doctoral student in curriculum and instruction at Penn State and chair of the Forum content committee. Co-hosting this podcast with me is Jeremy Anderson, a Penn State doctoral student in Educational Theory and Policy and a managing editor of the American Journal of Education. Today we have the privilege to speak with two scholars about the higher education admissions corruption scandal that broke on March 12th, 2019. Rafael Alvarado recently graduated from Penn State Law and is currently a PhD candidate in higher education whose research interests include legal issues in higher education, legal issues, legal education and law schools and university development. Dr. Mindy Kornhaber is an associate professor of Education Theory and Policy at Penn State whose areas of expertise include educational equity and testing. She joined the Penn State Faculty in 2001 after serving as a researcher at Harvard University for more than a decade. Thank you both for joining us.
Dr. Kornhaber: Happy to be here.
Rafael Alvarado: Thank you.
Logan: So, Jeremy, let’s start by talking about the scandal. What is this scandal? Where is it as of now?
Jeremy: Sure, so according to the New York Times,on March 12th, the Justice Department accused 50 people across six states for bribery, fraud, and racketeering for their roles and complicity in purchasing admission to selective universities in what the DOJ referred to as the largest college admission scam ever prosecuted by the Department of Justice. This scam included some of the nation’s top universities such as Stanford, Yale, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas at Austin, Wake Forest, and Georgetown. One parent reportedly paid up to $6.5 million towards getting their student into a university. At the center of this all are the charges against a man named William Singer, a college admissions consultant who has since pled guilty to arranging for students to take their SAT or ACT exams at sites in Houston or Los Angeles, where he had bribed test administrators, which sometimes included the false application of test modifications intended for students with legitimate learning disabilities.
He also bribed college coaches, he said to falsely certify that students had been recruited for the school sports teams. Prosecutors said he also falsified ethnicities and other biographical details in some cases to take advantage of affirmative action. He also arranged for the taking of tests by people other than the actual student, with NBC News reporting that one was getting paid up to $10,000 per test. Mr. Singer pleaded guilty to racketeering, conspiracy, money laundering, conspiracy, conspiracy to defraud the United States and federal obstruction of justice and he was recently released on a $500,000 bond pending a June 19th sentencing date. Along with this all, thirty-three parents were charged, including some celebrities such as Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin. Students themselves have not been charged with crimes, but accused parents have been charged with mail fraud. Since this all happened, the U.S. Department of Education has opened preliminary investigations into eight universities whose athletic coaches were allegedly part of the college admission cheating scheme, being prosecuted by the Justice Department.
Many of the universities tied to the scandal have begun rescinding acceptances to students who have been implicated in the scandal. And all of this is very important because if the department decides that any of the schools violated federal education regulation, it could assess penalties, which at the most extreme, ironically, would include cutting off an institution’s access to Pell Grants and federal student loans, which would again hurt students from lower income households. So it might be easy to downplay these crimes as the actions of the highly privileged individuals who set out to cheat the higher education admissions process. However, there are so many educational issues inherently wrapped up in it all and we’re hoping to dig into the broader context and higher education landscape in which this scandal took place. So one of the biggest components of Mr. Singer’s services dealt with standardized college entrance exams. So let’s start by considering the central role of standardized testing in the scandal.
Logan: So in this scandal, we saw families going to extreme and fraudulent lengths to obtain high test scores for their children. We wanted to ask both of you, how did we arrive at this point?
Dr. Kornhaber: Well, I want to point out that cheating on tests, whenever those tests have an important consequence has gone on for at least 1,300 years. So, the biggest cheating drive was in the civil service exam in China beginning in the 7th Century and that continued until 1905. So it’s not just Americans or American higher education. I think it’s a common impulse when there is an important gate that people will try to go over, under, around, or otherwise game the system. So we got here by nature of being human and having obstacles that we want to overcome. So then we could ask what kind of system would lower the incentives to getting around this kind of system? So we got here partly by that, maybe Rafael wants to chime in?
Rafael: Yeah, so I think part of what led us to getting here, is the fact that we know just enough about college admissions processes to understand some things that are valued but not enough about them to directly assess whether what they’re doing is illegal, constitutes bribery, and so one of the things that I believe you mentioned earlier, Jeremy, or that I hope we’ll talk about is where the line between an all-out bribe and a donation to an institution comes. Things like this are very difficult to prove in terms of evidence and the evidentiary standards that are required. So we know that the Department of Justice filed complaints against 50 people. We don’t know that that’s all the Department of Justice knows. And so it’s possible that they have more information. I think an example of this is Lori Loughlin, whose husband was not implicated as part of this crime. Even though there’s evidence that he may have been aware something was going on, there isn’t enough evidence to prosecute him in a court of law, which isn’t to say he is necessarily innocent of any wrong doing, but he’s not guilty in a legal way.
So you’re just seeing people pulling the levers that they’ve seen in admissions, test scores obviously play some sort of role, athletics play some sort of role, and so families are just kind of trying to maximize their own opportunities. In this case we have a few actors who clearly crossed the legal boundary, but there are plenty of families who come up to that line without going over that I think may have exacerbated some of the issues we’re seeing.
Dr. Kornhaber: Yeah. The other building a little bit on what Rafael said, there are families who want to do things within the system that are murky. But I think part of the issue again is what is the system and how could the system be reconfigured so that there’s less incentive or less reward for gaming the system. So part of my issue with this whole scam is that it builds on the hollowing out of a sense that education is a public good. Something that should be available and obtainable without detriment or a loss to others. So you can use the system, you can benefit personally from the system, but you don’t have to elbow everyone out of the way to access the system, knock them down and take them out. So we’ve now got, and some people attribute this to Ronald Reagan and the uproar over free speech at Berkeley, we’ve now got a system of higher education, both public and private. I think selective public education as well as private selective education that is seen as a private good. This is a family issue. Families have to and students have to compete. They have to knock other people out of the way. And when you win, oh, knock everybody out as much as possible except for yourself, then what you’ve got left is kind of selfish motivation. And we need a system in which we can reconfigure this as a public system for the public good. Especially selective public higher education like UCLA. UT was implicated in the scandal. Those things should be more open than they are.
Logan: So I’m wondering about the role specifically of testing in potentially reconfiguring the system of access. So do you think that colleges should abandon standardized tests or maybe rethink their role in some way in the admissions process?
Dr. Kornhaber: Well, a lot of colleges have done that. Some seven or eight hundred colleges. Fair Test keeps a record of which ones, and some of what’s been found is that the scores that are reported keep those colleges highly selective. So the good test takers, or good gamers, we don’t know which anymore, report their scores and other people are judged without their scores. So that is happening. The, the diminution of the importance of tests. On the other hand, if it’s an optional system where you can report your scores, there’s still the incentive to game the test taking.
Jeremy: That makes sense. That’s interesting. There’s a lot to unpack there. Shifting to the legality of it all. I’m fascinated by this murky line that you brought up Mindy and then you build off of Rafael because massive donations are fairly commonplace by wealthy individuals at universities. You know, it’s not unusual for a wealthy family to have a building built with her name on it the year before their student applies to go there. There was a Vice interview last night where they interviewed a lower income student at Yale who talked about, in her words, the affirmative action policies for the rich. So on the one hand it’s not illegal to donate to these universities, but where’s the boundary between legal donations and almost good old-fashioned bribery here? How might we think about the legal issues and tangled in that?
Rafael: The legal issues. In a case like this, you would need to demonstrate a quid pro quo transaction where a wealthy donor makes a donation explicitly under the understanding that this donation will purchase a seat for their family member, their son, their daughter, whoever they’re giving this donation for. Proving that is very difficult. In the wake of this whole scandal, I know that The Chronicle of Philanthropy, released an article talking about whether the IRS is properly funded to even investigate fraud in the nonprofit sector. So this may have been one case where the Department of Justice did come upon enough evidence that warranted an investigation and subsequently some criminal complaints, but we don’t know the exact degree of misuse of the nonprofit domain and the tax exemptions and the tax deductions that come along with working in this realm. We know that a lot of the money was channeled through nonprofits. The celebrities, I believe Will Singer also had a nonprofit, the Key Worldwide Foundation. So it will be interesting to see whether this incident sparks enough political motivation in legislatures to issue some sort of federal policy, either increasing the resources that the IRS has to investigate these or increasing the punishments for people who are found guilty of violating some of these laws, both of which in theory would work as deterrent for people engaging in explicitly illegal behavior.
Dr. Kornhaber: This again reminds me of the importance of public support for institutions. Right? So as we withdraw from support of higher education, either directly through our tax dollars or through shrinkage in NSF or NIH, we open up spaces where there is a kind of philanthropic miasma you can donate and you can expect something to happen maybe, but you can’t actually ask for it. Right? But I think there is a kind of winking, here’s my hundred million or here’s my $70 million according to Dr. Dre and I believe my daughter got in unaided. So it’s almost a delusional or self-deception kind of behavior. If somebody gives that much money, they’re likely, although I don’t know for a fact, they’re likely flagged in some way by admissions and the way a legacy might be flagged. I don’t know that.
Rafael: And so we actually do know for a fact, so the Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard case, one thing that very significantly came out of that was a massive amount of discovery that resulted in Harvard turning over just so many documents about their admission process. And in some of those documents it’s revealed that there is some sort of flagging for the children of donors or for the family member of donors. So we know for a fact that Harvard has engaged in this and we all kind of understand intuitively that it’s not only Harvard engaging in this, um, but that’s interesting in part because we know this is happening and the fact that this is happening affects the way we think about admissions generally. So back to Students for Fair Admissions. The expert economist that testified on behalf of Students For Fair Admissions, based on the data that he was looking at, actually pulled out of his sample athletic applicants, legacy applicants, and any applicants who were flagged as potential donors.
And then the economist ran their analysis to find that there was discrimination against Asian Americans. Again, ignoring how this data might be skewed by pulling out this very significant population that has rates of acceptance, sometimes up to five times higher than other applicants. So this is definitely happening. We don’t know. And again, admissions kind of operates as this black box. We don’t know what is happening in a lot of admissions offices. They’re not privy to turn that information over, but we all kind of intuitively understand that a lot of these folks are not giving their money solely out of altruistic interests.
Dr. Kornhaber : Can I ask a question? How would you prove that it’s a quid pro quo?
Rafael: That’s hard and you almost would need some sort of email in which somebody says, I have given you this money, my family member will get in, correct? And then a response saying, “Yes.” The evidentiary standard for this is pretty high. And that’s part of what makes it very difficult to determine whether or not something illegal has actually happened. A lot of these institutions will probably take care to be ambiguous as they accept these gifts and what these gifts might mean for future donors.
Logan: So we’ve talked a little bit about the possibility of a quid pro quo relationship, how difficult that is to establish. And I’m hoping we can maybe put that in conversation with some recent research by Raj Chetty and his colleagues. They were looking at upward mobility of students through various types of institutions. One of the findings that came out of that study, I believe it was a 2017 study, was that, what they were calling the Ivy League Plus, so the Ivy League institutions and similarly selective institutions, were successful about 60% of the time if you’re a student coming in from the lowest income quintile in moving to the highest income quintile. So it seems that these highly selective institutions can be economic mobility engines, but on the other hand, it costs a lot of money to fund them. Research intensive institutions and doctoral level education is expensive.
An article in the Atlantic last week was commenting on, the possibility that there’s a conflict of interest that universities that are highly selective may have. On the one hand seeking to provide access to upward economic mobility, but on the other hand, needing income to support their research, their research goals. How might we think about these potentially competing goals of providing access but seeking to, perhaps work the admissions process in a way that allows for these types of donations that are not necessarily quid pro quo, but is there a conflict of interest there and how might we think about that?
Rafael: The first thing that comes to mind when you mentioned that is how do we measure institutions and their value or their worth, and I think this comes back to the concept of prestige, which is very murky and very difficult to measure, but a lot of people argue is what institutions pursue They want to be prestigious institutions and part of how you do this is by having a lot of research occur on your campus. Part of how you do this is by having an entering class with a strong academic profile, which is often reported in your 25th, 50th and 75th percentile. What that means is that schools have a little bit less than 25% of the class at the bottom where they don’t have to consider academic profile the same way, because the bottom 25% is not going to show up in their report at statistics.
And so you have a lot of gray area here where you can consider sort of what financial strings might this candidate bring along with them to campus in a way that will help maximize potential future donations while also not risking the academic profile of the class. So that gives institutions and motivation to include some students into their classes that they know come from wealthy families who might someday give, without having to risk their academic profile. I don’t know if that answers at all what you’re getting at. It was just something that came to mind.
Logan: I think it does.
Jeremy: It speaks to the vicious cycle that seems to occur when research is showing that these universities are providing economic mobility, but to get into them in the first place, they’re selecting out maybe lower income students for the sake of prestige and money.
Dr. Kornhaber: I think another source of prestige is the size of the endowment, right? And so, and of course the endowment generates revenues for things that are central to the university, but I only got into faculty life later, or academic life later, and I always see myself as somewhat of an outsider to the system having not been prepared for advanced degrees along the way and just gotten lucky. So one of the [things I wonder about] is why do you have to do things, certain things in higher education beyond research, teaching, and service? For example, why do you have to continually put granite countertops in public spaces? I know this sounds very strange, but more and more I’m seeing high end or chairs that costs $150 in classrooms that roll around. I think there is by way of demonstrating prestige, certain gloss that we could do away with.
We don’t need to have granite marble floors in certain buildings. I think there is and you know, and there have been scholars who have written about the need to have lazy pools and things like this to attract students. I’m kind of a monastic person. I think the scholarly life can be accomplished without a lot of gloss, but the need to attract those higher end students, the need to maintain a veneer of prestige as well as actual prestige kind of feeds on this money hungry machinery. I would like to see a byway of systems, a kind of agreement across universities that we are no longer installing granite countertops. We are no longer having lazy rivers, but they’d all have to agree to it because if someone says, ‘No, I’m going to have a lazy river,’ or ‘No, I’m going to have the latest gym equipment for the students,’ then they’ll all do that. It would be nice to lower the gloss and go more monastic. I admit I am atypical.
Rafael: No, and I think that that might be an idealistic goal, but whether it’s realistic, a lot of evidence indicates that wealthier folks are very, very willing to pay the premium for the lazy river, the climbing wall, for these things that are ostensibly unrelated to the institutional mission of teaching, learning, and research.
Jeremy: So when we get to the end of this conversation though, you know, the biggest question here is what are some ways or policies going forward that might mitigate a situation like this or the chances of a scandal like this from happening again?
Dr. Kornhaber: I have so many ideas about admissions, partly because I was, I was lucky enough to be asked to write a paper for the Soros Foundation years ago. I was thinking a lot about this both fifteen years ago and all through the past fifteen years. One thing we have to remember as researchers is when you have very little variability, you no longer have predictive power. So there’s so little variability left in the SAT scores for these high end institutions that they’re not very useful as predictors within that institution. And then we also have incredibly high GPAs among a lot of students, so they’re not predictive anymore. So I could see a system, which again maybe crazily idealistic, where we say, and I wrote this up among eight other options, but given the current scandal, I think we could say we’re going to have a standard maybe in the 1250, 1300 range as a lower bar. That’s still a couple standard deviations above the mean. You’re catching pretty bright people there and above. And of course, then we might be catching more of those people who would be thinking, “I can’t compete in this institution. My parents didn’t have Mr. Riddle taking my tests to the early Voldemort. My parents couldn’t send me to all of these enrichment programs or hire the $400 an hour tutor.” So maybe we’d set this threshold at 1250, 1300 somewhere in there, which is attainable with a lot of work and some good luck without a lot of other pressures. And we’d have a GPA that would be not 4.5 or 4.7, which you can get in state high, but maybe it would be 3.7, you’d still have to be working and we’d look at the kind of courses that were, which is typical in admissions, look at the kind of courses available in that high school. Did the student do well in the more rigorous courses that were available? And then once you have that big pool, throw everybody’s name, applicants’ names down a stairwell, and whoever lands on the right stairs, they get in with a few adjustments. You know, you need an oboist or you need a pole vaulter but I wouldn’t look inside of any folders for flagging. That’s highly, highly idealistic. But I think you would assemble a diverse class. I think you would see universities then serving as a public good. I think there would be less incentive for cheating and for gaming and we’d have potentially more economic opportunities relative to the very few people who are from true poverty who get into these institutions now. So that’s my, that’s my number one way given the scandal. But if you want to read the paper, I can share it.
Rafael: And I, and I think that has some important implications for our whole concept of merit. And so because we traditionally associate folks who went to these very selective institutions is having earned their way there and having earned their way through, we now ascribe a certain amount of value to these institutions. And if we were to realize this is so random, at the end of the day, this is such a toss of the dice for so many people and it’s not the most significant thing that they got into Harvard or Yale or Princeton and said they had to go to Brown. Like, heaven forbid. And again, it gets back to this whole, we have I think, overvalued some educational backgrounds and undervalued everything else as a result because if you didn’t get into one of these top institutions, it doesn’t matter. When in reality a lot of these folks would be just as successful attending a state or regional a local university and would probably find themselves in pretty similar economic circumstances after graduating.
Dr. Kornhaber: Yes. And there’s research to support that.
Jeremy: Either of you have any final thoughts as we wrap up on this? Either on the scandal itself, its implications for the equity of students moving forward?
Dr. Kornhaber: I have an endless thoughts about this. Honestly. One of the recent issues among the wealthy, uh, or critiques of the wealthy is the idea of opportunity hoarding. So Richard Reeves has written a book called Dream Hoardersin which he’s not taking aim, especially at the top 1% unlike occupies taking aim at the top 20%, which includes almost all faculty beyond the assistant level, once they’ve paid off their school debts. I think as a society we need to reduce the incentives that are built into the tax system so that more and more accumulates to people who already have a lot and we need to turn it around a little bit. So people who are in schools that aren’t phenomenal have more more tax benefits so they can do the enrichment afterschool stuff. Maybe they do want to hire a tutor. So we need to think about how our tax system supports these kinds of perversions of meritocracy.
Rafael: Yeah, absolutely. I think the tax code as it exists right now incentivizes the wealthy to give more than it does the poor. So I know based on my graduate student stipend, I’m not eligible to itemize my deductions. So any charitable donations I give are completely out of my pocket. And somebody who earns a considerable amount of money can make the same donation I can, but will in fact pay less for it. And there’s also evidence that the wealthy give their money differently than the poor. And so, when we think charitable giving, that is more like giving to churches, to soup kitchens, giving to homes, you see more of that giving happening in lower income brackets. A lot of your mega rich donors are giving to higher education or giving to museums or giving to research hospitals. Those are the big three. And I argue that there is something of a disconnect between those kinds of elite cultural institutions and the charitable giving that these tax codes are supposed to inculcate.
Logan: There’s so much more that we could say on all of these topics. And so we hope that all of you who are listening will be able to engage with us on our social media channels. Be sure to follow us @AJE Forum on Twitter, look for AJE forum on Facebook and be sure to check out ajeforum.com for our latest articles. We want to thank both of you for speaking with us today and thank you for your time.
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