It’s a long accepted practice that star high school athletes have an edge in college admissions – assuming they’re really good and planning on playing sports in college. That’s more pronounced in revenue sports like football and men’s basketball, where a blue star recruit can mean millions of dollars in future athletic earnings. We’ve kind of accepted that a superstar quarterback might not need the same SAT scores as the rest of the incoming class.
But college admissions is about more than just big time TV sports. There’s a long and storied history of athletes in swimming, tennis, lacrosse, water polo – pretty much anything you can score on land and water – also getting preferential admissions, often to elite universities where acceptance rates currency in single digits. It won’t be the only thing that gets you into Dartmouth, but it’s hard to ignore the number of future Olympic swimmers at Stanford. Now, as a former Cornell track athlete – albeit not one that was good enough in high school to get much attention from my future college coaches – I fully understand trying to leverage your athletic skills towards your academic goals. I also understand everyone who’s critical of that process, including the long, long list of great students who may have been passed over for someone with lower grades and test scores.
That said, I think we all can agree that no matter what, people should never get easier admission to elite schools based on sports they pretended to play. That would be crazy. But truth is stranger than fiction, so that’s exactly what did happen in the salacious college admissions controversy coined “Operation Varsity Blues,” where some 50 people have been charged by the Justice Department for building a multi-million dollar college admissions bribery scheme. The accused include college coaches, academic consultants, and, of course, really rich parents trying to buy their kid’s way into top schools – like Yale, Stanford, Wake Forest, USC, and so on. And just to make it even more dramatic, two of the involved parents are actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin – who of course was Aunt Becky on Full House. In exchange for pretending these kids were faster and stronger than they actually are and need to be admitted, coaches got fat checks for both their personal and university accounts. That’s the Cliffs Notes version of the story – and using Cliffs Notes to not read seems almost quaint in comparison.
Faking athletic stardom was only one part of this crime. Also included was fabricating SAT scores, which is of course the plot of like 100 teen films. But it’s the sports part of this story that’s the most unusual. I think we all suspect that people buy test scores. Less assume they buy a tennis resume.
There are two prominent themes coming out this story – one fairly obvious, and the other less so. First, this scandal reinforces the vernacular that the rich and powerful can buy their way into the US News Top 20, maintaining the rigid class divide that’s brought us our upcoming political crisis known as the 2020 election cycle. This story is nothing new, even if it’s packaged in a particularly sexy story here.
The second theme is a bit less ubiquitous. It’s the idea that becoming an exceptional athlete in a sport besides football and basketball might give you entrée into the rarified air of the Ivy League and the like. Everyone knows the story about parents pushing their kids so they can chase a college scholarship for free tuition – a pursuit that’s typically fool’s gold. But we know less about parents pushing their kids in less profitable sports ventures – call them Olympic or even country club sports – so they can go to top schools. And not to in any way marginalize the efforts of these student athletes, but getting good at, say, tennis or lacrosse, usually takes a whole lot of money, dollars that, unlike football, won’t be repaid in scholarships or pro sports. It’s another way that people with money can take a path unavailable to those with less – kind of like doing high school summer enrichment and community service instead of getting a part time job. It’s how schools like Williams and Amherst vie for multiple Division III national titles in a long list of sports, contested by students who, unlike those in this current scandal, actually are really good at their sport. But still quite often come from fiscal privilege. Whether you think that’s fair depends probably on your background and world view. As someone who played college sports at a school they viewed as aspirational, I’m probably not the most objective. But at the very least, it should remind us that the problems with college sports don’t simply come at the top in football and basketball. And when it comes to getting into elite schools, you can never be too rich or too fast.