Steven Volk, March 13, 2019
What was your first reaction when you read the news about the FBI operation known as “Operation Varsity Blues” that took down the latest college admission racket? You know, the one that had wealthy parents paying bag-loads of money to get their kids – often without their knowledge – “guaranteed” admission to gold-plated universities, colleges to which they otherwise (i.e., in the real world of college applications) would not have been admitted. Um…what else is new? Isn’t this what happens all the time? As Libby Nelson put it, “the whole business of being admitted to elite colleges in America in 2019 — and make no mistake, it is a business — is corrupt all the way down.”
I must admit that my own reaction was to think: Oh, crap. Yet another reason for the public to throw shade on higher education. As if we needed another one. Nearly 60% of Republicans already think that higher education has a negative impact on “the way things are going in the country,” according to Pew survey. Sean Westwood of Dartmouth observed that “Colleges are simply seen as a production facility for Democratic beliefs and Democratic ideology.” (I probably should stop here to note that, according to the latest survey of undergraduate teaching released by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA, some 48% of the faculty identify as “liberal,” a number which has fallen from the 2010-11 survey. A large number, to be sure, but not even half of the faculty.) For their part, lower-income families will argue that the economic value (the “return-on-investment”) of a college education has fallen, although that is also inaccurate. And it probably doesn’t help that the media and the current occupant of the White House are fixated on challenges to free speech on college campuses that, studies show, are extremely rare, on controversies over “trigger warnings” that are daily, unremarked-upon, lead-ins to radio or TV coverage of difficult issues, or on cultural appropriation dust-ups which – also few in numbers – manage to live on for years, fueling the public imagination that all we do in college is argue about who can eat sushi and wear hoop earrings.
