Snapshot: This case examines the influence of family wealth on college admissions in the wake of the 2019 college admissions bribery scandal. While bribery is plainly unethical, the moral status of other instances where families spend money to help their children secure spots at selective colleges is less clear. What are the ethical implications of family expenditures—from music lessons to SAT tutoring to large donations—that can make students more attractive to colleges and universities?
Background: In 2019, news broke that a number of wealthy parents had secured admission for their children at prestigious universities by paying off standardized test officials to falsify their students’ scores and university team coaches to recruit their children—many of whom had little or no experience with the sport. These cases plainly represented instances of morally impermissible bribery: wealthy parents paid college counselors and university officials to provide illicit support for their children’s college applications they otherwise would not have received. Unsurprisingly, Americans responded to this news with a mix of outrage, disappointment and a dose of cynicism--don’t all wealthy families pay to get their children into elite colleges one way or another?
While much of the reporting on what came to be known as the ‘Varsity Blues’ scandal focused on the boldness and scope of the plot, including the involvement of more than one celebrity couple, this news also started conversations about the other, legal ways parents use money to improve their students’ college admissions prospects. Some parents, for instance, hire SAT and ACT tutors to raise their kids’ test scores and college counselors to workshop their application essays. Others send their students to expensive sports clinics or pay for years of music lessons, knowing full well that extracurricular excellence will almost certainly help their child’s application stand out. Many upper middle-class and wealthy families choose where to live and pay premium housing prices to gain access to highly-ranked public schools—or they simply buy their way out of the public system altogether by sending their children to highly-regarded private schools. Those with the means may even offer generous donations to universities in order to curry favor with admissions officers. Each of these examples represent a legal way to use wealth to improve a student’s college admissions chances. Together, they raise questions about the ethics of the college admissions process as a whole--should a family’s wealth play any role at all in tilting the balance of the college admissions lottery in their child’s favor?
This web page aims to do two things: (1) offer an entrypoint for thinking about the ethical dilemma(s) raised by both the ‘Varsity Blues’ scandal as well as the more mundane ways that wealth can tilt the college admissions process towards the wealthy and (2) provide resources--including discussion questions and links for further reading--that readers can use to help facilitate their own discussions of the ethical dilemma(s) wealth and income inequality pose for college admissions.. Readers can use this case to contextualize their understanding of how money influences each step of the college admissions process, and they can use the resources and discussion questions provided in later sections to help structure their own discussions.
The Dilemma: Over the course of their students’ K-12 academic experiences, wealthy families make a number of expenditures that will ultimately improve their child’s college admissions outcomes. Some of these expenditures are expressly made with an eye towards college--private SAT tutoring, independent college counseling--while other expenditures only incidentally support their children’s college prospects--sports camps and service trips, for instance. In both cases, wealthy families tilt the scales of opportunity in the favor of their children, undercutting our capacity to collectively realize equal educational opportunity. Which of these expenditures, if any, are morally permissible? What types of spending should the state (or, perhaps, universities themselves) restrict?
In an effort to preserve the equality of opportunity in the college admissions process, the state could, for instance, cap private donations to colleges and universities. We might hope that a policy like this would prevent families from using their wealth to sway a admissions committees towards admitting their child for reasons that have no plausible relation to the merit of the applicant herself. However, this type of restriction does little to address the other ways in which family spending can provide wealthier students with a leg uo in college admissions. Moreover, we might also worry that a broad ban on private donations improperly infringes on an individual’s basic liberty interest in supporting causes important to them.
This line gets even blurrier when we consider how family spending well before high school can also contribute to inequalities in the competition for spots at selective colleges and universities. Limiting a family’s spending on their student’s academic experience before high school arguably raises additional ethical concerns. For instance, restricting parents from spending money on basketball clinics may ensure the student from the upper-middle class family enjoys fewer benefits over the student who must forgo these clinics altogether to care for their younger siblings while their parents work, but we might also think such an intrusion by the state represents a form of undesirable “levelling down” and, perhaps, an unjust intrusion into family life.
Another option for limiting the influence of wealth in college admissions is for states to redraw school district boundaries and abolish private schools altogether, greatly reducing the ability of wealthier parents to pay for access to schools and districts with more resources. Such sweeping changes to the school system could potentially help ensure students from different backgrounds are educated together and ensure a more equitable playing field. Changes like these, however, still raise questions about state intrusion into the private financial decisions of individual families. Moreover, policy changes like these arguably cut against the longstanding American belief in the importance of local control of schooling. .
The section below provides more context about how money influences each step of the college application and admission process. Each subsection includes links to articles that provide a variety of perspectives on the role of money and wealth in college admissions followed by a set of discussion questions designed to help facilitate meaningful ethical reflection. Readers may find the discussion questions most useful after reading the articles since the questions are tailored to the perspectives provided in the linked texts. Readers may also want to review the Justice in Schools discussion protocol as an additional resource for facilitating meaningful discussion on ethical dilemmas.
A Walk through the College Admissions Process
Inside the Admissions Committee