Remember the "Varsity Blues" scandal of five years ago? If you don’t — and given everything that has happened in the world since, you very well may not — we can recap briefly: A college consultant named Rick Singer was charged (and later convicted) of bribing college admissions officers on behalf of well-connected clients. There were fake photos of water polo competitions, ringers taking the SATs, and a cast of chief executives and Hollywood types. The actress Felicity Huffman went to jail for 11 days. As corruption goes, the stakes were pretty small potatoes. But in retrospect Varsity Blues feels like a turning point. Five years ago, the idea that spots in top colleges were available for sale fed into all the misgivings that ordinary people had about academia and power. It was a little chink in the armor of meritocracy, confirming the suspicion that entry into the ruling class just required greasing the right palm.
I think Varsity Blues would play out differently now. Merely five years ago, the value and prestige of top universities was largely unquestioned. Since then, the standing of universities has been dramatically eroded. Middle-class parents, humiliated at coming hat-in-hand to the financial aid office to find out how much of a discount they can get off colleges' outsize — and largely fictional — sticker prices, wonder what value they are getting. Conservatives dismiss universities as factories for indoctrination, while liberals believe that the whole idea of meritocratic admissions is a fig leaf for upper-class power hoarding. Some consultants still charge parents tens of thousands of dollars to get their kids into college. But increasingly, the whole edifice of American college admissions seems like a relic of a collapsing era. At the time of the scandal, no one seemed to ask, "Is it even worth it?" Now that feels like the very first question that comes to mind.
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