August 3, 2009, 05:00 PM ET

Commonplace Corruption

As the Chicago Tribune reported a couple of days ago, University of Illinois trustee Lawrence Eppley has resigned "against the backdrop of a state investigation of a shadow admissions system that gave preferential treatment to students with ties to trustees, politicians and deep-pocketed donors. About 800 undergraduate applicants had their names placed on clout lists, known internally as Category I, at the Urbana-Champaign campus during the last five years, a Tribune investigation found. Dozens more received special consideration from the law school and other graduate programs."

Now, it'd be easy enough to use this merely as a point for Illinois in the Great American Corrupt-o-Thon it seems to be contesting against the state of New Jersey , or to chuckle at the inevitable appearance of the words "whose law firm donated $105,000 to Blagojevich's campaigns." But really, isn't the only out-of-the-ordinary thing here that the people in Illinois were dumb enough to give their list an official name? It's been well-documented that many selective colleges and universities use their admissions processes in all manner of self-serving and untoward ways as a means of garnering money, fame, and political power. Admissions are the coin of the realm in elite higher education and it's not surprising that institutions can, if they so decide, spend it for corrupt purposes. What's surprising is that they usually get away with it and manage to keep their elevated reputations intact.

The justifications for this kind of behavior are always the same, and always absurd. In no particular order:

The students admitted through our corrupt process were qualified (variant: they can "do the work."

Any selective college turns away tons of students who were, in theory, "qualified" to attend, in the sense that they met some absolute minimum standard (not that you'd be able to actually find said standard if you asked.) That's more or less the definition of "selective." The best 500 students Urbana-Champaign rejected last year were probably all but indistinguishable from the worst 500 students they accepted. All if this happens well inside the margins of "qualified," however defined. The question is who was most qualified, and admissions is a zero-sum game. The whole point of accessing the corrupt process is to bump out someone more qualified than you, otherwise why spend the money and/or political capital?

Only a small number of students were admitted through our corrupt process (variant #1: "they only get a little push"; variant #2 "only if all else was equal"). Being a little bit corrupt is like being a little bit pregnant. If you only break the law a couple of days a year, you still go to prison. Etc. I imagine most colleges and universities have someone in the philosophy department who could explain the ethics here.

Admitting students through our corrupt process benefits the university financially via donations and state appropriations, which are in turn used for virtuous purposes such as need-based financial aid. College admissions is, again, a zero-sum game, and I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that well-qualified low-income students generally don't have a special in with the governor or the trustees or the development office. It doesn't do a low-income students much good to drop extra money into the need-based aid fund if they can't access it because they weren't accepted because their slot went to the less-qualified child of some guy who wrote some other guy a big fat check. Education Sector could do all kinds of wonderful new education policy things if I robbed a bank this evening and deposited the money in our account, but that doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.

There's no official list or policy, our development people and admissions people just, you know, sit down to talk from time to time. Over coffee. To talk about the weather. And things. Right.

In the end, these practices persist because they're a kind of genteel, behind-closed-doors corruption, veiled by the deliberate vagueness of the admissions process and given a sheen of respectability by institutions that we look to for intellectual and cultural leadership. A lot of the people in positions of power within the government and certain business circles benefitted from these policies and hope their children will too. I imagine they think of themselves as generally moral people and aren't all that interested in thinking otherwise.

But that doesn't make it any less wrong. There's a pretty simple test to apply here. Pretty much all selective colleges and universities have Web sites with information for applicants that include admissions criteria. My alma mater, for example, includes things like "strength of high school record," "depth and overall quality of application essay," "standardized test scores," "extracurricular activities," and "proven ability to think and act independently." Colleges should ask themselves: is this a complete list? Does it include items like "father runs a hedge fund" or "uncle recently gave the governor a lot of money" or "mother is long-time majority leader of state senate"? No? Then those kinds of things shouldn't matter in admissions. If you'd be embarrassed to write it down and put it on your Web site, there's a reason.

And, since you asked: No, I don't think affirmative action is a corrupt process per above. There's a difference between naked bribe-taking and contributing to larger social goals of diversity and justice.

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Comments

1. a4l8l1i8e9 - August 04, 2009 at 06:43 am

There's a powerful but misguided desire in our culture to rank everyone -- we seem to believe that given any two people, one of them is "best" or "most qualified." This is not a productive impulse.

2. rkitchner - August 04, 2009 at 07:42 am

This refreshingly candid article underscores the fundamentally flawed distinction between tax-paying (for-profit) and tax-dependent (not-for-profit) institutions that many educators and regulatory agencies stubbornly refuse to acknowledge. In making this statement I am not suggesting, much less alleging that America's outstanding public and private non-profit institutions are rife with corruption. However, the facts indicate that real problems exist in this sector, be it in the form of sleazy business practices, unethical administrators and faculty, or out-of-control athletic programs, none of which serve to protect the best interests of the taxpayers who support them or the consumers who trust them. In this regard, the tax-dependent education community is not unlike its tax-paying counterpart, with one important difference: the former are given a free pass by most state educational oversight legislation, while the latter are presumed to warrant such oversight in the name of consumer protection. The time for a more sophisticated approach to accountability in higher education certainly has arrived, and the first step is to remove the specious line of demarcation related to the source of a given institution's source of funding. Scandals in admissions, financial aid and athletics proves beyond question that maintaining an appropriate balance between the interests of learners and stockholders is equally challenging, regardless of how the term "stockholder" is defined.

3. pdavis - August 04, 2009 at 08:01 am

Wow, corruption in Illinois, what a novel concept. And now we have expanded that corruption to the White House.

4. edcrowe - August 04, 2009 at 09:12 am

Kevin Carey's commentary illustrates the problem of allocating a scarce good (admission to a university with more applicants than places for freshmen) through a murky process that continues to exist at all non-open admission institutions of higher education because the "buyer" (the student and his/her family) has internalized the advertising come-on developed by the seller over years and years of practice. Overt corruption of this process, of the kind apparently practiced by U of Illinois senior administrators, trustees, and elected officials is only one of the problems that higher education refuses to face in admissions. There's athletics, affirmative action, legacy admits, etc., etc. All of these undermine credibility of the university, because all of them function and flourish in a netherworld of admissions practices often justified by the academic in arrogant and self-serving rhetoric. As Finley Peter Dunn's Mr . Dooley said in another context: "If ye'd turn on th' gas in th' darkest heart, ye'd find it had a good raison for th' worst things it done, a good varchous raison, like needin' th' money or punishin' th' wicked or tachin' people a lesson to be more careful, or protectin' th' liberties iv mankind, or needin' the money." Perhaps Transparency International could turn its attention to the worst cases of overt corruption, doing the public and the university a favor by exposing and helping to end them.

5. goxewu - August 04, 2009 at 09:28 am

"Education Sector could do all kinds of wonderful new education policy things if I robbed a bank this evening and deposited the money in our account, but that doesn't mean it's the right thing to do." "I don't think affirmative action is a corrupt process per above. There's a difference between naked bribe-taking and contributing to larger social goals of diversity and justice." In the first statement, Mr. Carey is saying that the ends do not justify the means. In the second, he's saying that they do. In the Illinois case, less qualified students were admitted over more qualified students in order for the university to curry favor with politicians who might help it get more money. In affirmative action, less qualified students are admitted over more qualified students in order help the university (and the state of Illinois, and, presumably, society in general) become more diverse. In Mr. Carey's metaphor, the Illinois admissions of less qualified students equals robbing a bank in order to buy a Bentley, and affirmative action admissions equals robbing a bank in order give the money to the poor. But both still involve, don't they, "robbing a bank"?

6. dulcie4 - August 04, 2009 at 12:03 pm

At a private college, trustees & admissions officers wouldn't pay any attention to the type of scandal search that U of I has been subjected to. This is getting so much attention because 1) it's a public university and therefore "belongs to the people"; 2)anything that can be tied to Blagojevich is good for a "tsk, tsk" these days; 3) this Chicago Trib is in bankruptcy and is frantically trying to ride any horse that will sell papers, even if it would have been worth only a ho-hum in pre-bankruptcy days.

7. jimlyttle - August 04, 2009 at 01:51 pm

I must be missing something. How is this different from Legacy applicants at Yale or Harvard?

8. drangie - August 04, 2009 at 01:56 pm

"I must be missing something. How is this different from Legacy applicants at Yale or Harvard?" It isn't, really.

9. crunchycon - August 04, 2009 at 02:17 pm

Yes, it is. Money is being contributed to the university for many if not most of those on "the list".

10. ledzep - August 04, 2009 at 08:00 pm

Well, yes, crunchycon, but "legacy admissions" keep alumni on the donor wagon. The transfer is more diffuse, rather than individuals having their spot purchased directly, but overall the university is exchanging a leg up in the admissions process for increased contact and leverage with a crucial pool of potential donors. That does leave open the possibility for non-wealthy alum kids to get in as legacies, but that doesn't change the overall structure, which is basically the same as what's being discussed here. Legacy admissions just has a more acceptable public face, because schools can say that they're interested in maintaining a certain tradition or identity, or type of community that is fostered by having multiple generations from the same families attend. That's not, perhaps, entirely specious in principle, but I would say it's almost entirely so in practice, especially at even moderately large institutions.

11. lmkillgore - August 05, 2009 at 09:33 am

Let's keep in mind that affirmative action isn't about admitting a less qualified applicant. It is about, in an instance where two candidates are relatively equally qualified, admitting a candidate whose group membership is in a historically disadvantaged category. Assuming any minority student is an "affirmative action baby" and not qualified denies what may be a student's considerable accomplishments (not the least of which may be resiliency in the face of adversity) and perpetuates that student's reduced status.

12. _perplexed_ - August 05, 2009 at 12:12 pm

"How is this different from legacy applicants at Yale or Harvard?" Yale and Harvard are private institutions, and barring discrimination against protected groups, they do not have to be fair or transparent in their admissions decisions. Public institutions do have such an obligation.

13. goxewu - August 06, 2009 at 01:37 pm

The weasel words in in lmkillgore's comment ("Brainstorm" editors: Could we please give the comments numbers again?) are "relatively equally qualified." As per "close, but no cigar," well, close but no cigar. College admissions, for instance, are based on the premise that some applicants are better qualified to be students than others. True, some instances are close calls, but the college makes them anyway. What affirmative action does is to say that in instances involving students of different races, close calls go to black or Latino students because of their race. And if we're going to use "membership in a historically disadvantaged category" as a euphemism for race, then we should include students of Chinese and Japanese ancestry. After all, we did have the Chinese Exclusion Act and Manzanar, not to mention pervasive racial prejudice against such Asians right up through the 1950s and most of the 1960s. But--whoa!--if we give those students a boost, then probably 90 percent of the freshman classes at Berkeley and 50 percent at Harvard or Yale and who knows how much elsewhere would be of Chines and Japanese descent. And then there are Jews and historically pervasive anti-Semitism. Ah, what a tangled web we weave, when first we attempt to paper over the obvious: affirmative action is racism (that is, deciding things on the basis of race)...well-meaning racism, but racism nevertheless. On the other hand, _perplexed_ should know that there's a difference between a private institution such as country club at Augusta which hosts the Masters golf tournament and a major university, which most likely accepts a lot of ogvernment money in the form of grants, tax breaks, students with Federal and State asistance, etc.