Long after the spectacle is over, when the rogue coaches and television actresses have made their final legal pleas, the fallout from the admissions-bribery scheme in which they’ve been implicated will live on.

It has exposed too much, confirmed too much.

Anyone who suspected that the game was rigged can find new evidence in the scandal, which showed how wealthy parents, including a couple of celebrities, paid off coaches and testing administrators to buy their children’s way into the likes of Stanford, Yale, and Georgetown. Those institutions enroll only a tiny fraction of college students, suggesting that the scandal’s broad resonance supersedes personal connections to highly selective universities. It has tapped into populist skepticism about money and power.

Criminal prosecutions stemming from the admissions scheme have been limited to a few dozen parents, coaches, and William (Rick) Singer, the college consultant who masterminded it. That narrow scope has allowed university leaders to distance themselves from the scandal, characterizing their institutions as the unwitting victims of a few bad actors. But that won’t forestall tough questions about the codependent relationship between the nation’s top-tier colleges and the power elite who fuel their endowments, finance their buildings, and willingly pay full freight for their children to attend.

Faculty members see it every day. In his three decades as a sociology professor at Wake Forest University, Ian Taplin says, he has seen the privilege of the university’s student body rise in tandem with its national prestige. Wake Forest, which was targeted in the admissions scheme, was always a place where North Carolina’s “good and great” sent their children, Taplin says, in part because it offered elitism without the “nasty Yankees” one would encounter up the road at Duke. But now Wake is an international destination for the well-to-do, Taplin says.

“If you walk around campus, you’re most likely to get knocked down by a Range Rover or a high-end Audi,” he says.

Taplin, who researches luxury goods and writes about wine, recalls being taken aback when he asked a student about her go-to house vino.

“She said, Every now and again I’ll really splurge,” Taplin says, “but on a general day I drink Tignanello,” which runs about $100 a bottle. “This was a 22-year-old.”

Katie Neal, a spokeswoman for the university, says Wake Forest is making progress toward greater socioeconomic diversity. The average need-based scholarship, she says, is about $47,000, which covers 66 percent of the total cost of attendance. A decade ago, the average need-based scholarship covered only 45 percent of the total attendance cost.

Statistically speaking, however, most universities targeted in the bribery scandal are provinces of privilege, a recent study suggests. At Wake Forest, 22 percent of students come from families in the top 1 percent of the income scale, meaning that their parents earn more than $630,000 a year, researchers reported in 2017. In general, these are places where the “one percenters” on the income scale outnumber or rival the mere mortals in their midst.

Provinces of Privilege

The admissions-bribery scandal has renewed criticism that elite institutions cater to the wealthy. Of the six private universities involved, all have more students from families in the top 1 percent of the income scale than the bottom 40 percent.

About the Data: Family-income data come from Opportunity Insight’s report “The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility.” Families in the bottom 40 percent make less than $38,400 a year, families in the top 20 percent make at least $110,200 a year, and families in the top 1 percent make more than $630,500 a year. Data are based on the 1991 birth-year cohort, which is approximately the undergraduate Class of 2013. Enrollment data are from the National Center for Education Statistics for the fall of 2017, and include only first-time, degree-seeking undergraduates.

Jennifer L. Mnookin, dean of the law school at the University of California at Los Angeles, describes the scandal as the “criminal leading edge” of a much more deeply rooted problem. Appalling as it was to learn that a Bruins soccer coach had allegedly accepted bribes to help rich students, Mnookin says, “my students are just as concerned with the legal version” of privilege in admissions.

“There’s nothing illegal about spending the cost of a Tesla on a tutor,” she says. “And that will probably help.”

Unpaid Internships and Country-Club Sports

Volumes of research are devoted to how income inequality figures into college admissions. Test scores have been found to correlate with wealth, and rich families can afford college counselors or extracurricular activities that pave the road toward a highly selective “dream school.”

What professors on the nation’s elite campuses see, in addition to those structural advantages, are the subtle ways that people of means position their children for admission into top-tier institutions. Clayborne Carson, a history professor at Stanford, says he has been approached several times by parents who’ve asked if their high-school children could work for him — free — during the summer. He usually turns them down.

“Elitism perpetuates elitism,” says Carson, who is founding director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute. “Who can afford to do that? The ability to take an unpaid job as a way of getting into something you want to get into is an enormous advantage in our society. If you’ve already worked with a Stanford professor, that can’t hurt you when applying to Stanford.”

Explaining his scheme to prosecutors, Singer described the three doorways through which a prospective student can enter an elite college. The front door is for traditional admissions, the back door is for the children of wealthy donors, and the “side door” — Singer’s specialty — is for the beneficiaries of bribery.

At Stanford, which accepts only 4 percent of its undergraduate applicants, a former head sailing coach pleaded guilty to accepting bribes in exchange for falsely claiming that two prospective students were competitive sailors — giving them a leg up in the admissions process. That’s clear-cut fraud, but professors are concerned too about how advantageous it can be for a student to compete in a so-called country-club sport.

“Many of the sports that Stanford supports are themselves bastions of privilege,” Carson says. “If you don’t have coaching and lots of support, you’re not as likely to become a world-class swimmer or a world-class water-polo player or a gymnast.”

In many cases, the admissions scam was made possible because coaches had relatively unchecked authority to admit recruits who met minimum academic qualifications — an enormous advantage at highly selective institutions that reject several times as many students as they admit.

Admission Through the ‘Side Door’

Dozens of people, including famous actors, college coaches, and a university administrator, have been charged by federal prosecutors for their alleged roles in an admissions-bribery scheme involving Yale, Stanford, and other elite institutions.

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Ariela J. Gross, a law professor at the University of Southern California, says the system through which athletes are admitted deserves more scrutiny.

“The fact that there is an entirely separate route for athletic admissions that circumvents the normal application process makes it ripe for abuse,” says Gross, who is chair of Concerned Faculty of USC, a group that was formed in response to several recent scandals. “Should head coaches be, in effect, admissions directors, making final decisions?”

Athletics admissions in California drew renewed scrutiny last week, when the Los Angeles Times reported on an investigation, completed in 2014, into parents who had made donations to UCLA’s athletics department in exchange for their children’s admission. UCLA officials, citing a systemwide policy that prohibits any consideration of financial or political gain in admissions decisions, have since acknowledged that the investigation found several coaches had violated university policy in connection with the donations.

California lawmakers have introduced a slate of legislative proposals in response to the latest scandal, including tougher requirements for oversight of special admissions for athletes at public institutions. University of California campuses can admit up to 6 percent of their students “by exception,” a category reserved for athletes or those with special talents who fall short academically.

‘Climb or Die’

The bribery revelations have effectively put the entire selective-college admissions system on trial. Anthony P. Carnevale, a labor economist, describes the system as a flawed machine that most reliably manufactures successive generations of wealthy, white families.

“College provides access to good jobs, and our college-selection system is reproducing the inequalities in K-12 and projecting them into the labor market, which starts a whole new cycle,” says Carnevale, director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “The thing people are getting mad about is that the meritocracy looks like it’s locked in, so it’s an aristocracy.”

How did we get here? As Carnevale puts it, college leaders are “no more evil than the rest of us.” They don’t set out to prop up aristocracies. But for the most selective institutions, the business model demands a steady stream of high-achieving, high-income students, Carnevale says. Admitting those students, and rejecting a lot of others, drives up national rankings and creates a product that wealthy families are willing to pay for through tuition dollars, test preparation, and high-priced consulting.

“The business model is climb or die,” Carnevale says.

At the University of San Diego, where a former basketball coach was accused of accepting a bribe, the scandal has spawned larger questions about inequity in admissions.

“We’re going to dig deep,” says James T. Harris III, the university’s president. “Have we lost our values? Are we serving the right population?”

There is little indication, however, that many college presidents will seize on the crisis as a moment for truth telling. Leaders of the eight universities targeted in the scheme have made limited public statements, and their admissions directors have in large part avoided answering direct questions about the scandal. Of all the presidents whose institutions were named by prosecutors, Harris was the only one who agreed to speak with The Chronicle for this article.

San Diego is a bit of an outlier in the scandal because it is considerably less selective than the other institutions are. But Harris says the underlying issues that the controversy raises are broadly shared at colleges with competitive admissions standards.

“We really are trying to serve,” Harris says. “But what we get caught up in — everyone does — are the rankings, and the ratings, and the prestige. And what we really should be concerned about is the social good. How do you balance all of that is the question for every president, and every board and every faculty, in the country.”

When enrolling a class, most selective colleges are forced to make a series of trade-offs that allow some wealthy students with subpar qualifications to get in ahead of better-qualified students of modest means. Sandy Baum, an expert on higher-education finance, says those cases are real but rare.

“We all hate it,” says Baum, a nonresident fellow in the Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute. “It’s terrible from an equity perspective. It’s a big problem that affects a small number of people.”

As maddening as people find this scandal, it centers on a relatively tiny sector of higher education. As defined by Barron’s selectivity index, nearly all of the institutions involved are in the “Ivy Plus” or “Other Elite” category, where fewer than 8 percent of undergraduates enroll.

Elite private colleges make for easy targets in this populist era, but it’s a misconception to say that they “start by taking all of the richest people,” Baum says. At the same time, it would be naïve to think that money doesn’t matter at all.

“If you give $10 million,” Baum says, “you’re going to get in.”

In Through the Back Door

That $10 million opens what Singer described as the “back door,” an entryway for the children of donors or the politically connected. College presidents don’t like to talk about the back door, but there is little doubt that it exists — and every so often there’s proof.

In 2009 a Chicago Tribune investigation revealed the existence of a “clout” list for University of Illinois applicants with powerful friends or family members.

In 2015, William (Bill) C. Powers Jr., who was then president of the University of Texas at Austin, acknowledged that he had insisted that the flagship campus admit a few “must have” applicants each year. That’s the way admissions works at “virtually every selective university in America,” said Powers, who died in March.

E. Gordon Gee, a past president of two highly selective universities — Brown and Vanderbilt — told The Chronicle recently that any president under “truth serum” would concede that, in rare cases, donor connections make a difference in admissions.

“As president, I did have a certain number of quote-unquote ‘slots’ that I could use for very particular reasons to support a student’s candidacy,” said Gee, who is now president of West Virginia University. “I can’t remember how many I had — six or 10, something like that. And I didn’t use them very often, but I did. Did I ever have anyone offer me money? No.”

Gee did not elaborate on what might have compelled him to use a “slot,” but he said he guarded against any clear “quid pro quo” in which a donation was exchanged for a student’s admission.

“We tried to keep a very bright line there,” Gee said.

The bright lines are easy to see, which makes the bribery scandal so easy to condemn. But privilege in college admissions seldom crosses into the realm of pure criminality; it’s typically a lot grayer than that. It’s preferences for the children of alumni. It’s a good word from the president. It’s an unpaid internship with the right professor. It’s acing an admissions test on which better scores track with higher family incomes.

“The whole system is a pay-for-play system,” says Joseph A. Soares, a Wake Forest sociology professor who has written about family income in admissions. “But that’s America.”

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.

Data visualization by News Applications Developer Jacquelyn Elias.