They’re Already Rich. Why Were These Parents So Fixated on Elite Colleges?

Wealth. Connections. Even, in some cases, fame. The parents indicted in the sweeping admissions-bribery scheme unveiled this week seem to have had everything going for them.

But they’ve been charged with mail fraud by the U.S. Justice Department for paying millions of dollars to an organization whose methods included cheating on college entrance exams and having applicants pose as recruited athletes to secure their children’s admissions to selective colleges, like Yale and Stanford Universities and the University of Southern California.

Why would they go to such great lengths to get their children into an elite college? Here are some possibilities.

The Measure of a Good Parent

The admissions process is often harder on parents than it is on their children, says James W. Jump, director of college counseling at St. Christopher’s School, in Richmond, Va. It may test their beliefs, he says – about parenting, about college, and about their own children. “It’s easy to believe where your kids go to college is a measure of how good a parent you are,” he said. “Which is ridiculous.”

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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Ridiculous or not, the idea is certainly pervasive. That’s what Jessica Calarco, an assistant professor of sociology at Indiana University at Bloomington, takes away from the alleged bribery scheme. “If anything, this scandal shows that it has gotten somewhat harder to game the system,” said Calarco, whose recent book, Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School, details the ways parents use schools to their advantage. “That’s because so many more people are playing the game.”

The ranks of the “mundanely privileged” – the doctors, lawyers, accountants, and, yes, professors – make a whole host of life decisions with their children’s college options in mind, Calarco said. Parents “see their own self worth in terms of their kids’ success,” she said. And they define success in narrow terms: “Can you get your kid into Harvard?”

The same pressures, Calarco said, exist for parents as privileged as those implicated in the scandal. “Even if they’re super rich,” she said, “they’re not a good parent unless their kid is successful.”

‘Curling’ Parents

People used to talk about helicopter parents, said Jump, the college counselor. These days, he said, the term is “curling parents,” a reference to the Olympic sport. Parenting, in other words, is no longer about hovering over one’s children. It’s about sweeping problems out of their way.

The desire to insulate children from problems also emerged in Calarco’s research. She interviewed a mother who said, “I just don’t want my kids to suffer.” That’s a nearly universal sentiment. But in this particular example, Calarco said, it was the mother’s explanation for why she would run her children’s homework to school if they forgot it at home.

If that’s your definition of suffering, then not getting into your top-choice college is a real hardship.

The desire to keep one’s offspring happy may also explain why the some of the parents implicated apparently worked to conceal their efforts from their children, Calarco said. Admission only feels good when it feels deserved.

No serious observer of college admissions would ever describe it as meritocratic. Just about everything colleges evaluate in their applicants – from standardized-test scores, to the difficulty of their high-school schedule, to their extracurricular participation – is partly a measure of the opportunities available to them. And that’s before they consider parents’ alumni status or ability to give a major gift.

But the idea that admissions rewards talent and hard work is hard to shake in the wider world.

“Most people at a place like USC were born on third base,” said Matt Chingos, who directs the Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute. But if you get in, he said, “at least you feel like you hit a triple.”

Status Anxiety

Admissions mania isn’t just about keeping one’s children happy, says Lois Weis, a distinguished professor of educational leadership and policy at the University at Buffalo. More than anything, she says, it runs on anxiety. “It is arguably the case,” said Weis, whose book Class Warfare is about class positioning and the college-admissions process, “that the anxiety is a rational – not wonderful, but rational – response to what people are perceiving.”

The global economy has changed, said Weis, and so has America’s position in it. “People with any means at all,” she said, “are incredibly worried that they’re not going to be able to sustain their own class position with their children.”

The best way to shore up class position? College. Education, Weis said, is increasingly a form of capital “thought to accrue to families.”

But just as an elite education has become more important, Weis said, it’s gotten harder to come by. The most prestigious colleges still enroll lots of privileged students, but they’re no longer simply competing with a fixed number of applicants a lot like themselves. A phone call from the counselor at the expensive private school probably won’t be enough to open the door to Harvard.

True one-percenters, Weis said, are the only ones who don’t share this worry. And while the families implicated in the scandal are rich, they don’t appear to be that rich.

Laura Hamilton, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California at Merced, agreed that these families may have been grappling with their limitations. They might not have had legacy status, or the ability to make the kind of donation that provides an edge in admissions, said Hamilton, author of Parenting to a Degree.

“They are feeling relative disadvantage,” Hamilton said. “Which is ridiculous, when you take it out of the world they’re in.”

The alleged behavior of parents who participated in the scheme may be extreme. But the impulse behind it, Hamilton said, is broadly shared. It’s the same one, she said, that drives families in the top 20 percent to send their children to private schools, or switch them into the classroom of the “best” teacher. “People use what they’ve got to their advantage,” she said, “at every sort of level.”

Leveraging Advantage

What does all of this parental effort add up to? The country has thousands of colleges. Experts agree that it’s possible to get a good education at quite a few of them.

One view of elite colleges assumes that they are the nation’s most challenging institutions. These places are the best, this view holds, and society should ensure that the best students go. But really, argues Awilda Rodriguez, an assistant professor in the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan, elite colleges are about ease. They smooth the path to everything graduates pursue later.

Rodriguez sometimes reflects on the fact that decisions she made as a teenager continue to matter. “I won’t ever not be a Princeton Tiger,” she said. Sure, it’s possible to get into a good graduate school or land a prestigious job without “Princeton” on one’s résumé. But having it there opens doors.

“You’re able to leverage this privilege in all of these overt and subtle ways, if you so choose,” Rodriguez said, “for the rest of your life.”

And it was that privilege, perhaps, that the parents were ultimately paying for.

Beckie Supiano writes about teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.