“A lot of this stems from how narrowly we define success,” she said.
In addition to criminal charges, Operation Varsity Blues has spurred class-action litigation. Students suing Yale University, Georgetown University, Stanford University and other schools caught up in the wide-ranging scheme contend the elite institutions “took the students’ admission application fees while failing to take adequate steps to ensure that their admissions process was fair and free of fraud, bribery, cheating and dishonesty.”
Todd Rose, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, predicts more revelations to come and doubts the charges will put an end to attempts to game the college-admission system.
“Anytime you create a system that has a very singular view of success, this will always happen,” he said. “It sort of guarantees not only cheating and corruption, but really, unhappy kids. As long as we treat higher ed like a designer handbag, it creates these incentives for corruption.”
Rose, who’s also co-founder of the Boston-based think tank Populace, thinks reform could start from the private sector. Top firms that make it clear they hire for ability and work ethic instead of focusing on a certain diploma, he said, could ease the frenzied competition for limited spots at a handful of prestigious colleges and universities.
“If we’re not willing to have the conversation about how we define success, this problem isn’t going away,” he said.