By now the college admissions scandal is not breaking news, yet as new information continues to emerge, the scandal has been consistently on my mind. 50 people, among those being wealthy parents, athletic coaches and popular actresses, have been indicted in the largest college admissions fraud ever to be prosecuted in the United States. Those indicted have been charged with a variety of crimes, some being because they bribed exam proctors to allow their child extra time and/or correct the student’s answers and others being because they paid athletic coaches to falsely state that the student were being recruited for a team. At this point it is unclear whether the applicants knew about their parents’ wrong-doings and whether their status at the school will change, yet some students have voluntarily withdrawn, including Full Houses’ Aunt Becky’s aka Lori Loughlin’s daughters Olivia Jade and Isabella Rose Giannulli. The scandal has sparked outrage and questions over just how biased and discrimanatory the college admissions process really is.
As a current first year college student at a university involved in the scandal, the vigorous college admissions process is still fresh in my mind. Images of me going to the library to craft my many supplement essays and spending over ten hours one Sunday to send in my carefully proof-read applications, are burned into my memory. I recall spending days choreographing and perfecting my dance portfolio in order to make myself stand out from the other 13,000 plus applicants. When I think of college prep my mind plays back pictures of me taking an ACT practice test each week and tediously working through my mistakes with my picky, “tell it how it is” tutor. And let’s not forget the hours of extracurriculars, school work, office hours and community service that embodied my high school experience. All of this was to give me the best possible chance of getting in to my dream school. And it worked.
The college admissions fraud has been shocking, dissapointing and quite frankly, disgusting. It has disturbed me thinking about how attainable college admission and success is if you simply put your mind to it and work for it, meanwhile these parents instilled an idea within themselves and their children that this can be acheived not through hard work and passion, but by cheating, lying, and deceiving. Yet this scandal has also made me realize how lucky I was to have parents that pushed me throughout my lower school years and built a work ethic within me that has allowed me to not only get into a school that I love, but also thrive at. Thinking about all the students whose parents did not do this for them and instead bribed their way into prestigious, competitive universities honestly just makes me sad. Their parents didn’t believe in them. To all the parents who didn’t push their children, who bought them admission into a university they didn’t belong at or work for, who took a spot from a worthy student, I am embarassed for you. Not only did you ruin any chance your child had at success in the future, you have also proved to the world that you don’t, and never did, have faith in your own child.