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Judge Calls Cheating USC Parent 'Thief,' But Research Shows Quality Students Matter, Quality Schools Don’t

The real victims of the college admissions scandal aren’t the kids who didn’t get into USC. The real victims are the kids of the cheating parents.

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(Image via Getty)

Boy, am I probably writing on the wrong website to voice this opinion, but your alma mater? Yeah, it doesn’t really matter.

The college admissions scandal that first ripped through the headlines a few months ago has been a source of much-needed schadenfreude for the downtrodden masses out there. If you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard about this, the gist is that a bunch of B-grade celebrities and other rich people raised kids too dumb to succeed on their own, so the parents bought their kids’ way into elite colleges through various types of bribery and outright fraud. Now all those overprivileged wealthy parents are getting their comeuppance. Neat!

In the most recent example of the bloodthirsty crowd cheering as the deposed royals trudge up to the guillotine, a federal judge in Massachusetts handed down the harshest punishment yet among the 13 parents and coaches sentenced so far in the scandal. Well, really it was only six months in prison, a couple years on supervised release, 200 hours of community service, and a $150,000 fine. That’s hardly life-ruining for someone who had $450,000 to blow to get his daughter and son admitted into the University of Southern California as fake athletes. Still, the sentencing judge’s harsh words caught a lot of people’s attention on this one.

U.S. District Judge Nathaniel Gorton was quoted in USA Today as saying this parent was no better than a common thief, “because that’s what you are — a thief.”

“Higher education in this country aspires to be a meritocracy,” Judge Gorton went on. “Those who work the hardest or make the best grades rightfully get accepted into the best schools.”

But… do they? I have no problem at all with this guy’s sentence, or the damning words the judge had for him. He is a thief. Still, in reality, if you look at actual research and shelve 350 years of Harvard marketing, what this guy stole — two seats at USC — wasn’t worth very much to begin with, and the students who lost them probably ended up doing just fine anyway.

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A famous paper by Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger published in November 2002 by the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that after adjusting for student characteristics, like standardized test scores, the income benefits from going to a very selective institution of higher learning were “statistically indistinguishable from zero.” A 2017 study called Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility found that although there was not much difference for more affluent students, lower-income students who went to a truly elite school did have a better chance of reaching the top one percent than their comparable peers at good public universities. But the fact that the more affluent students were sitting in the same classes as the less affluent ones and realized no benefit compared to their peers at public institutions shows that the benefit for lower-income students likely was not any difference in the quality of teaching at the elite institutions. Rather, the more affluent students already had good enough networks in place to help them reach the top of the income distribution, whereas the lower- cincome students had to find an elite network through an elite school to reach the top one percent.

So, to state it in non-economist speak, the quality of the school doesn’t matter, the quality of the student does. Elite schools aren’t teaching people any better than reasonably good non-elite schools. While elite schools perhaps provide some networking benefits to people from less affluent backgrounds (at least those who want to reach the top one percent), mostly the elite schools are just attracting more of the students who would do well wherever they went.

Still need an anecdote to convince you? I went to Truman State University for my undergraduate education, and the University of St. Thomas School of Law for law school, and I have more saved than this elite law school graduate everyone freaked out about last month who subsists on beans. And, you know, I’m two years younger and enjoy the occasional New York strip.

My dad certainly wasn’t going to be buying my way into USC, or anywhere else, after his 30 years of laying carpet, two busted knees, and another 15 years working as a public-school custodian. And he didn’t have to. Because him and my mom did the harder work of raising someone who doesn’t need his parents to bribe his way through life.

So, if you ask me, the real victims of the college admissions scandal aren’t the kids who didn’t get into USC. Those bright young people will do just fine anyway. The real victims are the kids of the cheating parents. They’ll be comfortable in life materially. Yet, it’s a special kind of psychological hell to have no choice but to ride your parents’ coattails all the way to the grave.

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Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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