Famous Actresses!!!!...Now That I Have Your Attention, Let's Talk About Education Inequality

Felicity Huffman

There's nothing quite as titillating as a celebrity scandal, and boy-howdy did we get a juicy one this week.  I don't wish ill on anyone, including Lori Loughlin or Felicity Huffman (Huffman is literally one of the actresses in the mosaic I made of my favorite performers on the background of my computer as I type this), but let's be real here-we all made the easy jokes yesterday when Aunt Becky and Lynette Scavo were two of dozens of millionaires charged with fraud for essentially bribing their children's way into elite universities across the country.  It's unclear now whether or not the actresses will actually face jail time, but their arrests highlight the true egregiousness of the education system in our country, and the way that the financially elite in America are able to abuse their wealth to ensure that their children have access to opportunities we simply cannot afford.  Don't let the TV stars distract you-the real story here is how broken higher ed truly is.

I am not a lawyer, but it doesn't require a law degree to understand what Loughlin, Huffman and the others charged were trying to accomplish here.  The accusations include spending tens, in some cases hundreds, of thousands of dollars to have falsified SAT scores, athletic records, and bribe college officials in order to ensure their children go to places like Yale, Stanford, and Georgetown.  This is a criminal enterprise, but perhaps it's surprising that celebrities would even need to cross the line into breaking the law, since there are so many legal loopholes that a millionaire would be able to abuse in order to get their children into an elite university.

For starters, there's legacy applications, and yes, Meghan McCain, these are truly a terrible system that you shouldn't be exempt from because you can't comprehend your own privileged existence.  Genetics is no indication of what kind of person or aptitude they have, and ensures that people who are part of an elite system get a leg-up for their children.  If you don't have that, there's of course money in general.  Yale University's annual tuition is nearly $48k, while Stanford's is just a thousand dollars less.  At a top four-year university, you're looking at $200k for your tuition even if you don't count books, room, and board; this is a cost that someone who used to make $325k an episode (Huffman's purported salary on Desperate Housewives toward the end of the series' run) is going to have less trouble coming up with compared to a parent earning minimum wage.

Lori Loughlin

Additionally, if you have the money you can legally bribe a school to get your children access.  There's no law against, say, donating $500k to Princeton out of the "goodness of your heart" and then suddenly the person whose name is on your new building also happens to match the name of an applicant.  There aren't laws against this unless you can prove it was intended as a bribe, but college admissions officers are aware of what keeps the lights on.  Millionaires have access to these avenues in the ways that regular people don't, and it comes with a cost for average citizens-you don't get to be as successful as the children of millionaires at the same rate of ease.

Because let's be real here-someone is going to care a helluva lot more about an applicant with Yale or Harvard on their resume than they are a lesser school.  You get access to those school's alumni networks as well as their prestige.  It's easier to get into a good grad school from elite universities, a self-perpetuating system where if you're in, you'll continue to succeed until you screw yourself over.  Large companies recruit more at universities like Duke or Georgetown than they would at more affordable universities, even if the talent might be just as strong.  It's already difficult enough to compete with the children of our country's wealthiest in every other avenue-adding in that they also get to bribe public universities to further advance their children is unacceptable, which is why it's appropriate that those who abuse this system are held accountable by the law.  But let's let this be the start of a conversation, not the end of it when Loughlin and Huffman's inevitable mugshots are leaked to the press.  What Loughlin & Huffman (allegedly) did was wrong, but don't pretend that countless people abuse our current educational system legally to ensure that we live in a less fair society.  The entire system should be upended so that education is not something that is afforded only to the rich first, with the poor getting the occasional scraps.