There was an interesting article in USA Today yesterday, about US District Judge Indira Talwani. She is the judge presiding over the big college scandal, the admissions mess that embroiled the actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin. The public has mostly focused on them, since they are famous. But all of the cases are appalling, and pretty amazing for both the brazenness and the outrageous cost of the shenanigans. For example:
- Gregory and Marcia Abbott, living in New York and Aspen, paid $125,000 to have their daughter’s entrance exams fixed so she could get into Duke.
- Devin Sloane paid $250,000 to sneak his son into the University of Southern California as a fake water polo recruit, a sport the boy didn’t play.
- Stephen Semprevivio of California paid $400,000 to get his son into Georgetown as a fake tennis recruit.
Good grief. You have that kind of money to throw away on a criminal scheme? There are plenty of colleges that would take your kids, welcome your ability to pay full tuition, and be delighted if maybe you donate a bit too. But you had to obsess about one specific school to the extent that you broke state and federal laws?
Judge Talwani has not been amused, to say the least. She sentenced Semprevivio to four months in prison.
She’s also been outspoken about the crimes. In response to the wealthy parents claiming they only wanted what was best for their kids, she wondered if they were really after what was best for themselves. “It’s not basic caretaking for your child,” she said. “It’s not getting your child food or clothing. It’s not even getting your child an education. It’s getting your child into a college that you call ‘exclusive.’ Are they doing this for their children, or their own status?”
Talwani also notes the irony that poor kids, minority kids, are often assumed to have benefited, somehow, from special treatment, as if they didn’t earn their slot. “Their legitimacy is challenged every day,” she said. Meanwhile, wealthy, privileged parents were paying to create false athletic scenarios to get their child admitted via ‘side door’ to their preferred prestige institutions. “I think the question that people need to ask is, what makes your children entitled to a side door?”
When I look at what our youngest son, Nick, has gone through and accomplished, especially considering the admissions scandal above, I’m even more proud of him than usual.
Always a gifted athlete, in soccer and then basketball, in ninth grade Nick decided to take up lacrosse. “You’ll never make the team,” one of his classmates cruelly told him when he attended the open meeting for the high school team. And it was true that at that point Nick barely knew which end of the stick to hold. Nonetheless, the following year he was playing varsity, and by the time he graduated he was captain of the team, earned first team all-county and first team all-conference honors, named a Brine National All-American, and led the team to winning the county championships. A National Honor Society member, he would have been a D1 scholarship winner, but the ridiculously early lacrosse recruiting in those days meant the window was already closed for his graduating year by the time he was hitting his stride.
So instead he took a five-figure academic scholarship to Western New England University, to study mechanical engineering and play lacrosse for a perennial top twenty-five D3 lacrosse team. But WNE turned out to not be a good fit for him. So he transferred to the New Jersey Institute of Technology, one of the top schools in the country, and a D1 athletic program. He was a midfielder battling teams like Georgetown, Army at West Point, and the University of Massachusetts.
By his junior year he knew something was seriously wrong. He struggled with his grades, and with depression. He left the lacrosse team to focus on academics, and his well-being, but nothing helped. He came to realize he was in the wrong major entirely, and the deeper into mechanical engineering he went the more obvious it was that he had neither the aptitude nor the interest. The field his well-intentioned mentors had always pointed him toward, and that he felt was his future, had become toxic for him. He felt like he was stuck in a huge cornfield he couldn’t see the end of, and he didn’t know how he was going to escape from it.
Fortunately someone pointed out that with his abilities in computer-aided design and his interest in creating solutions to real-world problems, he probably should have been in industrial design. This served as something of a revelation. So he transferred – as it happens NJIT has a great industrial design department, part of the College of Architecture & Design that recently received a significant gift from the architects Robert and Barbara Hillier – and while it is adding some time to his undergraduate stretch, Nick is where he should be and he is loving the program and newly-opened vistas.
Everything I just described came out of the work Nick has put in, both in academics and in athletics. That work has included recognizing when he was going down the wrong path, then making corrections. It has also included prioritizing elements of his life. Nick couldn’t return to the NJIT lacrosse team because switching majors impacted his eligibility (long story, short version is that the NCAA has some rigid and not always appropriate rules). Instead he is using his knowledge of the sport as a trainer and coach for high school teams, helping others develop their potential.
I’m proud of Nick not just for his accomplishments but for his response to setbacks as well, for how he handled those trials and resolved them, or went around them, and learned from them. We want our kids to do well, but more importantly we want them to thrive, to blossom, to experience their “bliss” as Joseph Campbell put it. And though it causes us pain and anxiety, we want them to have struggles too – not terrible, overwhelming struggles, but normal life challenges – so that in the course of events they find inner strength and learn about their capabilities and even their limits. We want them to better understand the world and the options for their place in it. We want them to be complete, independent adults.
In light of this it is even more crazy for those wealthy parents to pay huge bribes to sneak a child into a college that the child may, ultimately, not like or feel comfortable with, in a major they don’t embrace. Kind of pointless to spend four months in prison because you did illegal things to get your kid into a school he was always going to transfer out of anyway, right?