UNACCEPTABLE

Wall Street Journal reporters Korn and Levitz dig deep into the college-admissions scandal that figured so prominently in recent headlines.

It's difficult for most students to gain admission to elite colleges and universities, and especially so for those of indifferent achievement. This has been a cause of anguish for doting parents who see an Ivy League degree as a ticket to the good life. Jared Kushner is a case in point; he represents “perhaps the most egregious example of a back door deal,” a mediocre student with poor test scores but with a father who donated $2.5 million to Harvard. Bingo: instant admission. Enter a hustler named Rick Singer, who, himself a mediocre student who took eight years to get through college, found a decidedly lucrative gig in coaching students in the intricacies of college admissions, to which he later added shortcuts including back-door and side-door deals. Singer became a master of gaming a system with few safeguards. The nut of the story of course, is how Singer’s machinations played out with the actors Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman. Interestingly, they write, Huffman eventually figured out, ruefully, that Singer was a scam artist, albeit one who got results in the form of admissions—notably to the University of Southern California, where three coaches were bribed to admit students as “recruited athletes,” even if it sometimes took extensive use of Photoshop to get a decent photograph of a student in action. Huffman and Loughlin may have been the public faces of the scandal, but, Korn and Levitz write, it was far more extensive—and it ruined some students’ lives. The authors’ highly readable exposé goes well beyond the tabloid level, though, in exposing malfeasance throughout the higher-education system in the chase for ever scarcer dollars.

A capable examination of the seamy intersection of ambition, money, and higher education.