WATER POLO: THE NEW AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOR COLLEGE ADMISSIONS

Now that we’ve spent a couple of weeks shaking our heads over the college admissions scandal, it is time to reckon with the fact that our system of higher education is seriously broken.  This is about more than a water polo coach on the take.  It’s about affordability, access and equal opportunity. It’s about how the decimation of those qualities has put a generation of young people at risk.

A four-year private college degree now carries an average price tag of a quarter of a million dollars. Even with scholarships and parental assistance, the typical graduate starts adult life $30,500 in the red.   Nationwide, student loan debt exceeds $1.5 trillion.  The insanity of those economics has created a scarcity of opportunity, a Hunger Games-like competition in which 18-year-olds are forced to fight for an educational slot that might give them a shot at the good life and upward mobility.

As a result, high schools throughout the country are experiencing a mental health epidemic. The intense pressure on kids to compete for grades and test scores that could create a path to the “right” college has heaped enormous stress on students. Wrote a high school counselor in Maryland, “Honestly, I’ve had more students this year hospitalized for anxiety, depression and other mental-health issues than ever.”  A February Pew survey showed that 70 percent of teenagers saw anxiety and depression as a “major problem”.  An additional 26 percent said it was a minor problem.  

From a public policy perspective, the fix for this predicament is not exactly rocket science. Rather than treating college education as a scarce resource, it needs to be offered in abundance, free of charge, or at least on an ability-to-pay basis. In addition to academic ability, admission decisions need to reflect a need for racial and ethnic diversity and a leveling of the family income playing field.  What we have now is just the opposite: a college entrance turnstile heavily weighted in favor of the financially advantaged.

The real travesty in the college cheating scandal wasn’t that rich parents bribed their kids’ way into top schools.  Sure, it was sketchy for coaches to take payola for greasing the admission skids of phony athletic recruits who had neither the ability nor desire to play on their teams.   But in terms of applying a moral compass, the repugnancy level of that alleged felony is not that far removed from standard operating procedure on many campuses. This broader ethical quandry is a quiet affirmative action plan favoring well-heeled white kids with a mastery of sports like water polo, sailing, fencing, golf, tennis, lacrosse or hockey.  

According to the recent cheating indictments, all of the elite colleges involved had a set number of admission slots for each sports team.  Coaches identify the kids they want for their teams and, for the most part, they get in.  The National Collegiate Athletic Association estimates that between 61 and 79 percent of student athletes are white. Of the 232 Division I sailing athletes last year, none were black. In the case of lacrosse players, 85 percent were white, as were 90 percent of the hockey players. 

Kirsten Hextrum, a University of Oklahoma professor, told the Atlantic that it is not unusual for parents to spend $10,000 a year or more on equipment, private trainers, summer camps, and travel to tournaments in order to help their kids achieve the level of athletic proficiency needed to secure one of the admission slots reserved for their particular sport. Her research, and that of others, shows that students admitted through the athletic route have substantially lower academic ratings than non-athlete applicants. 

This preference pool of mostly white and privileged water polo stars – and others of that athletic ilk – was constructed with the same architecture as the old affirmative action and quota systems that once promoted ethnic and racial diversity.  For the past 40 years, however, those routes to college enrollment diversity have been battered into near oblivion at both the state and federal level.

Eight states have banned race-conscious admissions. The U.S. Supreme Court, in the 1979 landmark Bakke case, struck down the use of racial quotas in college admissions, but left the door open to the consideration of race as one of many criteria in student selection.  Through subsequent court decisions, however, that door has been slowly closing, and many legal observers believe it is about to be slammed shut in a case currently before a very conservative Supreme Court. As a result, according to a New York Times analysis, black and Hispanic students are now more underrepresented at the nation’s top colleges than they were 35 years ago. 

This leaves us with a startlingly absurd result:  Colleges are prohibited from creating a diverse student body by giving preference to ethnic and racial minority applicants, but it’s perfectly acceptable for them to create admission quotas for a pool of predominately affluent white athletes with less-than-stellar academic records.  Affirmative action isn’t dead. It has simply become a codification of white privilege.

In a TMZ kind of way, it was tantalizing to see television stars and investment brokers doing the perp walk on accusations that they bribed their kids’ way into top schools. But their approach differs only in kind – and legality – from what has become the accepted norm in college admissions. Affluent white families go to the head of the line, and everyone else battles it out for whatever is left.  Delusional defenders of the system call it a meritocracy, but it is far, far closer to being a plutocracy. And it needs to change.