Colleges once conferred degrees, not status

Two events in higher education led the nation to being the most advanced in the world.  During the height of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln signed the Land Grant College (Morill) Act which led to the establishment of public universities in every state.  As the U.S. was making the transition from a rural and agricultural nation to an industrial and technological one, the public universities supplied the research and knowledge and the opportunities for young people to acquire the knowledge.  It meant a huge leap of growth in all areas of knowledge as it provided students with the critical thinking skills of the liberal arts, as well as  scientific and technical knowledge.

The second event was the passage of the post World War II G.I. Bill.  As veterans returned to civilian life there was a shortage of jobs.   The G.I. Bill enabled them to attend college so that they could plan and pursue careers which allowed them to not only assimilate back into society but to greatly increase the human skill and talent for the nation's development.  In 1947, 49 percent of the college students were veterans attending on the G.I. Bill.   Rather than facing a difficult readjustment into a peacetime economy, the Bill sparked an unprecedented growth in the economy and advances in all aspects of American life.

Higher education also received huge benefits as it geared up to receive the influx of students who were determined to study hard and apply the knowledge and skills they acquired.  The influx of serious and determined students helped colleges and universities to strengthen and expand their curricula, and to upgrade their teaching and research activities.  America's public higher education system became the most respected in the world, and it set the standard for the advancement of knowledge.  The public universities rivaled the elite Ivy League schools in terms of the knowledge and talent they produced.  While the exclusive Ivy League institutions and other private universities claim an elite status and "star" professors, the public colleges and the private ones which participate in the mission to make education available to anyone who wants it are the force that raises America's education level and creates the vast pool of educated workers which have elevated the nation into world leadership.  

The current college admissions cheating scandal is not an education issue, but a skirmish in class warfare.  When people spend millions of dollars to get their kids into a prestigious university, they do severe damage to higher education.  Their objective is to make their children members of an exclusive club, not to provide them with a real higher education.  Cheating is the bane of academe.  It kills the scholarly enterprise because it destroys the trusted reliability on which knowledge depends.  Most people with education have learned the penalties of plagiarism, the passing off of someone else's work as their own.  People are not as aware of other violations of academic principle for which professors are summarily fired and banned from their profession:  falsifying data, bribery, malicious and sexual misconduct, mendacity.  All of those are behaviors that our current president practices constantly.

Those are the kind of acts that are involved in the college admissions cheating scandal.  They were committed to gain young students entrance into prestigious institutions, but they undermined the most essential qualities that give the colleges their prestige: meticulous honesty and striving competence.  Genuine knowledge is generated, refined, verified, and imparted only in places that apply the rigorous principles of scholarship.  One lie or deception can invalidate an institution as a source of information and as a participant in the making and delivery of knowledge.  For this reason, reputable institutions will rid themselves of personnel who indulge in graft and reject students who gained acceptance as a result of it.  Dishonest practices destroy a college's very reason for being.

Those young adults whose parents tried to buy them admission to prestigious institutions could get real educations at almost any of the  3,275 nonprofit public and private colleges in the U.S.  Many of the universities that do research along with their teaching rank academically as high--in some cases higher--as those that parents tried to bribe for admissions of their children.  Of the universities named in the indictment, six are private: Georgetown University, the University of Southern California, Stanford University, Yale University, Wake Forest University, and the University of San Diego.  Two are public:  the University of California Los Angeles and the University of Texas, Austin.  These universities have earned reputations because of the significant scholarship they have produced--at least at some point in their histories.  It may be the case that some students whose parents bribe their admission are interested in performing a high level of scholarship.  But their parents are paying for prestige and conniving ways to scam admission requirements.  They give little credence to the intellectual work and its products that are the basis for earned reputations.

A popular scam involving colleges is the rankings of "best" colleges" put out by  organizations such as U.S News, Princeton Review, and Niche.  These rankings are more marketing ploys than indicators of academic excellence.  Many colleges refuse to participate because the rankings have no scientific basis.  A critique in The New Yorker makes the point: "There’s no direct way to measure the quality of an institution—how well a college manages to inform, inspire, and challenge its students."  The reason is:

"Sound judgments of educational quality have to be based on specific, hard-to-observe features. But reputational ratings are simply inferences from broad, readily observable features of an institution’s identity, such as its history, its prominence in the media, or the elegance of its architecture. They are prejudices."

A few schools may be diploma mills that confer degrees as something that is purchased with tuition and fees--and may include some "prestigious" institutions.  And the degree of rigor required to earn a degree does vary.  But most colleges maintain standards for scholarship so that a degree is a statement that the student who has one has earned it. Students who hold degrees from community colleges and have then graduated from a state four-year school have generally have degrees comparable to those granted by more prestigious institutions, and they graduate with much lower debts.  But the clamor to get into prestige institutions has cut enrollments at many reputable and substantial state colleges, causing the to cut programs and faculty.  The focus on prestige institutions has had the effect of eliminating some affordable but competitive opportunities for students.  The preferences for the prestige schools is not based upon the facts, but on false information--on silly prejudices.

The hard fact is that paying millions of dollars to get children into prestige institutions is not necessarily going to provide a better degree than one earned by a student who worked his/her way through a community college and then a modest state university.  In terms of educational substance and quality, that working student may have the better degree.  

Real college degrees are about actually improving life.  They are not pretentious ornaments to be brandished like jewelry and luxury cars.  Real degrees mean something.  They mean that the people who earn them know something.