Finally, Parents Can Blame Someone Else for a Yale Rejection

(Bloomberg) -- For years, Liz Pleshette has tried, often in vain, to sell a message to tiger parents and their college-going cubs: Don’t judge yourself by the school that accepts you. Or, as the veteran college counselor likes to say, “It’s not Yale or jail.’’

Invariably, many families ignore her advice. But Thursday evening -- the time for tens of thousands of students to hear from Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the five other Ivy League schools -- may finally be different.

The reason: For the vast majority who end up Ivy outcasts, the nation’s largest admissions corruption scandal gives them a ready-made defense -- Hey, at least, I didn’t cheat.

Families have “been overvaluing some smoke and mirrors,’’ said Pleshette, a former Columbia University admissions officer and director of college counseling at the private Latin School of Chicago. “The wizard has been revealed behind the curtain.’’

In fact, at least one parent could face the prospect of Yale AND jail.

On Friday, many of the 33 parents confronting criminal charges will file into federal court in Boston for their first court appearance. They’re accused of paying $25 million in bribes to cheat their kids’ way into elite colleges, including Yale and Stanford. (Parents will likely avoid serving time if they plead guilty, lawyers said. The government made no allegations of wrongdoing against the children.)

Testimony in a civil case in the same court house last year revealed other realities about college admissions: how Harvard favors the children of alumni, or legacies, as well as those of major donors, and recruited athletes. The plaintiffs claim Harvard has a quota for Asian-Americans, which the school denies, saying its process gives everyone a fair shot.

At Dwight-Englewood, a private school in New Jersey, Kyle Schoeneborn, an 18-year-old senior awaiting word from the University of Pennsylvania, hopes to beat the odds. He’s grateful that he and others may not find the experience as soul-crushing as in previous years.

“It might end up being an excuse for a lot of people to say, ‘Oh, I didn’t get into my dream school because this is going on or my parents didn’t pay $50 million to get recruited to a certain sports team,’’’ said Schoeneborn, the lead in his high school musical and an editor on the paper.

The numbers suggest it is ever harder to get into the Ivies and similarly selective schools. Yale accepted as many as 22 percent of its applicants in the early 1980s. Last year, it was down to 6.3 percent.

Part of the reason is that students can now apply to more schools electronically, typically through what is known as the Common Application. The percentage of students who submitted seven or more applications increased to 35 percent in the 2016 school year, compared with 10 percent in 1995, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling. Many send in a dozen or more.

At the same time, the price of a degree has risen far faster than inflation and now can exceed $70,000 annually, including tuition, fees, room and board, at the most expensive and selective institutions. For lower- and middle-income families, the Ivies are sought after, as well, because they offer among the most generous financial aid.

Amid rising income inequality, affluent parents perceive a swanky degree as a way to preserve their position at the top. A decade after entering college, Harvard students had a median annual income of $89,700, according to federal data, which tracks only those receiving federal aid. At Binghamton, part of the State University of New York, it was $61,600.

Though academic research shows an elite degree confers little advantage to the already well-heeled, parents are spending more time driving their kids to sports and other activities in the frantic race to get an edge.

All that effort toward soccer practice and violin, with an eye toward the Ivies, exacts a psychic toll, according to Lisa Damour, author of “Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls.’’

Damour, a psychologist in the Cleveland suburb of Beachwood, says she’s already seeing in her practice a positive of the scandal, in terms of clients feeling like rejection may not be their fault. “It’s not all bad for the curtain to be pulled back,’’ she said.

In her quest for elite acceptance, Cailee Olitt certainly did all she could. The 18-year-old senior ranks in the top 5 percent of her class at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey. She played soccer for four years and co-edits the school paper, as well as holding part-time jobs at a frozen yogurt store and a bagel shop.

Unlike the students whose parents are accused of paying someone to take the college entrance exams for them, Olitt did SAT practice tests on her own. Her mother, a special education teacher, hired a tutor for the critical reading section.

Olitt hardly needed help with math. In her junior year, she took the Advanced Placement Calculus BC exam, the highest level for math. This year, she’s moved on to Calculus 3 and linear algebra. She scored 1570 out of 1600 on her SAT.

Still, Duke deferred her earlier this year, and she is waiting on Brown. She’s in at Tulane, Emory and the University of Virginia.

Her mother, Dari, stressed the unfairness of college admissions with Cailee and her younger daughter, a junior who plans to apply to Ivy League schools next year.

“Sadly there’s not much we can do when people are accepting bribes,’’ Dari Olitt said. “You just hope for the best for our kids and they’ll get seen for all their hard work and rewarded for doing it the right way.’’

To contact the reporter on this story: Janet Lorin in New York at jlorin@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Gillen at dgillen3@bloomberg.net, ;Margaret Collins at mcollins45@bloomberg.net, John Hechinger, Melissa Karsh

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