Perspective: College admissions are corrupt because universities are. Here’s how to fix them.
The Trojan Shrine at the University of Southern California is a symbol of its ideals. Can the school realize them? By Viet Thanh Nguyen Viet Thanh Nguyen Bio Follow Viet Thanh Nguyen is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Sympathizer,” “The Refugees” and “Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War.
In this way, universities are no different from those of us who obsess over our personal rankings: How many Twitter followers we have, how many views on YouTube and, in this case, the prestige of our degrees. The mania about status is a marker of our new Gilded Age, one based on a star system. In this winner-take-all society, stars are overpaid and the rest are underpaid.
Second, increase transparency and expand democratic governance, because corruption grows in darkness and secrecy. This would mean reforming boards of trustees so that they are not composed purely of the corporate class of billionaires and millionaires. Including faculty, students, staff and community members as trustees would help to ensure that fiduciary and administrative responsibilities are more democratic.
Fifth, get big money out of college sports. The bribery scandal revolves around minor sports, but major sports like football and basketball have regularly led to various ethical collapses in the past few decades, like the protection of football and the legacy of Joe Paterno over the lives of children at Penn State, or the “epidemic of academic fraud” involving athletes at more than a dozen universities. Sports have a noble place at a school where the Greek ideal is to test both body and mind.
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