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CNN Live Event/Special
Scheme and Scandal, Inside the College Admissions Crisis. Aired 11p-12a ET
Aired November 02, 2019 - 23:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[23:00:21]
ANNOUNCER: The following is a CNN Special Report.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I hope I'm going to find out either tomorrow or the day after if I'm getting into my dream school.
FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN HOST: The unbearable wait of the 18-year-old, chasing the college dream.
How did it become --
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: "Operation Varsity Blues."
JOEY JACKSON, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: You don't need to work anymore. You don't need to study hard or to be well-rounded. You just have to write a check.
ZAKARIA: A nightmare.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Coaches, entrepreneurs, and celebrities.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: It may have looked like a Hollywood premiere at times.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Lori, pay for my tuition, Lori.
ISABELLA ROSE GIANNULLI, LORI LAUGHLIN'S DAUGHTER: I do want the experience of, like, game days, partying. I don't really care about school.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Lori, are you satisfied?
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Do you want to say anything to your fans, Felicity?
JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: Two famous actresses caught up in what prosecutors are calling the largest college admissions scam ever.
ZAKARIA: Crazed parents doing whatever it takes.
RICK SINGER, INDEPENDENT COLLEGE COUNSELOR: It's unbelievable. It is so competitive to get your kid into school today.
DANIEL MARKOVITS, AUTHOR, "THE MERITOCRACY TRAP": And the parents are terrified.
MALCOLM GLADWELL, THE NEW YORKER: It's parents who are driving a lot of this craziness.
ZAKARIA: A fierce competition.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Top schools like Yale, Wake Forest, Georgetown.
ZAKARIA: And it starts early.
ALLEN KOH, CEO, CARDINAL EDUCATION: The youngest we've gone for college consulting would be third grade.
MARKOVITS: They're pushed, they're prodded. They're in the hands of tutors, coaches, and test preparation.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You may begin.
ZAKARIA: It's a big money business.
KOH: We will create packages that can break a million dollars.
ZAKARIA: And the real scandal may be what is legal. A side door for rich kid sports.
DANIEL GOLDEN, AUTHOR, "THE PRICE OF ADMISSION": There's only certain families that can afford to have their kids play some of these sports.
ZAKARIA: Donors (INAUDIBLE) and getting a leg-up.
GLADWELL: We allow them to play these corrupt games in admissions.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The system is broken.
ZAKARIA: Who is to blame?
GOLDEN: They set up a system that favors wealthy people and that made this scandal possible.
ZAKARIA: Finding the road back.
MCCALL ANGLIN, STUDENT, BEREA COLLEGE: Dig deeper, dig deeper, dig deeper into which path is the clearest one to take.
ZAKARIA: To what college is supposed to be.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Throngs of people hail the end of the war in Europe.
ZAKARIA: In America in 1945, anything seemed possible.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And what a thrill.
ZAKARIA: With World War II over, the country was revving its engines.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Almost 50 million motor vehicles.
ZAKARIA: And for a surging middle class, the American dream had a new name. The G.I. Bill. For the first time, almost all who had served could go to college for free.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Any kind of education and in any part of the country.
ZAKARIA: Millions jumped at the chance. But the most elite schools still remained closed to many. They were private clubs, open mostly to members of America's aristocracy. White Anglo-Saxon protestants. At Harvard, one man wanted to open the gates.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Really get going.
ZAKARIA: The school's president, James Bryant Conant, asked himself, what would Thomas Jefferson do?
Jefferson had written that America should create an aristocracy of talent to replace the aristocracy of birth and wealth.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Now he's about to enter an environment more in keeping with his social position.
ZAKARIA: Most Harvard men, and they were still all men, came from prep schools with the right pedigree.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: At college he will meet men of his own kind.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's servants who went with them to Harvard. They would put on their tuxedos every night and go to debutante balls.
ZAKARIA: Good manners often trumped good grades.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's extremely handsome and charming, he writes wonderful thank-you notes.
[23:05:03]
ZAKARIA: Out there in America James Conant believed farm fields working with their hands were Jefferson's diamonds in the rough, just wanting to be discovered.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Let's find those people and bring them to Harvard.
ZAKARIA: But how to find them? Conant decided that we needed a test. Not to measure knowledge, Greek, or higher mathematics. That would favor the well-schooled.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This really isn't the kind of a test that you can study for.
ZAKARIA: Instead we need a test that measures innate aptitude. Harvard had such a test for scholarship students.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Ready? Begin. ZAKARIA: And it became --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You may begin.
ZAKARIA: America's SAT, a test for all Americans. Last year, two million students took it. James Conant's dream of a meritocracy --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And admit you to the fellowship of educated men.
ZAKARIA: -- of the smartest, outshining the most privileged, seemed to be coming true.
(On camera): The SAT was meant to be the great leveler. It would give everyone a chance to climb the ladder of success. And for decades, it did, bringing millions of new faces into America's establishment. But how did we go from creating an aristocracy of talent to spawning a criminal conspiracy?
DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: This college admissions scam story, the biggest one ever prosecuted.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Do you want to say anything to your fans, Felicity?
ZAKARIA (voice-over): The college admissions scandal.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Lori, Lori, Lori, pay for my tuition, Lori.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Is there anything you want to say to the charges against you?
ZAKARIA: From the moment it hit the headlines --
SINGER: We have no comment. No further comment.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: The massive sting exposing the ugly truth.
ZAKARIA: America was appalled.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Are you satisfied with what the judge decided today?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It is morally outrageous.
JACKSON: You don't need to work anymore. You don't need to take your time and do the right thing. You just have to write a check.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Seems like we're working for nothing if they're just coming and just buying their way into college.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Having a lot of money is not part of what makes a person a person.
ZAKARIA: The story behind the scandal was the stuff of tabloids.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Who's who of coaches, entrepreneurs, and celebrities.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Felicity --
FELICITY HUFFMAN, ACTRESS: You're asking for a bribe?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You're pretending you're above that?
HUFFMAN: I've got my checkbook.
ZAKARIA: The actress Felicity Huffman pleaded guilty to paying $15,000.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Is prison the right sentence?
ZAKARIA: To inflate her daughter's SAT score.
HUFFMAN: I want to model for my daughters having a voice in the world. And, you know, that means having influence and having power, and to tell you the truth, having -- having money.
LORI LAUGHLIN, ACTRESS: We may have -- well, he may have embellished, lied a bit on our application.
ZAKARIA: Lori Loughlin and her husband pleaded not guilty after allegedly spending half a million dollars to concoct phony profiles of their daughters as accomplished rowers. Daughter Olivia Jade got into USC even though she was neither a rower nor a scholar.
GIANNULLI: I do want the experience of, like, game days and partying. I don't really care about school, as you guys well know.
SINGER: This is a game. Just realize that this is a game.
ZAKARIA: At the center of the scheme, independent college counselor Rick Singer.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Sir, why did you game the system?
SINGER: My key method unlocks the full potential of your son or daughter and sets them on a course to excel in life.
GOLDEN: Singer showed an ability to con and dazzle even very successful people.
SINGER: They send their plane to come pick me up, come to the meeting for a couple of hours, two or three hours, put me right back on the plane, send me to the next place I needed to go.
ZAKARIA: The Hollywood names made the headlines.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Are you guilty?
ZAKARIA: But some other parents were the most dumbfounding. Singer charged this woman $50,000 to have a stranger take her son's ACT. Her name is Jane Buckingham and she is a parenting expert. JANE BUCKINGHAM, AUTHOR AND TREND FORECASTER: Every working mom comes
to me and says, how do I do it all? Guess what, you can't. No one is super woman. So don't try to be.
ZAKARIA: She even gave her son's handwriting sample to make the forgery easier.
BUCKINGHAM: Also don't let guilt be your guide.
[23:10:02]
ZAKARIA: But Buckingham did plead guilty to fraud.
GLADWELL: Corruption is almost inevitable. It doesn't surprise me in the least that some people would try to game the system. The system is inherently phony.
SINGER: It's unbelievable. It is so competitive to get your kid into school today.
ZAKARIA (on camera): Frenzied parents lying and paying bribes to give their children a leg-up. Not exactly what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he envisioned the meritocracy. But the founding father could not have foreseen this crazed competition. It's all because a four-year degree has become the great economic divider in America. People who have one will earn about twice as much in their lifetimes as those who don't. And those who get the golden ticket and Ivy League degree can, government figures show, earn more than double the income of other college graduates.
GOLDEN: Parents get more and more anxious. That's why they turn to independent counselors. You know, they're desperate.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): There are at least 15,000 private college counselors in America. You can find dozens of them on YouTube.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Hey, guys, have you ever wondered how to get that elusive wow factor?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Today I want to speak about what you should never speak about during an Ivy League admissions interview.
ZAKARIA: Many are reputable. But they are largely unregulated even as their business is exploding.
KOH: We decline families all the time. A C average isn't going to get you into Harvard and there's nothing any consultant is going to do about that. Well, any legitimate consultant.
ZAKARIA: Private counselor Allen Koh likes to start his clients early.
KOH: I do believe the first time we're talking to them is fifth grade. The youngest we've gone for college consulting would be third grade.
ZAKARIA: You heard that right, third grade. Koh shared clients with Rick Singer but says he had no idea what Singer was doing.
KOH: I was shocked that I knew someone who did this. I was shocked that this was even possible.
ZAKARIA: And something else surprised him. The sums of money involved in the scandal.
KOH: I think a lot of people were shocked because they were so big. I was shocked because they were so small. Our most expensive college application package is $350,000.
ZAKARIA: That price doesn't even include test preparation.
KOH: Everything is a la carte for test prep. For families who have special circumstances, we will create packages that can break a million dollars.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Mr. Singer, do you have anything to say to the students who are in college now, what this might do to their lives?
ZAKARIA: Money is at the heart of the college admissions scandal. But more troubling than the bribes paid are the legal ways that money is used to corrupt the process. Wealthy parents spend lavishly to prepare their children.
MARKOVITS: From childhood on, they're pushed, they're prodded, they're in the hands of tutors, coaches, test preparation.
ZAKARIA: And it pays off. If you make over $200,000 a year, your kids will score on average 400 points higher on the SAT than kids from low-income families. Wealth also gives students a big advantage if their parents are donors.
SINGER: At some schools, giving $10 million isn't enough, because $10 million makes no impact on their school. They want $30 million, $40 million, $50 million.
ZAKARIA: Rick Singer convinced parents that his schemes were actually a bargain.
GOLDEN: He was saying to the parents, yes, you're paying hundreds of thousands of dollars but this is going to save you money. Otherwise you'd have to give $10 million to one of these schools to get your kid in.
ZAKARIA: Dan Golden is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. He wrote a bestselling expose called "The Price of Admission." At his own alma mater, Harvard, he looked at how often the children of big donors gained admission.
GOLDEN: Harvard has this group called the Committee on University Resources, something like 400 people. Then I came across Jared Kushner's parents on this committee. And I was interested because most of the people on the committee were alumni, and Jared Kushner's parents had no affiliation with Harvard.
ZAKARIA: White House adviser Jared Kushner, then an unknown teenager, applied to Harvard.
GOLDEN: I began speaking with people familiar who are family with Jared Kushner's high school record and it turned out he was not a particularly outstanding or motivated student. And there was no lack of people willing to attest to that.
ZAKARIA: Charles Kushner had donated $2.5 million to Harvard. Jared got in.
GLADWELL: So what I don't understand is, how is it that Harvard can let Jared Kushner buy his way in but it doesn't take a hit reputationally?
[23:15:06]
We should adjust and just say, oh, OK, so it -- that's what a Harvard degree means, all right.
ZAKARIA: The Kushner family has said there is no connection between the donations and Jared Kushner's acceptance. Harvard does not comment on individual applicants. Ivy League schools do point out that large donations give them the chance to educate students who could not otherwise afford them. They also contend that some children of large donors are rejected. What is clear is that in this meritocracy, it still matters who your parents are, especially if they went to the school of your choice. Legacy admission gives strong preference to the sons and daughters of alumni.
GLADWELL: The idea that you get a special break because your parents went there. Why? Was this feudal England?
GOLDEN: They're terrified of what would happen to their fundraising if they got rid of legacy preference.
ZAKARIA: According to the "Harvard Crimson," about one-third of last year's freshman class had relatives who went to Harvard. Legacy admission is deeply entrenched at many top tier schools. To understand where it all began, let me take you back to a troubling chapter from more than a century ago.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They founded schools that their sons might absorb the accumulation of man's knowledge and wisdom.
ZAKARIA: In the early 1900s, the number of applications from Jewish boys to elite schools began rising.
NICHOLAS LEMANN, AUTHOR, "THE BIG TEST": They tended on average to overperform academically and to, you know, have a sort of education- obsessed culture.
ZAKARIA: Anti-Semitism was far more prevalent then and concern grew over the number of Jews at Ivy League schools.
LEMANN: They came knocking at the door of the Ivies and the Ivies were very uncomfortable with that. ZAKARIA: At Harvard, President Abbott Lawrence Lowell openly called
it "the Jewish Problem." His solution, count the Jews to see how quickly their numbers were rising.
LEMANN: They felt that, you know, Jews will take over.
ZAKARIA: According to the historian, Jerome Karabel, administrators pored over records. But it wasn't always clear who was Jewish. So a ranking system was used. J-1 for students who were clearly Jewish. J-2, more than likely Jewish. J-3, could be Jewish. The findings, in 1922, Harvard was 21 percent Jewish. The president, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, decided to take action.
LEMANN: I am instituting a Jewish quota.
ZAKARIA: There was strong push back to the ugly idea of counting Jews.
GOLDEN: They looked for ways to hold down Jewish enrollment without actually having a specific Jewish quota number or an anti-Jewish policy.
ZAKARIA: Several other Ivy League schools, Yale, Columbia, were also dealing with the so-called Jewish problem. One answer turned out to be legacy admissions.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: One of another greater society of free and enlightened men.
ZAKARIA: Schools began giving preference to the sons of alumni. The idea was if they did so, they would not be able to take in as many Jews.
Up next, Rick Singer's dark scheme.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: What do you want to say to your former players?
ZAKARIA: To cash in on the enormous power of college coaches.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[23:21:17]
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Mr. Meredith, what do you want to say to your former players? Do you have any remorse, Mr. Meredith? Your former players who trusted you?
ZAKARIA: Yale's soccer coach took over $400,000.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: John Vandemoer pleaded guilty to taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes.
ZAKARIA: Stanford's sailing coach agreed to take over $600,000 for the sailing team.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: The FBI believes the UT tennis head coach was paid more than $90,000.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Any comments?
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Are you guilty?
ZAKARIA: In all, 10 coaches and athletic officials were accused in Rick Singer's scheme. Five have pleaded guilty, the other five who pleaded not guilty were hit with still more charges in October.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Mr. Singer, do you have anything to stay?
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: How can all the students there who were qualified and were cheated out of this fund.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Students were kept out of schools because of what you did.
ZAKARIA: It's no coincidence that college sports is at the heart of the biggest college admissions scandal in history.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Singer worked with the parents to fabricate impressive athletic profiles for their kid.
ZAKARIA: Singer knew that the recruitment of athletes was a weak link in the admissions process.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The students' athletic credentials have been fabricated.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Charging documents say Ernst accepted millions of dollars in bribes.
ZAKARIA: Coaches had enormous power to choose their recruits.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: What made you want to plead guilty?
ZAKARIA: It was tough to bribe a whole committee. But you could bribe one person. Schools say they are addressing the problem, stressing that they were victims in Rick Singer's scheme. But the system they created lives on, where some kids get huge advantages in admissions through the side door of athletics.
GOLDEN: They weren't the victims. I mean, that's ludicrous. They set up a system that favors wealthy people and that made this scandal possible.
ZAKARIA (on camera): When people think of college sports, they often think of all-American favorites like football and basketball. Sports with lots of publicity and many low-income and minority students.
But there is also rowing and lacrosse and water polo and other sports that a lot of rich white kids play and that many college applicants can't afford. Elite colleges reserve a huge number of slots for all athletes. More than 30 percent of the class in some schools. And they dramatically lower admissions standards to let the athletes in.
GOLDEN: With all the preferences, the preference for recruited athletes is the biggest in terms of how much it helps candidates.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Take Harvard, for example. Every applicant's academic record is ranked on a scale from one to six with one being the highest. Those who scored a four who were not athletes got in less than 1 percent of the time. But the athletes who scored a four got in around 70 percent of the time. Harvard claims that no one is admitted based on one single trait. Still, admissions at elite schools for athletes like lacrosse players is often effectively affirmative action for rich white kids.
GLADWELL: You can't play this absurd game where you have affirmative action program for rich white people because you have a back door for these sports.
ZAKARIA: Rich parents spend loads of money to help their kids become recruit-worthy athletes, paying hefty sums for coaching and camps.
[23:25:11]
Meanwhile, of course, many public school kids don't even have access to posh sports like golf and sailing.
GOLDEN: There's only certain families that can afford to have their kids play some of these sports.
ZAKARIA: So why do elite American colleges favor athletes in the first place? After all, other countries don't have these kinds of preferences for baseball players or skiers.
GLADWELL: People would look at you, or in England or in Germany and say, wait, wait, what?
ZAKARIA: One big reason for the favoritism is tradition. In the early 20th century, American colleges saw athletics as a way to mold young men's character. College sports grew wildly popular with the public.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yale squared off against Harvard in the final game of the season.
ZAKARIA: Spawning powerful athletic departments and loyal alumni.
LEMANN: I think if you gave the average college president at these kinds of colleges a few drinks and said, do you want to dial this down, they'd say yes. But they'd say, the alumni, I'd just hear from them immediately and they'd put up a big fuss.
ZAKARIA: College presidents like to talk about meritocracy but in fact they kept key elements of the old aristocracy in place like athletics and legacies.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yale was found more than two centuries ago by 10 congregational clergymen.
ZAKARIA: When one college president tried to take on legacies, all hell broke loose. Kingman Brewster was Yale's president in the 1960s. Famous for finally admitting women to the college. He was eager to make Yale more inclusive, courting more applicants from public schools. And he slashed legacy admissions by almost half in just one year.
LEMANN: Disaster. Immediate disaster.
ZAKARIA: The alumni revolted. Yale graduate William F. Buckley Jr. lamented that the son of an alumnus now has less of a chance of getting in than some boy from P.S. 109 somewhere.
LEMANN: Alumni contribution fell off a cliff.
ZAKARIA: Eventually Brewster gave in and ever since no Ivy League school has dared to take on the admissions preference for alumni children.
GOLDEN: They're terrified of what would happen to their fundraising if they got rid of legacy preference.
ZAKARIA: But there are great schools out there that avoid legacy preference. And they're doing just fine. Cal Tech doesn't cater to alumni kids and it has one of the largest endowments in the nation. Even Oxford and Cambridge, with their centuries of hallowed tradition, refuse to favor alumni children. Their endowments are well into the billions.
GOLDEN: We like to think in this country that England is the land of social class and aristocracy and America is the land of democracy. But at least in college admissions, the reverse appears to be true.
ZAKARIA: When you add up all the admissions preferences at elite schools, like legacies, recruited athletes, and children of wealthy donors, you get an astounding number. At some schools, it's around 50 percent of the class.
GLADWELL: That is the behavior that's typical of some moribund, irrelevant, corrupt private club.
ZAKARIA: Coming up, at Berea College in Kentucky, in order to get in here, you must be poor. When we come back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[23:32:29]
ZAKARIA: Graduation day. It is a celebration of one of America's most cherished ideals. If you're talented and work hard enough, you can make it to the top.
TIM COOK, APPLE CEO: It's time for you to lead the way.
MICHELLE OBAMA, FORMER FIRST LADY: You are the living, breathing proof that the American dream endures in our time. It's you.
ZAKARIA: To make it into Yale Law School, the top law school in the country, students must compete in a rigorous academic contest. MARKOVITS: You're sitting here today because you ranked in the three
tenths of 1 percent of a massive meritocratic competition.
ZAKARIA: Earning a degree from Yale is a golden ticket to the American elite. It's an exclusive club that includes Bill and Hillary Clinton and four sitting Supreme Court justices. But in 2015, students at commencement got some bad news from this man. The meritocracy is a broken system.
MARKOVITS: We've constructed a gilded cage that ensnares the rich and excludes the rest.
ZAKARIA: Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits told students that the payoff they've been working for their whole lives is actually a trap.
MARKOVITS: Working from 8:00 a.m. until 8:00 p.m., six days a week, without vacation or sick days, for every week of the year.
ZAKARIA: In other words, the system isn't even working for the winners.
MARKOVITS: We're now in a state in which a narrow elite is much too rich for society's good and works much too hard for its own good.
ZAKARIA: Markovits' main argument is that by rewarding a specific kind of achievement above all else, the meritocracy is making Americans miserable and creating a hyper unequal society.
MARKOVITS: If you're a middle class kid or a poor kid, you simply can't compete with the educations that rich kids are getting.
ZAKARIA: That's one of the reasons why at 38 of the most elite colleges including Yale, Princeton and Brown, you'll find more students from families in the top 1 percent than the bottom 60 percent.
But there is another way. An alternate universe, if you will. At a small liberal arts college in the foothills of Appalachia.
[23:35:05]
Berea College only admits high-performing, low-income students who have been excluded from our modern meritocracy. Rich kids need not apply. You heard that right. Berea will reject their applications. It doesn't want their money. This college is completely free. 98 percent of freshmen are Pell Grant recipients and come from families that earn an average of $28,000 a year.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's a radical ideology.
ZAKARIA: These are some of the poorest kids in the country.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Had you heard of Berea ahead of time?
ZAKARIA: The president of Berea, Lyle Roelofs, believes this is one of the keys to its success.
LYLE ROELOFS, PRESIDENT, BEREA COLLEGE: At Berea, no student feels stigmatized because all students come from the same economic context.
ZAKARIA: All students are required to work for the college at least 10 hours a week.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I know some students who looked up free college and found Berea.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This sounds fake. I was just like, there's a catch.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I thought it was a scam, there's no way.
ZAKARIA: But there is a way. In 1855, the college was founded to provide an education for students excluded from elite colleges, including women and freed slaves.
How do they do it? Well, it now has a $1.2 billion endowment. While Ivy League schools still admit the children of wealthy donors and legacies largely for the sake of their endowments, Berea has made it to the list of America's hundred richest colleges another way -- shrewd investing and good old-fashioned generosity.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Come join us. It's giving day.
ROELOFS: There's a fundamental impulse in American philanthropy to give opportunity to those who deserve it but lack the means. And we've tapped into that for many, many years.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Data analysis takes a little while.
ZAKARIA: If you're wondering how Berea ranks academically, this year it jumped 15 points in the U.S. News and World Report rankings, making it one of the top 50 liberal arts colleges in the country. But Berea's president has pledged not to publicize its rankings. He believes they fuel the college admissions frenzy by focusing on the wrong metrics -- money and status instead of quality.
Berea's admissions office doesn't obsess about test scores or grades. Instead, it identifies students who display extraordinary potential like McCall Anglin, a senior who had always dreamed of going to college.
McCall now works in the admissions office as a student manager and studies marketing. He spends any moment he can on his true passion, making music.
ANGLIN: I feel like this is somewhere I belong. I felt very welcomed as soon as I got to the college and was shown like all these different resources, like wow, these people actually want to help me succeed.
ZAKARIA: The college has built a culture in which students help each other to succeed.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It means the world to me. I feel like this is home for me. I do feel like this is home for a lot of people.
ZAKARIA: Dan Markovits thinks that Berea's model provides one possible solution to the madness of the meritocracy.
MARKOVITS: An excellent education is an education that teaches you what you need to know, the knowledge and the skills that you need, in order to do good work that's useful.
ANGLIN: Dig deeper, dig deeper, dig deeper into which path is the clearest one to take that will make you become successful.
MARKOVITS: The universities are realizing that their current business model is just too hungry for assets and status and privilege and they've got to diversify.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[23:42:41]
ZAKARIA: Affirmative action.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Affirmative action is leveling the playing field.
ZAKARIA: To understand just how politically charged the issue is --
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: We won't go to the back of the line.
ZAKARIA: -- consider this.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: One of the most important civil rights cases in over 20 years.
ZAKARIA: One landmark Supreme Court ruling still stands as the benchmark for minority college admissions. But it came over 40 years ago. And it involved a white man. Allan Bakke sued the Medical School of the University of California Davis for reverse discrimination. The university had a quota. It reserved 16 spots for minority students. Bakke argued he academically more qualified than the students who filled the quota. The court ruled in his favor in 1978. Racial quotas were deemed illegal.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Allan Paul Bakke.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They said once again that white rights are supreme in this country.
ZAKARIA: But affirmative action wasn't dead. The court also said that race could be considered in admissions but only as one of many factors. And now, another legal battle threatening to end affirmative action once and for all. This time the scene is Harvard.
Asian-Americans sued the school, charging that Harvard admissions officers disregard their sterling test scores and grades and hold them to a higher standard. And though a federal judge ruled in October siding with the university, the case is far from over. That's because the man behind the lawsuit is Edward Blum, one of the nation's most influential and conservative opponents of affirmative action.
EDWARD BLUM, CONSERVATIVE OPPONENT OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: Harvard systematically raises the bar for Asian-Americans and systematically lowers it for whites, African-Americans, and Hispanics.
ZAKARIA: Blum has vowed to appeal that decision and many believe it will end in a national showdown at a Supreme Court dominated by conservatives, many of whom are long-time skeptics of affirmative action.
[23:45:13]
GOLDEN: One of the ironies of the Harvard case is while it pretends to be about discrimination against Asian-Americans in admissions, it's really not. It's really an attack on affirmative action for blacks and Hispanics.
ZAKARIA: But many colleges feel that affirmative action is still badly needed in admissions. A recent analysis done by "The New York Times" found that black and Hispanic students were more underrepresented at elite colleges than 35 years earlier.
(On camera): At the center of all this is a complex question with no easy answer. If, as Thomas Jefferson once posited, we should have a meritocracy, what he called an aristocracy of talent, then grades and test scores should be the deciding factor. But the opposing argument goes, those are just numbers that do not always tell the story of how deserving and how enriching students from different cultures, races, and backgrounds may be.
(Voice-over): But here's what happens when only academic merit is considered in admissions. Stuyvesant High School in New York City. It is one of the nation's top public high schools. Graduate from here and you are likely to get into an elite college. So how do you get in? Take a single standardized test. It might sound fair but this is the meritocratic outcome.
In a city that is less than 15 percent Asian, Stuyvesant is almost 75 percent Asian. These demographics raise the question. Can and should a standardized test decide who has access to the best schools?
MARKOVITS: The way in which New York tried to deal with elite education and inequality is by having something like a fair test as a way of deciding who gets the elite education. And the consequence of that has been more and more unfair outcomes.
ZAKARIA: In this year's freshman class, only seven black and 33 Hispanic students were offered places out of nearly 900 coveted spots.
LEMANN: If you want to admit by those kinds of tests, it's at war with also wanting to admit more black and brown students. There's a historic racial gap on average in these kind of academic test scores. It's one of the most consistent findings in social science. The gap is actually closing but it's always been there. And so you have to dial down the importance of a test to dial up your racial diversity. ZAKARIA: Mayor Bill de Blasio has called to scrap the current
admissions system in the name of diversity. The furious reaction from parents and lawmakers led the mayor to say he was going back to the drawing board.
MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO, NEW YORK CITY: The attempt we made to address it was not -- just was not effective and we have to come up with a new approach.
ZAKARIA: Meritocracy versus diversity. Must one come at the expense of the other?
LEMANN: The two are in conflict. It's really one of the big fights in higher education.
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ZAKARIA (on camera): Let me begin with a confession. I'm a member of the meritocracy. I went to an elite college and then graduate school on full scholarships. I later served on the board of my undergraduate alma matter. So I both benefited from the merit-based system and also seen it from the inside and know that college admissions officers are overwhelmingly decent and honorable people actually trying very hard to balance all the factors that they're being asked to consider when passing judgment on 18-year-olds.
And yet there is obviously a problem with America's meritocracy. And the admissions scandal only revealed a small part of it. The critiques generally take one of two angles. The first is that America's colleges don't practice what they preach, that merit-based selection makes sense but in fact almost all colleges have retained or even enhanced some of the old aristocratic elements of admission such as legacies and athletic recruitment, or they forsake merit and lower the bar for well-intentioned reasons to let in more students from certain minorities at the expense of others.
This view holds that what is wrong with the meritocracy is that it is actually not meritocratic enough. There is another critique, though, that is more sweeping. It argues against the whole view of meritocracy itself. It believes that tests are arbitrary and not fully indicative of talent, that using them to organize and select society's elites is nuts, that it creates an atmosphere of crazy and relentless pressure for those on the inside and permanent exclusion for those on the outside. And because performance on these tests and associated rankings can be greatly enhanced by wealth and good education, it does produce a hereditary aristocracy rather than churning out a set of elites based on ability.
Both critiques have merit, though I have to confess I am drawn to the first, the idea that we need a better meritocracy. I understand the problems with the idea of merit. But what would you replace it with?
The old system based on blood lines and birth? Or an entirely subjective process in which admissions officers just pick their favorites?
When you're dealing with tens of thousands of applications and are able to admit a small number, it means you have to rely on some blunt instruments like tests and grades. Many criticize the reliance on these kinds of objective indices but few have been able to propose a workable alternative to them. That means universities should live up to their ideals. Rather than admitting athletes and legacies who are unqualified they should focus on finding bright children from poor backgrounds who have great potential but don't score as well on these testing measures.
Many elite colleges today take in more students from the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from the bottom 60 percent. It cannot be that those millions of students have no talent. It's just that we don't have a good enough mechanism to find them. Elite colleges should be taking in many more students anyway.
[23:55:05]
Even as their endowments have grown stratospherically, their class sizes have expanded very slowly. This emphasis on access should also animate politicians. The biggest problem with American education is that it does very, very badly for poor kids.
As Dan Markovits points out --
MARKOVITS: Comprehensively separates the rich from the rest in an increasingly unequal America.
ZAKARIA: -- the educational gap between the rich and poor today is greater than between blacks and whites in 1954 when Brown versus Board of Education outlawed school segregation. The American system of education does not provide many paths for poor bright kids to move up, which is at the heart of the scandal of our declining social mobility.
Finally, let's take to heart some of the broader critiques of meritocracy itself. Many people succeed in life even though they do badly on tests. Tests are not the measure of one's true worth in life. Nor is where you enter college. Perhaps the worst aspect of meritocracy is that it allows people who rise to the top to believe that they are better, that they deserve their success, and that those who do not do so well deserve their failure.
It makes us smug and insensitive, reproducing the worst aspects of the clubby aristocracy of old. That is the greatest moral failing of meritocracy and one that is best countered by recalling the wisdom contained in the "Declaration of Independence," the bible, and most of the world's scriptures that all people are created equal and are of equal worth, no matter where they got into college.
I'm Fareed Zakaria. Thanks for watching.
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