A lot of people are really up in arms since a story broke that a group of celebrities had bribed their kids' way into various selective universities. The SAT's "standardization" went out the window, and with it, the confidence in our college acceptance system. However, what truly surprised me about the whole thing was how shocked everyone seemed to be by the concept of bribery and cheating in one of the most nuanced and critiqued systems in America. Cheating shouldn't be so surprising. It happens at all socioeconomic levels and all geographic locations when college is at stake.
To illustrate my point about this, I'd like to talk about my own experiences. I went to a really competitive public high school in one of the richest counties in the United States. We are the county that people move to exclusively for the schools, where helicopter parents push their children to the limit in order to secure a spot at Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Berkeley, Duke, Columbia, and Stanford. All of these schools, by the way, now have students attending from my class.
Everyone always talked about my high school like we were some sort of haven for intelligence. It was all ridiculous. We weren't a group of kids fueled by a love of learning. We were smart, but what drove us was a spirit of competitiveness and ambition pushed onto us by the very school that was meant to inspire us. The social atmosphere was vicious. Even though no one said it out loud, everyone was trying to make themselves look smarter than everyone else. The more AP classes you took, the higher your GPA, the more clubs you were president of, the better. In a world like that, is it really all that shocking when kids resort to ulterior methods of achieving the same results?
Cheating was a problem at my high school. The competitive atmosphere fueled an unwitting desire to succeed that went unimpeded by rules of ethics. Get the A at any cost, even if it means bending the rules. People copied each other's answers for all their homework, designed essays together, discussed problems from exams, told one another what to study. It wasn't so much hard, clear cheating. It was collaborative cheating. If I help you on this test, I can cash in later and ask you for the next one.
We were all a part of the cheating problem at my high school, and we're all a part of the cheating problem in the real world. Some people are, of course, more significant players in this system. Bribery is a whole new level of unethical conduct, but it plays into a bigger issue. When it comes to the college process, people will do anything to succeed. Maybe that's because society has decided that college is a bigger deal than it should be.
The idea in society has become that if you don't get into your top choice reach school, you're somehow lesser. The issue here isn't just "wanting to succeed." Like in my high school, we've adopted a new, competitive approach to life where we figure that college is the only way for us to get ahead in the race. Not only that, but it has to be a top school. It's not enough to get an education. You have to get one at a fancy, private school. Anyone who doesn't get in, just like those who didn't make the grade in high school, are clearly dumber and less qualified.
This is the attitude our society is up against. People are cheating because they think they need to. They're playing an inevitable role in an environment driven by a competitive spirit that looks down on those who fall "behind." This is the attitude we have to fight if we want to better ourselves as a society.
