Sports recruiting is the real scam of college admissions.

The corruption scandal at the universities, which broke out Tuesday, was embroidered with unusually delightful details, including Aunt Becky's famous Instagram girls and a ploy aimed at photoshoping rich child heads on the body. real athletes. The ploy seemed to many as proof that the rich will stop at nothing to give their children unfair advantages in life. But the zany details of this affair hide a much larger scandal unfolding in plain sight: the entire ecosystem of recruiting high-level university athletes.

What the FBI calls "Operation Varsity Blues" is centered on a college preparation guru named William Singer, accused, among other things, of helping parents create fraudulent sports records for their children . Singer would also have paid university administrators and coaches to rank the candidates as recruited athletes, thus reserving them places in the schools of their choice. In some cases, the applicants did not practice these sports at all, let alone excel. Singer described the project to parents as a "side door" to admission. (Prosecutors claim that he helped parents get standardized and fraudulent test results for their children.) Among the defendants were nine coaches who allegedly received bribes, including the coach of Stanford University sail, John Vandemoer, former Yale University women's football coach, Rudy Meredith and the water polo coach of the University of California South, Jovan Vavic.

Apart from the current scandal, most of the difficulties encountered in recruiting in university sports over the last few years have been with Division I football and basketball teams. Are athletes being paid illegally? should they will be paid? Do students receive a real education? Do university football programs even benefit colleges? The athletes at the center of these debates are not the mediocre descendants of white celebrities; they are warmly recruited and sometimes famous nationally, and they also tend to be black.

But the vast majority of elite college athletes are not superstars with a chance to become pro. Rather, it's the kind of athlete actress Lori Loughlin claimed was her daughters: decent high school athletes in less important sports like rowing, football and water polo. (Loughlin and her husband, Mossimo Giannulli, reportedly paid $ 500,000 for their daughters to be designated as rowing recruits at the USC.) Most elite schools recruit athletes to these rookies. sports, generally reserving copious slots in each class of freshmen for talented students.

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"I'm stunned," said Mimi Doe, a college admissions consultant and co-author of Do not worry, you will enter. "You can see the dark belly [of college admissions]She compared enrolling at an elite university to get a ticket for a movie theater: it may seem that there are 500 seats available, but many are actually reserved for categories particulars of "legacy" candidates and athletes.

In many cases, the admission criteria for grades and test scores are relaxed for these recruits. Slate wrote in 2017 that college sports in many elite schools are "essentially a positive action program for athletes". And the group most likely to benefit from this program is not black superstars but "white men with mediocre academic backgrounds," like one of the Wesleyan elders. Administrator of the University put:

Two former Wesleyan admissions officers have said they believe the system of "tricks" (which allows the school to admit 60 to 70 undergraduate students per class who do not fit the academic profile typical of the university) benefits disproportionately to white men. Minority athletes, they said, can benefit from a length of admission independent of their skills on the ground, as their presence contributes to increasing racial diversity on campus. When athletes of color are admitted to Wesleyan without using sports tips, these pitches are often used by white athletes. "Not only do you have white men who would not otherwise be in Wesleyan," says the former director who has held various positions at Wesleyan. "But then the school does not work as hard to recruit minorities who are not athletes."

Many less prestigious sports are expensive, and even less excellent. They require investments such as sophisticated hardware, pool time and private coaching. They massively attract white players and disproportionately exclude black students. According to NCAA data, only 160 of the 7,277 female crew members last year were black; Among the water polo players, the black athletes accounted for 31 of the 2,263 members of the team.

When special slots are reserved for these athletes in elite schools, they are primarily intended for high net worth individuals who might not otherwise be accepted. According to a survey conducted by Harvard Crimson last fall, more than a quarter of athletes recruited in the current freshman category came from families with incomes over $ 500,000. At Harvard, only 12% of recruited athletes come from families with incomes below $ 80,000. Yes, it is a scandal that a few dozen rich and famous parents have basically bought college acceptance letters for their children through a "side door". But we should not fool ourselves into thinking that the front door is so much more noble.