Stand at the steps leading up to any elite American university and you’ll find yourself before two doors. There’s the “front door,” the traditional application process: submit your GPA, test scores, personal essays, all the fruit of the four-year gauntlet that is high school, and compete with thousands of others vying to squeeze through the narrow frame. And there’s the “back door,” or “institutional advancement:” donate a sizable sum to the university, for some north of ten million dollars, so your application will become what they call a “development case,” or buying your way in.
In 2018, the world learned of a secret “side door,” a fraudulent scheme led by William Singer a crafty former university admissions consultant. Assembling a gang of crooked coaches Singer could, in his words “provide a guarantee” of admission to elite universities by posing, quite literally, NARPs (non-athletic regular people) as star athletic recruits for a fee of a few hundred thousand dollars upward to $6.5M depending on the school.
People were very upset. We’d always sort of known about the back door: Aggressively average Andy Prescott III gets the yes letter from Yale and swears that the newly announced $15m Prescott Library has nothing to do with it. But there was a valid justification for average Andys: Let a few rich dinky shitters pay millions for admission and that money could be used for the greater good of all students like funding scholarships, research grants, and new facilities. There was no such trade-off with the side door: all that money went directly into developing Singer’s fat pockets.
Univeristy-Sponsored(TM) Corruption
Selling admission through the back door is corrupt on two grounds. One, for the same reason Singer’s scheme is corrupt: you are allowing someone to buy something that should not be able to be bought. And two, it corrupts the purpose of the university as an institution.
The real reason universities aren’t going-three-times-SOLD’ing freshman seats is that doing so would degrade the value and meaning that a university degree confers — it would devalue the “honorific aspect of admission,” as Harvard Professor Michael Sandel puts it. Compare this to being able to buy the Nobel Prize, he proposes. Imagine a world where along with the prizes awarded to leading physicists and mathematicians for their groundbreaking work, the institute also publically put a few prizes up for sale. Wouldn’t merely knowing that they sold prizes depreciate the distinction the award bestows?
In addition to devaluation, an admission-for-dollars scheme would also undermine the merit of all the students who worked hard to earn their way through the front door. If a balding billionaire real estate mogul bought a Nobel Prize, it would undermine and, in a way, disrespect the effort and work of all previous and future award winners.
Now imagine that during the Nobel Prize ceremony, it isn’t announced who bought the prize and who truly earned it. Would that not take nearly all the meaning away from the prize? Would it still feel right to celebrate all the winners if we couldn’t tell who was who? This happens every year at elite American universities since (I’ll go out on a limb here) back-door students aren’t particularly eager to announce their corruption-enabled admission. So, except in the few most obvious cases, back-door students step up on that same stage every year and accept the same prize posing as front-door students.
The college admissions scandal presented a perverted play-by-play of this when many of the implicated side-door students claimed they were in the dark about the whole scheme. Many maintained they had no idea their parents had orchestrated their admission. If true, it would mean that those side-door students, for a time, truly believed they deserved their admission on account of their own hard work and merit. Imagine the delusion of accepting a Nobel Prize your parents secretly bought you, standing up on stage alongside those distinguished individuals, and believing, truly (with zero imposter syndrome), that you earned it. As is the premise of Sandel’s book What Money Can’t Buy: there are some things that just shouldn’t be for sale.Despite all this, if it is true that universities require the contributions of back-door admits then, I argue, the least they can do is soften this corruption by being transparent. There is a system that exists, in the unlikeliest of places, that has, I believe, the potential to address the corruption that undermines the merit of hard-working front-door students by labeling who is who.
Phi Omega Omega Phi Omega Omega
Mirroring universities, there are two doors into KKG. There is the front door: be attractive, sociable, wealthy, and hope the sisters like you. And there is the back door: have a legacy or donate a large sum to the sorority (let’s call it “sororal advancement”). The crucial difference though is, unlike universities, back-door admits at KKG do not have the privilege of joining the organization inconspicuously.
Finally, the main course: Kappa Alpha, Kappa Beta
When I tell people about this system, people who are usually uninterested and only listening because I’ve cornered them, they are almost always initially appalled to hear it. They admonish how cruel and mean it is, and how it defies that “sisterhood” that sororities are always so proud of. But I argue that it creates a fairer representation of merit and that it is a system that universities would do well to adopt.
Kappa Alpha, Kappa Beta is the flash of light that catches corruption naked. By assigning a label to Kappa Beta girls, it serves as a persistent reminder that they did not deserve their spot in the sorority. That if it hadn’t been for some divine interventive help like a few thousand bucks or a legacy, they would not be there. It is the mark they must bear as, along with extortionary dues and emotional damage, another cost of entry.
On the flip side, assigning a label to Kappa Alpha girls serves as a reminder that they truly deserve their spot in the sorority. That through their own merit, they have rightfully earned their place. It celebrates these women, and it ensures that no honor is stolen from them.
Very, Very Practical Applications
Harvard could require the one-third of its newly-minted Class of 2022 who were legacy admits to stitch “CRIMSON BETA” on their graduation stoles when they walk across the stage to receive their degrees. The designation could precede Latin Honors as it is equally if not more prestigious: “Tavius Koktavy graduated BOBCAT ALPHA and Summa Cum Laude from NYU…” Or it could be made into a kind of honor society like Phi Beta Kappa, where graduates are inducted by review of FAFSA documentation, university donation records, and legacies.
Why Labeling Matters
It would help outstanding and talented students who were rejected understand that the decision was not necessarily a reflection of their supposedly lacking merit, but (potentially) rather of bad luck. Harvard President Drew Faust himself admitted: “We could fill our class twice over with valedictorians.” A rejection is not necessarily because they aren’t good enough. The system is far from perfect and a rejection letter is not the final judgment upon one’s life and future.
It would help them understand that not everyone who was admitted truly and wholly deserves to be there—it could have uncontrollable factors that tipped the scale such as a legacy, a donation, or because someone’s dad golfs regularly with an admissions officer. In some cases, one could view their spot as unjustifiably stolen.
It would reject the stolen honor claimed by legacy and back-door admits. It would teach them that just as their “success” is a direct result of random good fortune, it’s entirely possible that others’ “failures” is a direct result of random bad fortune—factors completely out of their control. This realization may teach them (this is a stretch) to use their advantageous starting position to help others who weren’t as lucky.
This Could Legit All Be Fake
It’s important to know that within KKG this categorization is very, very informal. Nobody’s reviewing financial records or legacies. As in everyone is guessing who is Kappa Alpha and Kappa Beta based mostly on beauty. I was informed that if the sisters were placed in a police lineup, one could easily pick out who belonged where. So it turns out that the system is really quite crude and that the initial reaction of it being mean is accurate. If it is truly that easy to distinguish who is who based on beauty alone then it’s a whole other can of worms to untangle the cruel “rigor” of the admissions process.
I guess the calculus goes as such: If beauty was an SAT score, and there was a minimum required for admission: the singular, only way that those with a “low” score are admitted is through outside help. I’m sure Kappa Beta girls are granted plenty of opportunities to “redeem” or prove themselves through what should truly matter: active contribution to the organization, service, embodying sororal ideals, etc. But they should understand that the “mark” they carry is pretty permanent and that they will always be Kappa Beta. It’s cruel but fairer, and after all, still, only a nanoscopic price to pay, to start far ahead of everyone else.
