Kappa Alpha, Kappa Beta | How university admissions can benefit from an act of sorority bullying

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

Singer’s side-door scheme is what is referred to in textbooks as corruption. But the official university back-door scheme is the same way, just institutional corruption. If back-door admissions weren’t a form of corruption, then universities wouldn’t be so secretive about them. If it wasn’t corruption, they would be better off holding a Sotheby’s-style auction every year and selling a few seats away. With an auction open to the public, they are sure to raise significantly more money. But of course, the idea of an auction for admission makes most people laugh.

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

Every fall and spring (depending on the school) sororities open the doors of their gleaming white houses to recruit new sisters. Substitute “admissions process” with “rush,” and substitute GPA and SATs with a different kind of merit. One glance at the University of Southern California’s Kappa Kappa Gamma (KKG) sorority’s Instagram will quickly give you an idea of what kind of merit we’re working with here.

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

Allegedly, the unspoken system used within KKG and the fraternities they mix with goes as follows. Girls who are admitted to the sorority on their own merit are labeled: “Kappa Alpha.” And girls who are admitted through legacy or sororal advancement are labeled: “Kappa Beta”. Front door = Kappa Alpha. Back door = 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

This is easily translatable into the higher-stakes realm of university admissions. Universities should devise a similar categorizing system that celebrates the merit, hard work, and deservingness of their front-door students. One that would also remind the back-door students of their sheer dumb luck, their un-deservingness.

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

By recognizing this distinction, universities would rightfully disclose that their admissions process is not wholly meritocratic.

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 should be noted that this article has nearly zero journalistic integrity. I’m not making any of this up, but I am going off of the extremely reliable source of: a friend of a friend. This also explains why you are reading this in the wild west of an internet blog. In fact, another friend of mine who is a part of a fraternity that mixes with KKG says he has never heard of the system before. That being said, if any of this is true:

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.

Welcome To The Rawlsian Rabbit Hole

One may argue that the KA/KB system is broken because the merit in question (natural beauty) is superficial and arbitrary. Since one cannot choose to be born with more natural beauty, then KA/KB fails as a measure of deservingness and true individual merit.

There is a bizarre opportunity here to tie in philosopher John Rawls’ conception of deservingness and moral desert to address this. It will be helpful to first understand the difference between deserving something versus merely being entitled to it.

If you bought a winning Powerball ticket, you could not say that you deserved to win. The idea of deservingness is tied to justice: getting what one is due. Most would agree that one cannot deserve something that is random and outside of their control. Try looking a friend in the eye after you win the Powerball and telling them you deserved to win. If they are patient, they may only punch you in the nose. Or consider telling a five-year-old girl who was diagnosed with a rare terminal illness that she deserved it. It’s completely absurd. If her parents are extraordinarily patient, they’ll only chuck the hospital crash cart at you.

Now consider, if someone overdoses on heroin, does he deserve to die? Some might actually answer: it depends. Let’s make it nice and comically easy: He was the child of two parents who themselves struggled with addiction and he grew up in a terribly underfunded foster care system. Whether you can even say he chose to abuse the drug that eventually killed him is contentious. Addiction-afflicted parents, poverty, and foster care are not things someone can opt out of being born into, they are random. But, they are things that can greatly increase the risk of abusing drugs. So would you say he deserved to die? Rawls would say no. He would say that the person is entitled to “reasonable expectations” of harm or even death when abusing heroin, but he would reject the idea that he deserved to die.

The Powerball of Life

Most, if not all of us, agree that back-door students can’t claim they deserved to be admitted because of the fact that they couldn’t choose to be born into a wealthy family. Rawls would also reject that back-door students deserve their place because their admission occurred on the basis of winning the “naturally lottery” and therefore is “morally arbitrary.”

But, Rawls would also reject the idea that front-door students deserve their place. SATs are repeatedly found to be highly correlated to family wealth. If being born into the middle class, living in a safe neighborhood, and under the care of a loving double-parent household are factors one could not choose, but nonetheless, factors that helped one get through the front door, could one still claim they fully deserved it? These factors are akin to winning minor lotteries along the way leading up to the main prize.

And what about low-income and minority kids? This is where Rawls gets very contentious. Rawls would contend that even those who were able to claw their way up the bottom must attribute some of their success to factors outside of their control. Those who start at the bottom must find the will to work significantly harder and must often overcome extraordinary odds. With so many structural barriers and such a slim chance, those that do succeed and experience that rare phenomenon known as social mobility must be the winners of an astoundingly unlikely lottery, only a little later in life.

The documentary Waiting For Superman depicts this arbitrariness starkly as parents wait anxiously for the results of an annual lottery that will determine whether their child attends a high-performing charter school or not. When one parent is asked whether there is “another chance” if her daughter Francisca isn’t selected in the lottery, she answered with a tragic no.

In another instance, Wes Moore, a black man who grew up poor in Baltimore in the ’80s describes this same randomness when reflecting on his eventual acceptance into an elite university:

“It made me think deeply about … how many kids who didn’t have ‘luck’ like mine in this instance would find themselves forever outside the ring of power and prestige … So many opportunities in this country are apportioned in this arbitrary and miserly way.”

Moore’s heartbreaking memoir follows his correspondence with another individual who shared the same age, grew up in the same neighborhood, and, remarkably, shared the same name, but found himself on a different path in life. Wes Moore, the author of the book was a Rhodes Scholar, a decorated combat veteran, and a Wall Street banker. The stories are shrouded in an air of regret as their conversations take place on either side of a plexiglass barrier. The Other Wes Moore (also the name of the book), was serving a life sentence without parole in a maximum-security prison in Maryland for a violent jewelry store robbery gone wrong.

Wes tries to unpack the crucial moments and turning points in each of their lives to understand how they ended up on such opposite ends of the spectrum. While Wes does not subscribe to Rawls’ theory and makes it very, very clear that the other Wes is not a victim of fate, the story nonetheless is filled with moments where totally arbitrary events alter the courses of the two men’s lives.

Wes frames each turning point as a decision either of the men could have made, but we quickly learn that he was able to enroll in the exceptionally elite Riverdale Country School in New York City, where tuition is $44,600 a year, making it the fifth most expensive private high school in the country. And when he nearly flopped out, he was given an extraordinary opportunity to transfer to an elite military boarding school called Valley Forge in Pennsylvania. The other Wes was not given such decisions (if you could call it that) to make.

Tu-May-Doe, Tu-Mah-Doe

If we wanted to punch the guy who claimed he deserved to win the Powerball, then we’ll probably want to curb stomp the guy who tells someone who overcame poverty hell that they didn’t deserve their success.

But Rawls would remind us again that we are confusing entitlement and deservingness. If the low-income, minority, first-gen college kid put in the work to climb to the top, they are entitled to “reasonable expectations” of success, he would say. But again, because of all the arbitrary factors like natural intelligence or extraordinary athletic ability, that kid cannot claim he/she deserves it any more than the kid who paid their way into school.

It sounds ludicrous and to get around this you could just rule it all out as some kind of clever, but useless semantic trick:

i.e. So what, now serial killers don’t deserve to be on death row? They are just “entitled to reasonable expectations” of being incarcerated? Sure, whatever, no one deserves anything, but that doesn’t change the fact I will still believe the low-income front-door kid deserves it more than the snobby back-door kid. It also doesn’t change the fact that everyone should still put as much effort in as they can, and work as hard as they can if they want any opportunity to succeed.

Bear with me because we’ll see that the difference between the two is purposeful and like every lunatic children’s show, there is a meaningful moral of the story at the end!

What about blood, sweat, and tears?? HM??

Now there’s the inevitable: How about effort?! Doesn’t the mere existence rich kid fuck ups, prove that effort means something? In a case between two people who start at the same place with the exact same opportunities, the one who works harder deserves more, right? Rawls, now our resident annoying guy, would argue that even the conscientious desire to strive is a gift given to us. Even motivation, intellectual curiosity, and drive itself can be attributed to random factors and events. So, the one of two that works harder is, again, entitled to reasonable expectations of more success, but anything concerning deservingness after that is doo doo.

Many get straight up indignant about Rawls’ definition of moral deservingness because they feel the theory totally discounts effort and implies that everything is already determined by fate. But his theory is only uncomfortable if we don’t present the second consequential idea that Rawls put forward. If no one deserves anything, if everything is morally arbitrary, Rawls argues, then society should be structured so that those at the top help those at the bottom.

It is a two-part exercise: (1) If we agree that nobody really deserves anything; if we are all equal in that we hold only the winnings of this random lottery, then (2) Those who have won a lot ought to give to those who haven’t won much.

We don’t necessarily have to believe and live out Rawls’ definition of deservingness to still recognize how this line of thinking obliges the successful to give back to the less fortunate. That, I believe most of us can get on board with.

Wow! So it was all about giving back after all?!

Based on Rawls’ second point, it makes sense that he would actually approve of a back-door scheme, so long as the money goes directly to helping those at the bottom. By funding scholarships, financial aid, or expanding enrollment to more low-income or minority students. Funding a second gleaming state-of-the-art equestrian training center doesn’t count.

Applying Rawls’ philosophy to sorority rush and university admissions is a cheeky thought experiment, but I do believe it provokes interesting questions worth thinking about. If Rawls is right, then Kappa Alpha, Kappa Beta fails in three ways. One, it fails as a measure of deservingness. Second, it does double duty in perpetuating the meritocratic myth: By creating a categorization system that sponsors/recognizes the myth of “true merit” and “no merit,” and through its own existence, further affirming meritocracy as a fair and ideal system. And three, it’s just mean!

I think Rawls’ philosophy takes us on a semi-frustrating but eventually rewarding mental jungle gym crash course to, in the end, give us a framework for rethinking “failure” and “success,” and to give us a rationale for giving back or helping other people. It’s helped me further recognize the gifts I’ve received and, I’ve found, provided a very compelling reason to give back to those who’ve been denied those same gifts, through no fault of their own.

Back To Greek Row

So, if you argue that Kappa Alpha girls don’t truly deserve their place because natural beauty is random, then you must accept that if you can point to even one random event that helped you either succeed or fail, you too do not deserve it.

We are all subject to this same randomness whether we choose to believe it or not. Some make it into Harvard, some don’t. Some are born into the 0.1%, others into war-torn countries. Rawls contends that this deeply unequal distribution is neither just nor unjust—they are merely “natural facts”. What is just and unjust, however, is what we decide to do about these facts. Do we stand atop our mountain of lottery winnings, flex in the mirror, and tell ourselves it was all us, that we deserve it all? Or do we choose to lift others up?

As fun as it is to drag those side-door kids who were unaware of their parents’ payoff, if we think about it, “they’re no different from all the other people who can’t see the hidden forces working in their favor,” says Will Stancil. 

If Kappa Beta was supposed to distinguish those who didn't deserve their place, and if all of humanity stood alongside one another and were judged: We'd all be Kappa Beta.