Say it ain't so, Aunt Becky!

 A burgeoning college-admissions scandal snares a couple of television celebrities, and raises questions about parenting and college.

Here in suburbia, how do we parents arrange our lives?  That's very simple: virtually every major decision we make, from where we choose to live, to the schools we choose for our children, to the activities we encourage our children to pursue, to the jobs we work, to the ways we save and invest, is geared toward getting our children into and through college.  Good primary school districts are better than less good ones for this purpose (or so we all believe), so the imperative is to live within the territory of a good school district.  Top-rated colleges are better than lesser ones (or so we all believe), so the imperative is for students to get into good colleges.  And if you're a good contemporary helicopter parent, you don't trust your children to make the latter happen all by themselves (e.g. by working hard in school and applying for colleges on their own); you become active partners/collaborators/directors in those endeavors.  You might even take on massive amounts of college-loan debt on behalf of your children, if you don't happen to have a million or so in the bank to pay for your children's secondary educations.

There are heroic Christian families who spurn these pressures: parents, for example, who don't need to, but choose to, live in poverty-stricken urban neighborhoods or somewhere in the developing world, in order to teach their children that the world is wide and life is diverse and hard, and that most families on our planet are not sweating over whether their children can get accepted into Princeton or need to settle for UCLA.  But most of us aren't heroes.  I'm not; when my wife and I got married, we moved from Chicago to the suburbs, for the banal but powerful reason that we thought it would be a better place to build a life and rear a family.

This goal-directed activity becomes visible on the day of high school graduation.  At our local high school's graduation ceremony, the names of all 400+ graduates are listed in the graduation program, and next to each name is the name of the college s/he will be attending.  If you think that parents don't scan that list avidly, before, during and after the ceremony, then you don't understand suburban parents.

There was a time, when my parents graduated from high school in the 1950s, when high school graduation marked, for many of those kids, the end of formal schooling and the beginning of the rest of their lives.  They might be married within a year, have children shortly thereafter, and get a job in the family retail store or the local factory, and proceed with their adult lives.  My mother was married and pregnant at nineteen.  As the father of daughters who have now surpassed that age, that blows my mind.  That life progression would be considered unthinkable these days, at least hereabout.

Among the graduates of our local high school, typically there are a small handful who gain entrance into Ivies each year, and a somewhat larger cohort who are accepted into other top-tier schools like University of Chicago or Duke or Michigan.  Getting into other Big Ten schools is socially acceptable.  Private schools (like my alma mater, Loyola) also are ok.  When it comes to the so-called "directional schools" (e.g. Western Kentucky, Northern Illinois), the other parents shake their heads - or, if their own kid got into a better school, gloat.  The kids on the community college track feel compelled to rationalize or apologize - I've heard this quite a few times over the years from the kids themselves, and their parents.  As for not going to school at all: probably there are a few such kids each year in the graduation program, but I don't recall noticing it.

We tried to ensure our kids had activities when they were growing up, and we encouraged them to stretch themselves, but we were much less pushy about these things than some parents are in our community.  Many parents I've known have dreamed of their children qualifying for athletic scholarships, and have spent thousands of dollars on camps, travel teams and so on to help their kids develop athletically.  And the for-profit help-with-homework outfits like Huntington Learning Centers reportedly are doing brisk business around here.  As do the ACT- and SAT-coaching services.

These reflections on the social pressures of child-rearing, at least among a certain cohort of Americans, is prompted by the juicy scandal that is unfolding: some 50 persons, including two semi-famous television actors, have been indicted by the Justice Department for conspiring to cheat the college-admissions process in order to land their children in top-flight colleges.  According to the NBC News story:

Authorities said the FBI investigation, code-named Operation Varsity Blues, uncovered a network of wealthy parents who paid thousands of dollars to a California man who boosted their children's chances of gaining entrance into elite colleges, such as Yale and Stanford, by paying people to take tests for their children, bribing test administrators to allow that to happen, and bribing college coaches to identify the applicants as athletes.

More details on the conspiracy:

Of the 50 people charged so far, 33 are parents and nine were college coaches. The others were a mix of standardized test administrators, a test proctor and [alleged ringleader William Rick] Singer associates, authorities said. ...  Parents paid Singer $15,000 to $75,000 per test for someone else to take the SAT or ACT exams in place of their college-age sons or daughters, according to the court papers. 

Singer facilitated the cheating by advising students to seek "extended time on the exams, including by having their children purport to have learning disabilities in order to obtain medical documentation that ACT, Inc. and the College Board typically required before granting students extended time," the indictment says.  Prosecutors said Singer used the cash to bribe two people who administered the exams — Igor Dvorsiky, of Los Angeles, and Lisa "Niki" Williams, of Houston.  In exchange for receiving the payments, Dvorsiky and Williams allowed Mark Riddell, a Florida man hired by Singer, to secretly take the tests or to replace the children's answers with his own, according to the indictment. ... 

From 2011 to last month, parents paid Singer roughly $25 million to bribe coaches and university administrators to "designate their children as recruited athletes, or other favored admissions categories," according to the court papers.  In some cases, Singer’s associates created fake athletic "profiles" in an effort to improve the students' chances of getting accepted by making them appear to be highly successful high school athletes.  Singer would then bribe college coaches to allot slots meant for incoming athletes to the children of the wealthy parents, authorities said.

The two actors in question are Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman.  Loughlin appeared for several seasons on the '80s-'90s sitcom "Full House" as Aunt Becky, the wife of Uncle Jesse and the mother of twin boys in the latter seasons.  When my wife and I were newlyweds, we watched the show semi-regularly, because my wife prefers wholesome entertainment, and also she thought Uncle Jesse was hot.  I've also seen Loughlin more recently in a couple (or maybe even more than a couple) of Hallmark Channel made-for-television rom-coms - not that I seek those out, but they are innocent pleasures of the female contingent in our household, and I can't completely avoid them.  Huffman was a cast member of "Desperate Housewives", a show which I watched once for 10 minutes during Season 1 and then gave up on for the remainder of its run, but which I understood strove to be somewhat un-wholesome within the constraints of network television of that era.

If we believe the charges as detailed in news reports, the two actors behaved in in a distinctly unwholesome manner:

Loughlin and her fashion designer husband, Mossimo Giannulli, agreed to pay bribes totaling $500,000 to bolster their two daughters' chances of gaining admission to the University of Southern California, court papers say. Huffman and her husband, actor William H. Macy, paid $15,000 to get one of their daughters unlimited time for her SAT test, prosecutors say.

I certainly don't inhabit Hollywood, but as I've noted above, I do reside in a milieu in which college admissions are an important matter.  That said, one has to wonder, in the grand scheme of things, how much of a difference it really makes whether a person goes to University of San Diego or San Diego State.  Or San Diego Mesa Community College.  My idea is, figure out your vocation - what God is calling you to do.  Then go do that.  If that involves going to college - go for it.  Some of the happiest years of my life were my college years.  Going to college is a blessing I wish for everyone.  But please, parents, can we keep all this in perspective?  And maybe avoid spending some time in the hoosegow?