If Resilience is Important, What Does the College Admissions Scandal Teach Us?

Recently, I was in a meeting with a group of injury and violence prevention professionals in New Orleans when I heard one of the presenters (a local judge) say something that caught my attention. The presenters were talking about how they are addressing adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) in Louisiana (see previous blog posts about this). Typically, those in my profession think about how ACEs affect children in underserved communities. We try to craft programs and policies to help those without resources and influence. But, this judge, who deals with family court issues, made the comment that many families with resources (i.e., wealth) also make bad or harmful decisions that impact their children. Just hours earlier, I had watched news coverage of the college admissions cheating scandal that has resulted in many wealthy individuals being charged with fraud after paying thousands of dollars to get their children admitted to elite colleges.

I have to admit that I did a lot of sighing and rolling of my eyes when I heard the story about the college admissions scandal, partly because I have some implicit bias. Some of this has to do with my career, which has focused on serving under-served families and those who are typically discriminated against. And, some of my bias comes from my own experiences.

Several years ago, I read the book Early Decision: Based on a True Frenzy. The book was the debut novel by Lacy Crawford, who had spent 15 years traveling as a highly sought-after private college counselor. The novel illuminates the madness of elite families who go to extreme measures to ensure their children are admitted to prestigious universities. About the time that I read the book, I was asked to write a sorority recommendation for a young woman who would be starting college during the Fall semester of that year. As an alumna of a women’s sorority, I’ve been asked to write dozens of these recommendations throughout the years. I’ve written recommendations for girls who have attended public schools, as well as recommendations for girls who attended private schools.

My bias is based on this experience. Let’s be clear, my bias is the result of my experience viewing the high school resumes of 30-40 young women – not of an empirically validated study. Of those 30-40 high school resumes I’ve read, I’ve found that young women from public schools have far greater involvement in community service activities, demonstrated leadership characteristics, and higher academic performance than of those of the young women who attended private schools. That doesn’t mean that I think students who attend private schools aren’t deserving – they are, or that I think private schools don’t offer good educational opportunities – they do.

That said, I also have to acknowledge that my experience, bias, and opinion do not make me an expert in this arena. Far from it.

I have zero experience with wealth or private schools. I only attended public schools because that’s where my parents taught. I attended public universities because that’s where my friends were going. I was able to pledge a sorority, which was a financial burden for my parents, because I was on scholarship, which helped defray the costs of my tuition, books, and lodging. My daughter also attended rural public schools. While she considered applying to out of state schools, she ended up attending the University of Oklahoma for her undergraduate degree. She also received an academic scholarship from the university because of her grades and ACT score. We didn’t purchase any study guides or hire a tutor to help her prepare for the test. Her father and I never even considered it, and he was an educator. She had a perfect Reading Comprehension score on the ACT, so all those books we purchased during her childhood may have been a good investment!

Here’s the other thing – in addition to the scholarship our daughter received from the University of Oklahoma, she also qualified for scholarships given by our local community. But, my husband, who was the high school principal, would not let our daughter accept the local scholarships because there were other members of her senior class that had greater financial needs. So, that’s my frame of reference and bias.

While I am a self-admitted “education snob” and wanted very much for my daughter to graduate with a college degree, where she attended college, as long as she got a quality education, was not significant to her father or me. That’s because we know many successful people who graduated with degrees from East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma, Southern Nazarene University in Bethany, Oklahoma, University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond, Oklahoma, Southwestern Oklahoma State University in Weatherford, Oklahoma, and Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

In case you think I don’t value the education at prestigious universities, I do. My friend Nancy’s son and daughter graduated from Brown University and Emory University, respectively. Both Nate and Laine were accepted at those universities on their own merits and excelled at those schools. I have many friends and colleagues across the country that teach, have taught, or graduated from prestigious public and private universities. My best friend has taught at Johns Hopkins University for years. I encouraged my friend and colleague, Merissa to attend Hopkins after she was accepted there. She did and had a great experience. But, Merissa, who is a public school alumna with an undergraduate degree from Notre Dame, applied to both Notre Dame and Hopkins not because of their prestige, but because those universities offered the educational pursuits she sought. Neither of my best friend’s children chose to attend Hopkins, opting instead for universities that better suited their individual needs.

It would be easy for me to get on my pious progressive pedestal and feel superior to those families of wealth and privilege who feel entitled to secure their children’s admission to the elite universities at all costs, including cheating and fraud. But, I’m tired, so tired of playing the “blame game.” It’s not solving any of our many complex societal problems, including the exploitable college admissions system.

Plus, as much as I’d like to feel immune to the entitlement that I equate with people of means and privilege, if I’m honest, I have to admit that I’ve also been guilty of looking unfavorably at people who don’t have financial resources. My first recollection of this goes back to elementary school, when I unfairly “judged” classmates who came to school looking unkempt. Much later when I was in college, my father, who was the elementary school principal, asked me to fill in as a substitute teacher for a couple of weeks during my holiday break because the Kindergarten teacher was on maternity leave. I vividly recall two children in that class. One child was a blond, blue-eyed little boy with an abundance of charisma, who came to school dressed in the latest 5 year-old fashions of that time. The other child was a little girl whose hair was rarely combed and was often dressed in clothes that didn’t fit properly and were clearly handed down from a sibling. Without understanding why, that little girl irritated and frustrated me. Looking back on that time, I clearly favored the little boy.

One day during that substitute teaching stint, my dad popped into the class. When he entered the classroom, that unkempt little girl ran to him and hugged him. And, my dad hugged her back. I watched as he bent down, looked her in the eyes, talked to her, and patted her on the back. That little girl craved attention, and my father showered her with lots of positive attention. As I watched that situation unfold, I felt shame at my own behavior. It was one of many important lessons my father taught me without ever saying a word, and my eyes still well with tears when I remember that scene. Although I have tried to emulate the compassion I saw in my father that day, I have often fallen short.

When the college admissions scandal broke, I was at a meeting learning more about prevention strategies that take a shared risk and protective factor (SRPF) approach from my colleague and Safe States Alliance President, Lindsey Myers. A publication by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Prevention Institute entitled, Connecting the Dots: An Overview of the Links Among Multiple Forms of Violence, explains how “risk factors” such as rigid social beliefs, lack of job opportunities, and family conflict can increase the risk of violence. By the same token, there are “protective factors” such as connections to caring adults, access to jobs with livable wages, and safe places to live and exercise that can build resilience when faced with risk factors. Protective factors give individuals the skills to solve problems non-violently.

Lindsey is the Branch Chief of the Violence and Injury Prevention-Mental Health Promotion Branch of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. Colorado is one of several states looking at the connection between social determinants of health, ACEs and SRPF, while implementing strategies that prevent multiple forms of violence and injury and substance abuse. Hearing Lindsey’s examples of Colorado’s efforts energized me. I can’t wait to start exploring opportunities to implement similar strategies and programs in Dallas.

I’m also encouraged when I listen to my friend Debi talk about Odyssey Leadership Academy (OLA), an “out of the box” school in Oklahoma City founded by her son, Dr. Scott Martin. Against the advice of probably everyone in his family and my husband, Scott set about to “fix” what he considered a “broken” educational system. He established OLA because he was alarmed both at the empirical data related to teenage stress, anxiety, depression, sadness, loneliness, and self-harm that the traditional model of schooling imparts, as well as the anecdotal evidence he witnessed in his classrooms.

In the “Letter from the Founder” on the OLA website, Scott says, “We believe that a vision of education rooted in health begins not with information, but with the in/formation of persons committed to the well-being and flourishing of themselves and their communities. We strive to be a place that shapes the imaginations and affections of our students not to prepare them for the real world, but to help them shape a better world for us all.”

When I listen to the news of the college admissions scandal, as well as other stories of greed and indulgence, I wonder about the resilience of the children of these parents. I wonder about the skills these children are learning.

It’s important for me to be reminded about the compassion and empathy that Scott and OLA faculty are teaching because we also awoke last week to the horrifying news from Christchurch, New Zealand. As many as 50 people have died from mass shootings at two mosques. As of this time, a 28 year-old man has been charged in the attacks. Just before the shootings, a link to an 87-page manifesto, which was filled with anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiments, was posted to an account in the suspect’s name on Twitter and 8chan, an online messaging board that has been used by anonymous accounts to share extremist messages and cheer on mass shooters. When the suspect appeared in court, he made a hand gesture associated with white supremacists.

Last week as I enjoyed the sights, sounds, and tastes of New Orleans, I was reminded about a Gloria Steinem quote I heard recently. “We don’t learn from sameness. We learn from difference.”

Whether we are rich or poor, Muslin or Christian, gay or heterosexual, black, brown, white or red, or educated by academics or life experiences, perhaps, it would behoove us all to spend more time outside of our own small worlds.