Prescott Valley, Arizona Correspondent

I spent two decades in public schools writing letters of recommendation for students whose parents could not afford a test-prep course, let alone a bribe, and I want to say at the outset that nothing in the indictments unsealed in March surprised a single teacher I know. The surprise, the thing that made it a story, was that the parents were famous and the method was crude: a proctor correcting bubbles, a photograph of a boy in a backyard pool labeled water polo, a girl listed as a coxswain who had never seen a boat. Those were crimes, and the woman sentenced last week deserved her fourteen days and a good deal more, and I will not spend this piece defending anyone who paid to have a child’s test answers changed. But the question asks about public trust and the debate over merit, and the honest answer from a classroom is that the public never trusted the system, that the teachers never pretended it was merit, and that what the scandal did was give everyone permission to say out loud what the counselor’s office has known for thirty years, which is that the front door is small, the back door is large, and the children of ordinary families are competing for the space between.

Let me describe the doors, because the man who ran the scheme described them himself, in a recorded call that the prosecutors released, and his description is the most accurate account of elite admissions I have ever read. There is the front door, he said, where a student gets in on her own. There is the back door, where a family makes a donation large enough that the development office has a conversation with the admissions office, and that door is legal and costs, in his estimate, ten times what he was charging. And there was his side door, where for a few hundred thousand dollars he could guarantee what the back door only made likely. He was not describing a corruption of the system. He was describing a market with three price points, and he was selling the middle one to people who could not afford the top. The parents who went to prison were not the ones who broke the system. They were the ones who could not afford to use it legally and got caught improvising.

Now what it did to trust, which I think is less than the coverage says and in a different direction. The polling before the scandal already showed large majorities believing that admissions favored the wealthy. The scandal did not create that belief; it confirmed it with photographs, and confirmation does not lower trust so much as it ends the argument about whether the distrust was fair. What changed, in the classrooms I still visit and the parents I still talk to, is the register of the conversation. A mother in Prescott Valley whose daughter did not get into the university she wanted used to say the daughter was not good enough. She now says the slot went to someone whose parents knew somebody, and she may be wrong about her daughter’s case, and she is right about the system, and the shift from the first sentence to the second is the actual consequence of this year. It is a shift from self-blame to system-blame, and system-blame is more accurate and far more corrosive, because a family that blames itself studies harder and a family that blames the system stops believing the studying matters.

The debate over merit and privilege, which the question asks about, has been sharpened in a way I find useful and the universities find uncomfortable. The scandal arrived in the middle of a trial over whether Harvard discriminates against Asian-American applicants, and the documents from that trial showed that the children of alumni and donors are admitted at several times the overall rate, legally, through the back door the scheme’s organizer described. So the country has spent the year looking at two things at once: a criminal scheme that bought admission for the children of the rich, and a legal system that does the same thing more slowly and with a tax deduction. The universities would like the public to be outraged about the first and to regard the second as tradition. The public, which is not stupid, has noticed that the difference between a bribe and a donation is whether the development office knows about it, and that noticing is the real damage to the elite institutions, because their whole claim on the country’s deference is that they select on merit, and they have spent the year explaining why some of the merit is inherited.

I want to say something about the children, because I taught children and nobody else in this argument seems to be thinking about them. The students who were admitted through the side door are now, some of them, expelled, and all of them are known, and most of them appear not to have known what their parents did. A teacher learns that the cruelest thing a parent can do to a child is to arrange a success the child did not earn and then let the child believe she earned it, because the child builds a self on the belief, and the self does not survive the discovery. Those children have discovered it in the newspaper. Meanwhile the children in my former district, who took the test without a proctor fixing it and did not get in, have learned that the game was rigged in a way they had suspected but could not prove, and they will carry that into every institution they encounter. I do not know which lesson is worse. I know a school is supposed to teach neither.

So my answer is that the scandal did not lower public trust in elite universities so much as it ended the universities’ ability to dispute the distrust, and that the debate over merit has been sharpened by the coincidence of a criminal case and a civil trial that together showed the public that the illegal door and the legal door open onto the same room. The parents who went to prison deserve to be there. The system they were trying to cheat is the larger scandal and is not a crime, and the universities’ defense of it this year has cost them more than the indictments did. As a teacher I would grade the year this way: the students learned exactly what the adults had been hiding, and the adults have not yet decided whether to admit it or to keep writing the brochure. I would advise admitting it. The brochure has been read.

Wheeling, West Virginia Correspondent

Nobody from this valley was in the indictment, and nobody from this valley was in the applicant pool the indictment was about, and I want to begin with that, because the question asks about public trust in elite universities and the honest answer from Appalachia is that the public here never had any to lose. The schools in the indictment, Yale and Stanford and Georgetown and the University of Southern California, are not places that the children of Wheeling apply to. They are places that the children of Wheeling hear about, the way they hear about yachts, as a thing that exists for other people in other places, and the news that rich parents in Los Angeles paid to fix their children’s test scores landed here the way news of a yacht sinking lands: with interest, a certain satisfaction, and no sense that anything had changed about the water.

So let me say what the scandal looked like from a place that was never in the game, because I think it is a clearer view than the one from the places that were. A man in California built a business selling admission to famous universities to people who could afford a few hundred thousand dollars but not the millions that the legal version costs, and he sold it by faking test scores and athletic records and bribing coaches, and the universities, by their own account, did not notice for seven years that they were admitting water polo players who could not swim. The parents were actors and executives and lawyers, and the first one sentenced got fourteen days last week for paying fifteen thousand dollars to have her daughter’s answers corrected. The debate that followed was about merit and privilege, which is the debate the educated class has with itself about who deserves its own advantages, and I have watched that debate for fifty-eight years from the outside and I will tell you what it looks like from here: it is an argument among the people inside the building about the seating chart, conducted in a language designed to be inaudible to the people outside.

Here is the thing I actually think the scandal revealed, and it is not about universities. It is about the word merit, which has become the educated class’s way of describing its own position as earned, and which the scandal exposed as a story that even the people telling it do not believe. If the system were merit, the parents would have trusted their children to the test. They did not. They paid to beat it, because they knew, as everyone in their world knows, that the test is one of several doors and the other doors are bought, and that a child without a bought door is competing against children who have one. The scheme’s organizer said this on tape. The Harvard trial documents said it in court: the children of alumni and donors admitted at several times the rate of everyone else, legally. The scandal did not reveal that merit had been corrupted. It revealed that the people who talk most about merit had already priced it, and were shopping for a discount.

Now the labor man’s view of what that does to a country, because I spent years across a table from people who believed they had earned what they had, and the belief is the thing that makes the bargaining hard. A ruling class that believes it earned its position does not negotiate with the people below it; it instructs them, in the vocabulary of merit, to try harder, and it builds a system in which trying harder is the thing the people below are permitted to do while the people above arrange the outcomes. The scandal put a photograph on that: a boy in a backyard pool, labeled water polo, on his way to a university that the sons of this valley could not get into with a perfect score and a scholarship, because the slot was for the boy in the pool. I do not say that the boy’s parents were typical. I say that the system they were trying to game had been built by people who said the word merit while using the back door, and that everyone outside the building had already noticed, and that the scandal gave them the proof they had not needed.

What I think changes, and it is not trust. The people here did not trust the elite universities before, and they do not trust them now, and the ones who went to prison for fourteen days have not altered that arithmetic. What changes is the argument, because the educated class can no longer tell the rest of the country that its position was earned without the rest of the country laughing, and a ruling class that cannot say its position was earned has to say something else, and the something else is the question of the next decade. It can say the position was inherited, which is honest and which it will not say. It can say the system should be fixed, which is what the universities are saying, with task forces, and which nobody outside the building believes. Or it can go on saying merit while the photograph of the pool circulates, and the laughing gets louder, and the laughter becomes a politics, which it already has, and which the people in the building keep calling populism as if the name explained it.

So my answer is that the scandal did nothing to public trust in elite universities in the places that never had any, which is most of the country, and did a great deal to the educated class’s ability to describe itself, which is the thing that actually mattered. The debate over merit and privilege has been settled, outside the building, in favor of the view that the two are the same word with different tax treatment, and the people inside the building are the only ones still debating it. The woman who got fourteen days committed a crime. The system she was trying to cheat is not a crime, and it is the larger scandal, and the sons of this valley have known that since before she was born. The parents in the indictment paid for an education, in the oldest sense of the word: they learned what the system actually costs. The rest of the country got the same education for free, from the newspaper, and it is the only thing the elite universities have given this valley in my lifetime.

Long Island, New York Correspondent

The charge was not bribery of a university. I want to begin with that, because the legal structure of the case tells you what the law thinks the crime was, and what the law thinks is not what the public thinks, and the gap between the two is where the question about merit and privilege actually lives. The parents were charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest-services fraud, and in some cases money laundering, and the theory of the fraud was that they deceived the universities, which were the victims, by causing their employees, the coaches, to breach the duty of honest services they owed to their employers. The universities were the victims. The children were, in most cases, uncharged. The test proctors who corrected the bubbles were charged as participants. And the man who built the whole thing, who pleaded guilty in March and has been cooperating since, described the universities’ own donation channel as the legal back door that his side door undercut on price. I spent ten years in a prosecutor’s office and I have rarely seen a case in which the victim, the institution whose integrity was defrauded, had a legal business selling the same thing the defendants were convicted of stealing. That is the legal fact at the center of this, and it is why the question of trust has an answer the universities will not like.

Let me take the crimes first, because they were real and the woman sentenced last week deserved worse than fourteen days. Paying a proctor to correct a child’s test answers is fraud on the testing company and on every student whose score was honest. Paying a coach to list a non-athlete as a recruit is fraud on the university and on the athlete who did not get the slot. Routing the payments through a charity and deducting them is tax fraud. Those are crimes with victims, and the prosecutors in Boston have handled them competently, and the parents who pleaded guilty have been treated, so far, with a leniency that I think reflects their lawyers more than their conduct. Fourteen days for a fifteen-thousand-dollar bribe is a sentence that a public defender’s client would not receive for a comparable fraud, and the judge said as much about the defendant’s remorse and her cooperation, and I would note that remorse and cooperation are also things that money buys, in the form of counsel who know how to present them.

Now the legal door, which is where the question of trust goes. The documents from the Harvard trial last fall, which is a separate case about whether the university discriminates against Asian-American applicants, disclosed what everyone in admissions knew and nobody had been required to put in a filing: that the children of alumni are admitted at several times the overall rate, that the children of donors are flagged on a list the dean reviews, and that recruited athletes in sports played mostly by the wealthy are admitted at rates that dwarf everyone else’s. None of that is illegal. A private university may admit whomever it wishes within the civil rights laws, and the tax code permits the donation, and the donor’s child’s application is not fraud because nobody is deceived; the university knows exactly whose child it is admitting and why. The scheme’s organizer was convicted for selling a counterfeit version of a product the universities sell legally, and the difference between the counterfeit and the original is that the original is priced in millions and disclosed to the development office. A paralegal who has spent years reading zoning files recognizes the structure: the variance that costs a bribe is a crime, and the variance that costs a campaign contribution and a lawyer is governance, and the people who can afford the second regard the first with real indignation.

What has it done to trust? I would answer with the evidence from my own field, which is that the civil litigation is where institutions discover what the public believes about them. In the months since March, students have filed class actions against the universities claiming their applications were not fairly considered, and those suits will mostly fail, because the courts have never recognized a right to a fair admissions process at a private university, and because the plaintiffs cannot show that any particular slot was theirs. But the filing is the signal. People sue institutions they have stopped believing will police themselves, and the universities are being sued by their own applicants, which is a thing that did not happen at scale before this year. Meanwhile the Harvard case awaits a ruling, and whatever the judge decides about race, the record she decides it on is a record of a legal preference system for the wealthy that the public has now read, and the universities’ claim to be selecting on merit will have to be made, in future, against that record.

On the debate over merit and privilege, the law has a useful contribution, which is the concept of a fiduciary. The coaches were convicted because they owed a duty to their employers and sold it. The universities owe no comparable legal duty to the public; they are private corporations with tax exemptions, and the exemption is the only hook the law has on them, and nobody in Congress has proposed to pull it. But the public has, I think, concluded that the universities owe a fiduciary duty to the idea of merit, that the duty is the basis of their prestige and their tax status, and that they have been selling the duty through the back door while prosecuting the people who bought it through the side one. That conclusion has no legal force. It has enormous moral force, and the universities have responded to it this year with internal reviews, which is how an institution responds to a moral claim it does not intend to honor.

So my answer is that the scandal was a fraud case in which the victims operated a legal version of the fraud, that the parents convicted deserve more than they have received and will likely receive less than they deserve because they can afford to, and that public trust in elite universities has been damaged less by the crimes than by the discovery, through a separate lawsuit, of how the legal door works. The debate over merit and privilege has been resolved in the public mind in favor of the view that the two are priced differently and sold by the same institution, and the universities have no legal obligation to change that and no moral standing to defend it. A paralegal would note that the counterfeit has been prosecuted and the original is still on sale. That is the law working exactly as written. It is also the reason nobody outside the building believes the word merit anymore, and the law has no remedy for that, and the universities, so far, have offered none either.

Dayton, Ohio Correspondent

I cannot fill the machinist openings in my plant, and I want to begin there, because the question asks about the debate over merit and privilege and I think the scandal has illuminated a part of that debate that nobody in the coverage has touched, which is what the country has decided merit is for. Thirty-three parents, by the indictment, paid a combined twenty-five million dollars to get their children into universities whose degrees, in most of the majors those children would have chosen, lead to careers that pay less than a journeyman toolmaker earns in the Miami Valley by the age of thirty, with no debt and a pension. The parents did not do it for the earnings. They did it for the name, and the name is the thing the scandal is actually about: a credential that has become the country’s primary marker of having been sorted upward, so valuable as a marker that people with money will commit federal crimes to acquire it for children who did not qualify, while the plants in Ohio that build the things the country runs on cannot find anyone to run the machines. That is a merit system that has stopped measuring merit and started measuring membership, and the people who built it are the ones who got indicted for trying to buy their way in.

Let me describe the system from the shop floor, because I think the view from a plant is the one the universities least want to hear. Every year the local high schools send the great majority of their graduates to four-year colleges, because that is what the guidance counselors are measured on and what the parents have been told is the only route to a decent life. Every year a large share of those students do not finish, and many of the ones who do finish carry debt into jobs that did not require the degree. Meanwhile the community college down the road runs a precision-machining program with a one-hundred-percent placement rate and starting wages that beat most of the four-year graduates, and it cannot fill its seats, because the parents regard it as the place you send the children who are not going to college, and the children have absorbed the regard. I help with a youth robotics team on weekends, and the kids on it are the exception: they already know that building things is a path, and their parents are mostly engineers who know it too. The rest of the county has been taught that the only merit worth having is the kind that gets you a name on a sweatshirt, and the scandal is what that teaching looks like when it reaches the people who can afford to act on it.

Now trust, which the question asks about, and which I will take as a process engineer takes a quality claim: by asking what the specification was and whether the output met it. The elite universities’ specification, as stated in every brochure, is that they select the most talented students in the country through a rigorous and fair process. The scandal showed that the process could be beaten by a proctor with an eraser and a coach with a bank account, and that the universities did not detect it for seven years, which is a quality system that is not inspecting its own inputs. The Harvard trial last fall showed, separately, that the legal process gives the children of alumni and donors a preference that would be called a defect in any other context. So the output did not meet the specification, the inspection did not catch the defects, and the response, as of this month, has been expelled students, fired coaches, and internal reviews, which in my plant would be called treating the symptom. The specification itself, which is the thing the public trusted, has not been revised, and I do not expect it to be, because revising it would require the universities to admit that the product is not what the label says.

Here is the point about merit I most want to make, because I think both sides of the public debate have it wrong. The people defending the universities say that the scandal was a few bad actors and the system is fundamentally meritocratic. The people attacking them say the system is rigged for the wealthy and merit is a fiction. I would say, from a plant that measures skill every day, that the system is meritocratic about the wrong thing. It measures, with great precision, a particular kind of academic performance at seventeen, plus the ability of a family to purchase the coaching that produces that performance, plus the legacy and donor preferences, and it does not measure, at all, the things the country actually needs done: whether a person can hold a tolerance, troubleshoot a line, lead a crew, or build something that works. The parents in the indictment were not trying to beat a merit system. They were trying to buy the only kind of merit the country has decided to count, and the fact that it is the wrong kind is the scandal underneath the scandal, and no one went to prison for it.

I want to say what I think the scandal should change and will not. It should change the guidance office, which should stop measuring itself on four-year enrollments and start measuring itself on what the graduates are doing at twenty-five. It should change the employers, who should stop requiring a bachelor’s degree for jobs that do not use one, which is most of them, and which is the practice that gives the credential its monopoly value. It should change the parents, who should look at the placement rate and the debt load before they look at the name. And it should change the universities, who should be made to publish, as a condition of their tax exemption, exactly how many seats went to the children of donors and alumni and recruited athletes, so that the public can see the back door that the scheme’s organizer was undercutting. None of that will happen, because the people who would have to change are the people who benefit from the current count, and they are the same people who sit on the boards.

So my answer is that the scandal damaged trust in elite universities among people who had trusted them, confirmed the view of people who had not, and sharpened the debate over merit and privilege by showing that the thing the wealthy will commit crimes to buy is a credential whose value is membership rather than skill. The plants in Ohio cannot find machinists. The parents in California paid twenty-five million dollars to avoid the possibility that their children might become anything like one. Those two facts are the same fact, seen from opposite ends of the country’s idea of merit, and until the idea changes, the scandal will repeat, legally, every admissions cycle, and the machines will go unrun. I would trade one indicted parent’s bribe for a fully enrolled machining program. The country, so far, has made the opposite trade, and called it merit, and the robotics kids are the only ones in my county who seem to know the difference.

Las Vegas, Nevada Correspondent

In this town the cardinal sin is not losing. It is cheating, and the difference between the two is the whole business, because a casino depends on every player at every table believing that the game is honest even though the odds are against him, and the moment a player believes the game is fixed, he leaves and takes his friends. I dealt cards for six years and I watched the surveillance people pull cheaters off the floor, and the thing they understood that I want to apply to the admissions scandal is this: the house does not prosecute cheaters to protect its money. It prosecutes them to protect the belief, because the belief is the money. The elite universities have spent this year prosecuting cheaters, or watching the government do it, and they have done it for the same reason, and the question the public has started asking is the one a casino never wants asked, which is whether the house itself was dealing straight.

Let me describe the game as the scheme’s organizer described it, because he was the most honest person in the indictment. There is a front door, where you get in on your own, and the odds there are long and getting longer, with the famous schools admitting four or five percent of applicants. There is a back door, where a family makes a donation large enough that the development office puts in a word, and that door is legal and costs millions. And there was his side door, where for a few hundred thousand dollars he would guarantee what the back door only improved, by having a proctor fix the test or a coach fake a recruitment. He was, in casino terms, a man who had noticed that the house was already letting certain players see the dealer’s hole card for a price, and who set up a cheaper service next door offering the same view. The parents who bought from him were not high rollers; they were players with money but not enough to be comped the suite, and they wanted what the whales were getting and could not afford the rate. The house caught them. The house has not said much about the whales.

So the question of trust. Nineteen years in this industry have taught me to read a floor, and the floor I would read here is the one that was never at the elite tables to begin with, which is most of the country. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where the children of this valley actually go, admits most of its applicants, costs a fraction of the schools in the indictment, and was not mentioned once in the coverage, and the people who send their kids there watched the scandal the way the players at the five-dollar tables watch the high-limit room: with interest, some envy, and no sense that it was their game. For them the scandal did not lower trust in the elite universities; it confirmed a suspicion that the elite universities were a different casino, with different rules, for people with a different kind of money, and that the degree from the high-limit room is a chip that the rest of the economy has agreed to honor at face value for reasons that have less to do with what was learned there than with who else was in the room. That is the actual question about merit and privilege. It is not whether the admissions process is fair. It is why a chip from one room buys so much more than a chip from another, and the scandal did not answer that, and nobody has asked it, because the people who could ask it are holding the chips.

Now the people who were at the elite tables, and whose trust the question is really about, because they are the ones whose trust the universities need. The upper-middle-class parents who played the front door honestly, who paid for the tutors and the test prep and the summer programs and the essay coach, which is itself a legal advantage that the family in the five-dollar room cannot afford, have discovered that some of the people at their table were cheating and that the house was not watching. Their response has not been to leave; the odds at the elite tables are still better than anywhere else and they know it. Their response has been to demand that the house tighten the surveillance, which it is doing, with audits and reviews and a few expelled students. That is what the house always does after a cheating scandal. It adds cameras. It does not change the odds, and it does not disclose the hole card to the players who were never shown it, and the players at the honest table go back to the game a little angrier and no better positioned, which is how the house prefers them.

I want to say the thing about the sentence, because it is the detail that tells you how the house handles its own. The first parent sentenced got fourteen days last week for paying fifteen thousand dollars to have her daughter’s answers corrected. I have watched a dealer go to prison for longer for palming a chip worth a hundred, and I have watched the surveillance room treat a card counter, who broke no law, as a greater threat than a drunk whale who was handed the game. The system’s sense of proportion is calibrated to protect the appearance of honesty rather than its substance, and fourteen days is the appearance: enough to say the cheaters were punished, not enough to suggest the game was ever really at risk. The parents who are fighting the charges, with better lawyers and more at stake, are betting that the house would rather settle than let a jury look at the hole card, and I would not bet against them.

So my answer is that the scandal did to trust what a cheating case does in a casino: it reassured the honest players at the high-limit table that the house was watching, confirmed to the players at the five-dollar tables that the high-limit room was never for them, and left untouched the thing that actually determines who wins, which is the odds the house sets and the chips it chooses to honor. The debate over merit and privilege has been conducted this year as if the problem were the cheaters. The problem is the house, which has a legal hole-card service for its best customers and a prosecutor for everyone who tries to get the same view at a discount. The woman got fourteen days. The whales are still in the suite. And the children of this valley are at UNLV, which is a fine school that nobody indicts anyone to get into, which is the clearest statement of what the chips are actually for that this whole year has produced.

Owatonna, Minnesota Correspondent

The elite American university is a luxury brand, and I want to begin by saying that as a man who spent some years as a wine consultant and knows what a luxury brand is, because the scandal makes no sense as a story about education and perfect sense as a story about a brand whose value depends on scarcity, and whose owners discovered this year that a counterfeiter had been selling their label at a discount. A bottle of a famous Bordeaux and a bottle from the vineyard next door may be chemically indistinguishable to most palates; the first costs ten times the second because the name certifies that the buyer could afford it and knew to ask for it, and the certification is the product. The degree from the schools in the indictment works the same way. The education available at Stanford is not ten times better than the education available at the University of Minnesota. The admission is ten times scarcer, and the scarcity is what the parents paid for, and the counterfeiter, a man who built a business selling the label without the scarcity, was prosecuted for the same reason the wine trade prosecutes counterfeiters, which is that a label that can be bought is a label that is worth nothing.

That is the frame, and it explains what the scandal did to trust better than any appeal to fairness. The brand’s customers, the families who played the admissions game honestly and expensively, learned that the label had been counterfeited and that the brand owners had not noticed for seven years, and their trust was damaged in the way a collector’s trust is damaged when a forgery turns up at auction: not in the wine, but in the auction house. The brand’s non-customers, which is most of the country, learned what they had already suspected, that the label was a marker of money rather than of anything they could aspire to, and their trust was not damaged because it had never existed; what changed was that their suspicion acquired photographs. And the brand owners, the universities, responded as luxury houses always respond to counterfeiting, which is with prosecution, tightened authentication, and a public insistence that the genuine article is as exclusive and as merited as ever. The one thing a luxury house never does is lower the price or widen the distribution, and the universities have not.

Now the history, because the brand was built, and I think the public debate over merit and privilege would be better informed if it knew how. A century ago the elite colleges admitted mostly on examination, and the examinations were being passed, in numbers that alarmed the trustees, by the sons of Jewish immigrants from New York. In the 1920s Harvard, Yale, and Princeton invented the modern admissions apparatus, the essay, the interview, the recommendation, the emphasis on character and leadership and geographic diversity, and the legacy preference, for the explicit purpose of limiting that population and protecting the social composition of the student body. The holistic review that the universities defend today as the mechanism of merit was designed as the mechanism of exclusion, and the legacy preference that the Harvard trial documents show admitting the children of alumni at several times the overall rate is the direct descendant of a policy created to keep the wrong people out. I do not say that to assign the current universities their ancestors’ motives. I say it because the system was built to be gameable by the right sort of family, that is its original design, and the scandal this year was a man from the wrong sort of family selling the right sort’s tools to people who could not otherwise afford them.

The investor’s view of what happens next. A luxury brand hit by a counterfeiting scandal typically recovers, because the demand for the certification is inelastic and the buyers have nowhere else to get it. The elite universities will recover for the same reason: the economy still pays a premium for the label, the employers still screen on it, and the parents still want it, and the ones who went to prison have made the honest game look more valuable, not less. What the brand cannot recover is the argument. For a generation the universities have defended their tax exemptions, their endowments, their admissions preferences, and their place at the top of the American status order on the claim that they select the most talented young people in the country by fair and rigorous means. The scandal, together with the Harvard trial, has made that claim unsayable in public without a laugh, and a brand that cannot describe its own value is a brand living on inertia. Inertia lasts a long time in this market. It does not last forever, and the political attention to endowments and legacy preferences that has been building for years just acquired a face in a backyard pool.

I want to say what the Minnesota view adds, because this state has a public university that for most of its history admitted most of the people who applied and produced, out of that unselective pool, a respectable share of the country’s engineers and doctors and executives. The land-grant model was the American alternative to the luxury brand: admit broadly, educate rigorously, and let merit show itself in the work rather than in the acceptance letter. That model has been eroding for thirty years as the public universities chased the rankings and the rankings rewarded selectivity, and the result is that the whole system has drifted toward the brand model, where the admission is the achievement and the education is the perk. The scandal is the brand model’s natural product. The remedy, if there is one, is not to authenticate the label more carefully. It is to make the label matter less, and the only institutions that can do that are the employers who screen on it and the public universities that abandoned the alternative, and neither was indicted, and neither has said a word.

So my answer is that the scandal damaged trust in the elite universities as an auction house, confirmed the non-customers’ view of them as a brand, and left their market position intact and their argument in ruins. The debate over merit and privilege has been clarified in one respect: the public now understands that the holistic process was built to be gamed by the right families, that the legacy and donor preferences are the legal form of what the parents in the indictment did illegally, and that the universities have no intention of changing either. A counterfeiter was caught. The brand will survive him. What the brand cannot survive, in the long run, is a country that stops believing the label certifies anything but the ability to acquire it, and that country grew by a great many people this year, most of whom were never going to be customers and all of whom vote. The wine is fine. The auction house has a problem. The problem is that everyone has now seen the catalogue.

Tyler, Texas Correspondent

One of the coaches in the indictment was the men’s tennis coach at the University of Texas, who took a hundred thousand dollars to list a boy as a recruit, and I want to start there because it is the one piece of this scandal that touched my state and because it tells you something the California-centered coverage missed, which is that the public universities were in it too, and that the public universities are the ones the children of Tyler actually try to get into. My two kids are in public school. The university in Austin is the school they hear about, and it admits, by state law, the top six percent of every Texas high school class automatically, which means a kid from a small East Texas school has a shot at it that a kid from a Houston prep academy might not, and which is the most honest admissions rule in the country because it is a rule, printed, that no donation can change. Somebody got around it anyway, through the tennis team, for a hundred thousand dollars. That is who pays and who gets paid, and it is where I want to start.

So let me say what I think the scandal revealed, from the point of view of a man who writes insurance and sits on school boards and has spent a career asking who pays. It revealed that the universities, elite and public both, run two admissions systems, one for the public that has rules and one for the money that has conversations, and that the second system is so well established that a man in California could build a business selling a counterfeit of it and the universities did not notice for seven years. The scheme’s organizer called the money system the back door and said it costs ten times what he was charging. The documents from the Harvard trial last fall said how the back door works: children of donors on a list, children of alumni admitted at several times the rate, recruited athletes in rich kids’ sports waved through. None of that is a crime. The counterfeit was. And the thing I keep coming back to is that the universities are the victims in the indictment, legally, because they were defrauded, and they are also the proprietors of the legal version of the fraud, and a victim who runs the original is a victim I have trouble writing a claim for.

Now trust, and I will say what I see from a town where the elite universities are not an option and the public ones are a hope. The people here did not trust Yale or Stanford before March and they do not now, and the fourteen days the actress got last week did not change that arithmetic, because the people here know what fourteen days means when a working man commits a fifteen-thousand-dollar fraud, and it is not fourteen days. What changed is the view of the public universities, and that is the damage the coverage missed. A kid in Tyler who did not get into Austin used to assume it was the numbers. He now knows that the tennis coach was selling slots, and he wonders what else was for sale, and the wondering reaches a school that was supposed to be the fair one, the one with the printed rule, and that is a loss the state cannot afford, because the printed rule is the only thing that makes a family in a town like this believe the system is worth playing.

The debate over merit and privilege, which the question asks about, is in my view a debate between two groups of people who both have degrees from the schools in question, and the people here have been watching it the way they watch most arguments between people from elsewhere. One side says the system is meritocratic and the scandal was a few bad actors. The other says the system is rigged and merit is a myth. Both sides went to the schools, both sides send their children to the schools, and neither side has proposed the one thing that would settle it, which is to make the back door public: publish, every year, how many seats went to donors’ children and alumni children and recruited athletes, so that the family in Tyler can see the odds before it enters the game. The universities will not do that, because the numbers would end the argument, and the argument is worth more to them than the trust. I have watched a lot of institutions prefer the argument. They are the ones that end up with insurance claims.

I want to say the plain thing about the sentence, because the readers of this forum know I will. Fourteen days for a fifteen-thousand-dollar bribe, with a judge talking about remorse, for a defendant with the best lawyers in Boston. The contractors I insure know men who did real time for less. The parents who are fighting the charges, with more money and more at stake, are betting that the government would rather settle than put a jury in front of the question of how the legal back door works, and I think they are right, and I think the prosecutors know they are right, which is why the pleas have been so generous. The system that was defrauded is the same system that decides how hard to punish the fraud, and it has decided, so far, not very hard, because a hard punishment invites a hard look.

So my answer is that the scandal did little to trust in elite universities among people who had none, confirmed what the honest players at those schools already feared, and did real damage to the public universities, which were in the indictment and which are the only ones that the children of a town like this ever hoped were fair. The debate over merit and privilege is an argument among the credentialed about their own advantages, conducted in front of a country that has already reached a verdict and would like the universities to publish the back-door numbers so the verdict can be checked. They will not. The tennis coach in Austin was fired. The printed rule still says the top six percent get in. I would like my kids to believe the rule. After this year, I have had to explain to them why it needed a tennis team to get around it, and that is a conversation a man should not have to have about the state university, and I have had it, and so has every parent in East Texas who read the indictment. Who pays? The kid who believed the rule. Who got paid? A tennis coach. That is the scandal, from here, and it has nothing to do with actresses.

Gastonia, North Carolina Correspondent

The story ran above the fold in March because two of the parents were actresses, and I want to say that plainly because it is the first thing a copy editor knows about why a story runs where it runs, and because it explains why the question about public trust has been answered mostly by people who were never going to apply to the schools in question. If the thirty-three parents had all been the executives and lawyers and real estate developers that most of them were, the indictment would have been a business-page story about a Boston prosecutor and a California fixer, and it would have run for two days. Because two of them had been on television, it ran for six months, it produced a sentencing last week that led every broadcast, and it taught a country that mostly attends community colleges and state schools more about the admissions practices of a dozen elite universities than that country had ever wanted to know. I edited every wire story about it, and I can tell you that the readers of a regional paper in a textile town read them the way they read stories about yachts, and that the lesson they drew was not the one the universities would have chosen.

Let me say what the lesson was, from the comments and the letters and the conversation in the break room. It was not that the system was corrupt. The readers already believed that, in the vague way people believe things about institutions they have never entered. It was that the system was expensive, and that the expense was the point. The man who built the scheme said on a recorded call that the legal back door, a donation large enough to get the development office’s attention, costs ten times what he was charging, and that number traveled further in Gaston County than any detail about proctors or water polo, because it put a price on something people had assumed was priceless. A reader who learns that admission to a famous university can be had, legally, for a sum he will not earn in a lifetime has not lost trust in that university. He has learned what it is, and what it is turns out to be something he can describe in a sentence, and the sentence is not about merit.

Now the thing a newsroom notices that the public does not, which is the coverage itself. The story was framed, from the first day, as a scandal about cheating, and the cheating was real and the parents who did it deserve what they get, which so far is fourteen days for the first one. But the framing let the universities be victims, which legally they were, and the victim frame let the coverage avoid the question that the Harvard trial documents had already answered the previous fall, which is how the legal door works. I watched the two stories, the criminal case and the civil trial, run in separate sections of the paper for months, as if they were about different institutions, and I cut them to fit, and it was only when a columnist put them side by side that the readers saw what the readers in the break room had already seen without help: that the crime was a discount version of the policy, and that the policy was on the record, in Harvard’s own filings, with legacy and donor admission rates several times the overall rate. The press covered the counterfeit as a scandal and the original as a tradition, and the readers, who are not fools, noticed the difference in tone and drew their own conclusion about whose side the press was on.

Here is where I will say what I think, since I am all over the map and this one has two roads that lead to the same place. I think the parents committed real crimes and the first sentence was soft. I think the universities ran a legal version of the same transaction and have spent the year pretending not to. I think the debate over merit and privilege is being conducted almost entirely by people who hold the credential in question, on both sides, and that the people who do not hold it have reached a settled view that the credential is a marker of class rather than talent, and that nothing in this year’s coverage has given them a reason to revise it. And I think the coverage, by making the story about two actresses, did the universities a favor they did not deserve, because a story about actresses is a story about celebrity and a story about the back door would have been a story about every reader’s own child. My two sons are in public school. The older one asked me in March whether people could buy their way into college. I told him yes, legally, for enough money, and that the people in the paper had tried to do it cheaper and gotten caught. He thought about that and asked why the cheaper way was the crime. I did not have an answer a twelve-year-old would accept, and I have been editing this story for six months, and I still do not.

I want to say something about the schools the readers actually attend, because they are the part of the story that never ran. Gaston College, the community college a few miles from my desk, enrolls more students than the freshman classes of Yale, Stanford, and Georgetown put together, charges a fraction of their tuition, and places its graduates in jobs that the county actually has. The state universities admit most of the kids who apply from here, and the ones who go do fine. None of that was in the coverage, because none of it is a scandal, and because the coverage was written by people who went to the schools in the indictment and are interested in them in a way they are not interested in Gaston College. The public that is supposed to have lost trust in elite universities mostly never thought about elite universities, and the scandal’s real effect was to make them think about them for six months and conclude that they are a club, which is the one thing the universities cannot afford to be seen as and the one thing the coverage, by its choice of subject, confirmed.

So my answer is that the scandal ran because of the actresses, taught a country of state-school and community-college families what the elite credential actually costs, let the universities play the victim while their legal version of the same transaction sat in a different section of the paper, and resolved the debate over merit and privilege, outside the building, in favor of the view that the two are the same purchase at different price points. Trust was not lost, because it was never held by the people now describing the schools in a sentence. What was lost was the universities’ ability to object to the sentence, and the coverage, which should have written it, let a columnist do it six months late. I edit the wire. The wire called it a cheating scandal. The break room called it a price list. The break room was right, and the first thing I would change about the coverage is the headline, and the second is who was allowed to write it.