Adam Oubaita is a poster child for the American meritocracy. He grew up in Queens, the son of a Russian immigrant mother and Malian-Moroccan father who met in New York. He aced a New York City exam to win a spot at Stuyvesant, one of the most selective U.S. public high schools.
At Stuyvesant, Oubaita has kept up with notoriously grueling academics, all while writing for the school newspaper, participating in Model United Nations and working part-time as a jewelry-store cashier. On his own, he studied every day for his SAT college exams using free online tools and library books. The 18-year-old senior ultimately scored a 1590 on the test, 10 points off a perfect score, and now tutors others.
“You get used to the five hours of sleep,” he joked, after wrapping up his Shakespearean literature class and en route to mock-trial competition.
Now, Oubaita and other top students from modest backgrounds -- America’s strivers -- are questioning a system that was supposed to reward grit. The betrayal cuts deepest among less privileged students at the nation’s most rigorous academies, such as exam schools in New York, Boston and Virginia and all manner of top-performing public schools.
This week, federal prosecutors charged dozens of parents with scheming to cheat their children’s way into elite universities such as Yale, Georgetown and Stanford. The government said parents collectively paid millions to game college entrance exams and bribe college coaches to win special treatment for their kids as athletes, even though some didn’t even play sports. They scammed extra time on the SAT and ACT by faking kids’ disabilities or paying a proctor to fix wrong answers or have someone else take the tests for them.
“I see so many brilliant people who get turned away” from colleges, Oubaita said. “They have to try so much harder just to be considered at that same regard by colleges. That in itself is just so unfair. Instead, the people who are taking up those spots are people who are literally bribing their way into college. It’s completely ridiculous.”
Getting Ahead
Lower-income students have reason to stress out about the quality of the colleges that accept them, said Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Richard V. Reeves. For a rich child, enrolling in a slightly less prestigious college has a negligible effect on post-college career success, research shows. However, he said, “if you’re a kid from a middle-class or working-class family and you get into an elite college, that transforms your life chances.”
Sandra Timmons sees these transformations up close. She’s president of A Better Chance, a nonprofit that helps low-income sixth to 12th graders -- many of them members of minority groups -- into top private schools and later colleges like Yale and Harvard. The admissions scandal will discourage those students.
“It’s one illustration about how uneven the playing field can be if many of the controls and protections aren’t in place,’’ she said. “It does undermine that belief for that young person who believes the odds are against them already. They think, ‘there’s no way, it’s not fair.’’’
Rich Campuses
Students from poor -- or even middle-class -- backgrounds are hard to find on elite campuses. Ivy League colleges enroll more students from the top 1 percent of income than the bottom 50 percent combined, according to research by Harvard economist Raj Chetty and others.