There is a question one hears in the college admissions business: “Are you in for three or thirty?” Some college admissions professionals so love the work that they make a career of it; many more get a three-year taste of it and find something else to do. I made it a little over three years before leaving college admissions to return to what those of us in the business call “the other side of the desk.” I have not contributed to Forbes in months—in part due to how bone-tired I was after my stint as a college admissions officer.
Why does this matter? Because I believe part of what happened in the Varsity Blues scandal took place because overworked and underpaid staff—who in some cases are short-timers—may simply not have had the time, energy, or experience to do anything other than trust what coaches told them by listing certain applicants on their recruiting lists.
How could this be? Because sometimes there is too much to do by too few people in too little time. More on that to follow. First, I’ll offer what I saw in the recruiting of student-athletes from a school where I worked for more than a decade; it happened to have one of the top high school sailing teams in the nation—a valuable perspective given that many of the pseudo-athletes in the scandal were in smaller niche sports such as sailing, crew, and tennis.
Informal conversations between college and high school sailing coaches take place regularly, because that network is small. What might be six degrees of separation elsewhere may be one or two in sailing. The world is so tiny that I—as college counselor at a small school on a Caribbean island—had reason to communicate and sometimes meet with coaches from Boston College, Bowdoin, Brown, Coast Guard, College of Charleston, Connecticut College, Georgetown, Harvard, MIT, Navy, Roger Williams, St. Mary’s of Maryland, Stanford, Tufts and Yale. (I want to make clear that the coaches I know at 14 of those 15 institutions have had no involvement in Varsity Blues; in their communications with me they showed integrity in every instance.)
But, while trying to help one of the aspiring student-athletes in my care, I had breakfast a few years back with the one sailing coach who has since pled guilty to involvement in the scandal, having apparently put ill-gotten money into his program, not into his own pocket. (His involvement still stuns and saddens me.)
The larger point? If one counselor from a school that graduates just a few dozen students each year can have reason to contact 15 coaches multiple times for just one niche sport—and follow up with admissions officers at each institution each time—imagine how many different conversations are taking place each year.
As but one example, Harvard has 42 varsity teams, some of which, like football, might have 30 slots for academically qualified recruits each year. Sailing might have 3. But to get to those 30—many of whom may have applied a bit early and received so-called Likely Letters, indicating that their chances of admission have just improved dramatically—the coaching staff and admissions office—sometimes including an athletic liaison in addition to the regional representative responsible for applications from a particular school—will have to have considered hundreds of student-athletes. A sailing coach will need to consider dozens to get to 2 or 3.
And let’s remember that we are talking—in these cases—of leagues and sports where there are no athletic scholarships. Student-athletes who are tagged as recruits have a much greater likelihood of admission to Ivy League and other super-selective colleges like most of those in the scandal; however, the financial aid they receive will be based upon need, not special talent in sports. The scale in programs when athletic grants-in-aid come into question is even greater, and we all read from time to time of the NCAA uncovering a scandal of one type or another.
Some watching what happened in the athletic aspect of Varsity Blues have wondered how the admissions officers involved with recruiting student-athletes could have missed the fact that the photoshop athletes were not in their university’s boats or on their courts or fields in the fall. How did they miss this fact? In many cases they were already on the road recruiting the next class. As an example, one year I was already again traveling to high schools before the new class had even arrived on campus for move-in day. Admissions officers in some cases may never see the student-athletes they’ve helped recruit once they arrive, or perhaps even during the process, because all they may have seen is the application itself, various emails, and coach with a list of student-athletes he/she hopes to have admitted.
The key figure at the center of the Varsity Blues Scandal was clearly an ingenious cheat who figured out—for years—how to use money to manipulate the system. Part of how he got away with it for so long was that there are so many different communications to track; the colleges that got burned missed some illicit ones. Indeed, given all the conversations that can and do take place with regard to recruiting student-athletes each year, some part of what happened in Varsity Blues reminds me of the iconic line in the Paul Newman movie Cool Hand Luke: “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”
To that end, my next contribution will further describe a year in the life of a college admission officer and suggest steps that those applying in the year ahead should take in light of the scandal.
