Punishment in the Admissions Scandal (Fred Wherry)

Episode 4 September 25, 2019 00:37:02
Punishment in the Admissions Scandal (Fred Wherry)
Annex Sociology Podcast
Punishment in the Admissions Scandal (Fred Wherry)

Sep 25 2019 | 00:37:02

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Show Notes

Felicity Huffman got 14 days of jail for bribing to get her children into college. The gang gets together with Fred Wherry (Princeton University) to reflect on the punishment and how elite college admissions work.

Frederick Wherry is a Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. His new book (with Kristin Seefeldt and Anthony Alvarez) is Credit Where It's Due: Rethinking Financial Citizenship with the Russell Sage Foundation.

Photo Credit

By Angela George, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 00:01 <inaudible>. Speaker 2 00:05 It's the annex, the sociology podcast. I'm Joseph Cohen. I'm Leslie Hinkson and I'm Gabriel Russell. Our guest today is Fred weary from Princeton university. Fred is the author of credit where its due rethinking financial citizenship with the Russell Sage foundation today. Punishment in the college admissions scandal. Our discussion was recorded on September 17th, 2019 Speaker 1 00:30 <inaudible> Speaker 0 00:35 so for those of you have been living under a rock, there has been the scandal that has actually been causing quite a kerfluffle, not just within higher education but across American society more broadly. This scandal deals with wealthy, sometimes famous people finding ways to get their children into college. Now good parents, I guess around the country and around the world will do almost anything that they can within reason to get their kids into a good school. But apparently many of these parents either outright bribed people themselves or went through an intermediary who then actually bribed individuals either to number one, help them increase their child's sat or act score to take the sat or act for their child. Three there are coaches for teams, colleges and universities across the country who pretended that this child was actually a promising athletic recruit, even though they didn't even play the sport in order to guarantee them a spot in the incoming class. Speaker 3 01:53 Yeah. They like Photoshop their heads on pictures of actual athletes and submitted them, didn't they? Speaker 0 01:59 Yeah. Yes. They do that in some cases. And so I, I think so it's come back into the news because one of the famous people caught up in the scandal, Felicity Huffman, an actress for sentencing actually just came down and I think she is meant to be serving 14 days in prison and I think she has to pay, uh, in jail. Okay. Um, she's got a $30,000 fine and she also has 250 hours of community service. And so this is the first of the sentences and Hoffman by all accounts has been actually one of the most cooperative, if you will, of the individuals being sentenced in this scandal. And so it will be interesting to see what happens to others who've been caught up. And so I thought today, especially since we have a Fred wary on, we could, you know, what, as an, as an economic sociologist, maybe we could have a conversation about the scandal itself, but also, you know, what this means about, you know, what is and is not acceptable in terms of ways of paying for your child to get into college. Speaker 4 03:17 Hmm. I think the most difficult thing I find and the case is that while we talk about Felicity Huffman and her 14 days, we don't talk about those mothers. Um, who just happened to not have a lot of money and who happened to be women of color who faced much tougher sentences for falsifying documents to get their children into a better school district. And so it's so the instinct to help your child, it's not something that, that, that any of us is concerned about. It's the, it's the sense of both the sense of justice and not finding its way equally across the various cases. And also the sense of all brought. Um, so most of us go into the Academy because we, we think that education is somehow sacred and we think we have a calling. Uh, we think we're doing some good in the world with students and when there's a sense that there's rot within. Speaker 4 04:14 So in the case where you have a, a coach at Yale who been, uh, is falsifying materials to get students in for payoff, there's a sense that there's a rock with that, so that, uh, and in this case there's a, there's a, at least the rock was outside. Um, I joked, and you know, this is no joking matter, but I joke that probably her Hoffman's, uh, biggest mistake with that she paid too little and got too much. And because there's, I think the second, uh, difficulty here is that, um, we, when we're thinking about education, we're thinking about it as, as a institution, that's a great equalizer. And that rely solely on a person's innate capacities. And so you're rewarded, you're rewarded in your, where you get a grade. The grades actually supposed to reflect both effort and capacity. And so I know, you know, we all have had students who tell us that they put in a great deal of effort, but I can't, you know, you can't grade them on the effort. Yeah. But you do hope that the effort combined with capability somehow, uh, yields a positive result. So there's a sense of merit that we hold dear. And I think what we have in the Huffman case is those norms of equality are understandings of merit, however fictionalized they may be. All of that was broken. Speaker 3 05:31 Hmm. I mean the, well, the first thing, the, the legal problems didn't come from the getting access for your under-qualified student with money. Like the legal problem was the university didn't get its cut. Right. I mean, a Jared Cushner gets into Harvard, it's just he paid the school directly. And is that the legal problem? Speaker 0 05:49 Well, he didn't pay the school directly, so, uh, I believe it's golden. Anyway, the book is price of admission talks in great about the link Speaker 5 05:57 between admissions. And I think I'm may have discussed this last time we talked about this. So apologies to someone who just finished binge listening to all of our, Speaker 5 06:07 but you know, golden talks about how you can't sell and admissions seat and development officers are very coy about this. And will you only talk about gifts and we'll kind of redirect the conversation if somebody basically says, you know, look how much do I have to pay. And you know, I know you know, 900 sat, you know, this is a joke about like a Oh 800 sat, you know, you're going to have to buy a new football stadium or something like that. But you know, more realistically it's very kind of coy and indirect and it's based on a gift exchange, uh, language and you can't actually sell the seat. You can only have the S the, the admissions seat be a reciprocal gift for fundraising. Uh, but you guys are right that it was <inaudible> and that was actually Fisher's whole pitch, right? Is that he talked about the front door you get in cause you have perfect SATs and you went to the Olympics and then he talks about the backdoor, which is you get in because your parents endowed a chair and you know, whatever. And then he talks about what he called the side door, which is we brought the a women's soccer coach. Speaker 3 07:12 Right. But, but Gabriel, what's really the difference between constructing the transaction to give a school money for your low ability child's admission if it's constructed indirectly as a form of, you know, relationship building and reciprocal gifts. At the end of the day money goes to an institution and an institution waves its skill requirements to give you admission. Like, Oh we're just, it's, we're constructing the same transaction just more elaborately and in a way that makes it looks manifestly less transaction, aren't we? But it's not the same transaction is it? Speaker 0 07:44 No, it, no, it's totally not. I mean, as we've discussed before, and I think you mentioned it just a little while ago, Joe, I mean, there was the one transaction where it's like, okay fine, your kid will get in and then we'll build a new stadium and the entire community can share right in that thing, right? That's one thing, right? And there's another transaction where you're like, okay, I'm going to pay this guy $500,000 he gets a cut, right? And then the university. But yeah, and, and it's not just that, that the university doesn't get a cut, like the student body doesn't get a cut, right. And so I kind of feel like the sort of transactions where, you know, development offices are like, okay, fine, you know, we're not going to tell you that you can pay to go, but Hey, what can you give us? I think that there is this kind of understanding that it's for the greater good or for, it's the, it's for the greater good of the community. And so in that, in that instance, this sort of norm of quote unquote meritocracy, this norm of quote unquote, you know, equality and fairness, it's okay to actually just say, okay fine, those rules don't, or those norms don't apply here. It's another thing when this is something that's just supposed to benefit your child and you and like the three people who got a cut of the action. Speaker 5 09:13 Well there's two separate issues. So one is kind of the principle agent issue in that the women's soccer coach or the rowing coach or whatever is kind of delegated a certain amount of authority to act on the institution's interests and they're betraying the, you know, delegated authority for venal interest. So that's one issue, right? Is does it, you know, like was it was just saying does it benefit the whole institution or the whole student body or does it just benefit a particular corrupted agent of that institution? Yeah. Then there's a second issue of how is it structured, right? Because we can imagine a situation where the singer doesn't give, doesn't just flat out bribe a soccer coach, but gives gifts to the soccer coach. And then the soccer coach reciprocates for it. So that would still be a principal agent thing, but it wouldn't be framed as explicitly. Speaker 5 10:00 And if you look at, I mean we were talking about Hoffman, but one of the other defendants as Lori Loughlin, you know aunt Becky and, and her defense is that she didn't know what was going on. Her defense is that she paid Fisher and she gave all this money to his charity. But people give charities that end up going to colleges all the time. So basically her defense is that she thought that it was the usual thing of development and not basically money laundering bribes to soccer coaches. Uh, or was it, no, it was rolling coaches in the case of her daughters anyway, some kind of coach. And so if you go by my office station model, kind of the standard practice that you see described in price of admission is office cation by gift exchange. And then what Loughlin is claiming as her defense is <inaudible> by brokerage. Speaker 5 10:47 Right. So she gives money to Fisher. Yeah. So she gives money to the, the consultant that's for his fake charity. And then he turns around and then the consultant turns around and gives what's basically a cash bribe to the rowing coach. But her, she can now defend in court and she is going to defend herself in court, who the jury probably won't buy it. But, but she's going to at least assert that she didn't know that, you know, she basically was herself the victim of an unprincipled agent should that she thought he was just a consultant and she didn't realize he was a money launderer. And you know, it's, it's, if I was in her place and I would probably take the plea deal and get 14 days like Felicity Huffman, but, uh, if I wasn't gonna take the deal, that's probably the best defense she can make. You know, there's a nontrivial chance it'll work. Speaker 0 11:35 Yeah. I wanted to go back to a point that Fred made and you know, Fred, you said earlier something like, uh, I think it was you, Fred, she paid too little for getting too much. And I'm wondering how much of it has to do with the price and how much of it has to do with going back again to like norms, right? And like, and also presentation of self. So those in the know, right? Those in the elite would know you don't go to this guy, right? You would know that there is this particular way to do this and it's because they did it in this, I don't know, I, I guess trashy way, right? This date class say way, right? This is why people are up in arms and this is why people actually get a prison sentence or a jail sentence. Speaker 4 12:26 Yeah. Yeah. I think most people understand sort of the style of transaction mattering when they're at the Cornerstore, eh, you paid for your Coca-Cola. And if the person who is paying for the Coca Cola just throws the money onto the countertop, even if it's the right amount, there is a sense both by, um, the person who was the cashier and others who are standing in line to pay that this is inappropriate behavior. And so if we only think about transactions as whether or not the amount was right and then we missed something cause there's something about the style of the transaction that sends other kinds of signals because every time we engage in some kind of financial transaction, we're sending multiple signals that go well beyond sort of the standard understanding of price and it's change. And so on the one hand there's a problem of the style of the transaction. Speaker 4 13:20 Then the second problem in terms of thinking about paying so little and expecting so much is that it actually, as far as these things go, it wasn't a lot of money. And so here you, there's a sense that not only have you sort of broken trust with all the other parents who are standing in line to pay and whose children have paid in various ways in their preparation, but you've also sort of devalued how much the things were and also misunderstood the sort of the importance of decorum when obtaining something that other people hold sacred and that you yourself should. Uh, and so I think there's a, there's a lot that that sort of happened in this transaction in which if you let that behavior sure go on without any types of punishment, then it degrades everyone involved. And so that's where that becomes one of the troubles. Speaker 3 14:14 Does that also apply to people who pay to get their entrance essays edited or you know, pay to have their, you know, names known to the admissions board as somebody who is a contributor to the community? These are all more illegal ways, right? They're not like not putting the cash in the, in the till they're seen as perfectly acceptable, but they still undermined that idea that the people who are being admitted are being admitted on the ability in a strict sense rather than, you know, enjoying the benefits of supplemental services or having other people, you know, enhance Speaker 4 14:51 application. Well this is the great thing about supplemental services because it can be an acknowledgement that we are a much more nurture than we are nature when it comes to merit. And so someone could say, yes, I have a tutor who comes to the house and, and isn't that a good thing that my child is getting extra instruction and therefore at presumably there's a way to do an editing of an essay in which you're helping that child learn how to write as you're talking them through the editing process. That's probably not happening in a lot of the cases. Speaker 3 15:27 I don't think so. Speaker 4 15:30 In fact it's this and that and the practice actually does it system on some families where they do have a tutor who is there and helping a person learn skills as they go through an editing process, you're able to sort of, everyone's able to pretend that we're all sort of doing the right thing. And so because there are lots of opportunities for obfuscation, there is also lots of opportunities for people to believe in the parts that they're playing. And so, so it may be that someone says, I really didn't know about what's going on. I wish you're still doing something that's generally considered to be a good thing. And if they, and they may actually really believe it and it, by virtue of really believing it, they're able to play the part well. Uh, and so that's the other thing that we should try to keep in mind is that just because, uh, an outcome shows up that would suggest that a person had mal-intent their intentions may actually be pretty innocent. Otherwise they couldn't pull it off. Speaker 5 16:26 Yeah. My, my book, you know, we'll probably end up being, you know, what 200 pages, but the, the one sentence version is you just got to have something plausible to write in the memo section of the check, figure out something to write in the memo section of the check. Other than I bribed this dude, you know, or I hired this prostitute, you know, you're halfway there towards getting away with it. So we kept talking about money and we kind of had this implicit notion that you walked into Fisher's office and there's like a menu and it just says, you know, you know $30,000 you know, and that that's the menu price, but you actually engaged in an absurd amount of price discrimination. Yeah. I forget what the exact ranges, but I think he charged anywhere between 15 grand and like 200 grand or something like that. Yeah. Now most people paid a tiny fraction of what is normally understood to be kind of the development price. I mean there's no price because it's a gift, but there is kind of an implicit development explained with development prices for people who don't know. If you go through the development office and you say, I'm gonna, you know, give a donation, that's enough to, you know, endow a chair. Right. Build the building. Yeah. Well not quite build a building, but I forgot what the, I, it's, I haven't read olden in a few months, but Speaker 3 17:39 the reservation price for each institution differs. Some you can go through with 50 or a hundred grand, some might take it Speaker 5 17:47 other than that. And it's actually relatively among moderately selective and above colleges. I forget what it is, it's several million dollars so and and wait, but the number is surprisingly stable for the development price, but it's much higher than what Fisher was charging. Official would charge anywhere between like 15,000 and 200,000 most people paid around 40 maybe, maybe a little bit more than that. I forgot what it was. But it was a about, it was like an order of magnitude lower than the development price and it was comparable to like a couple of years of tuition. So you know, I just think it's interesting that he engaged in price discrimination that, you know, to a certain extent he was kind of figuring out like if you came and you said how much to get my dumb ass get into USC, he kind of say, well how much you got, you know? Yeah, exactly. Very different from walking into McDonald's and saying how much for a latte, you know, and it, they just pointed the sign and it says, you know, two 90 or whatever. Speaker 0 18:41 Well, you know, for me, I think what's equally interesting, and I don't understand why people aren't talking about this more than just thinking, just having conversations about inequality broadly is, you know, why don't we just stop using the language of merit? Right? And why don't we just like rethink like the, I don't know, the authenticity of this thing called meritocracy, right? I mean, I think what ends up happening, and I see it like at my kid's high school and these like incredibly stressed out kids and when I'm doing my alumni interviews and I see these children who look like they're gonna break down crying any moment and are giving me resumes, right? When I'm just there for a conversation, they truly believe that the kids at least that they're like, okay, fine. There are these boxes that you're supposed to check off in order to show that. Speaker 0 19:39 I, that I have done everything I needed to do in order to display that. I am at this meritorious individual, right? I've got SATs that are above 1500 right? Out of 16 like I did like 10,000 hours of community service, right? I rescued a village, I ran into a burning building and rescued some puppies, right? And you know, and I wrote this essay that basically the new Yorker wants to actually publish. I did all of these things and that should be enough, right? When actually like merit is whatever it needs to be in order for an admissions committee, right? To say, Oh, this is actually the class that were constructing in this given year. Right? And so last year you would have been perfect for our incoming class, right? This year, not so much. Right. And money actually does matter even at institutions that have need blind admissions. Money matters. Speaker 5 20:48 Okay. So I think one way to put it is that if you have a scarce and valuable resource, you will find people finding ways to bid for that scarce and valuable resource. And I think all of the kind of crazy stuff about, you know, modern, upper-class and upper-middle-class parenting that you're describing. And you know, that we've all read a million Atlantic monthly articles on, by the way, a friend of mine once said that, uh, you know, you can just look at the covers of Atlantic monthly and you can see that they're like designed with like laser precision to target the anxieties of, um, college educated white women in their 30s anyway. So you have a valuable resource. People are gonna find ways to bid for it, you know, they're gonna find ways to compete for it. And so if you have something that broadly, you know, defined, we call it merit, you're gonna see people basically engaging this in this insane arms race to find ways to maximize their merit, or at least their merit as measured, you know, or as they anticipate will be measured. Speaker 5 21:52 And so, you know, you have the thing of like, well I founded four nonprofits while I was in high school and I did service learning and I did this and I did that, you know, which is, you know, a bizarre way to behave as a teenager if you know that this is what, you know, the Harvard admissions committees looking for, you're going to engage in it, you know, and you're good. Likewise, you know, it's a boom to a coaches of preppy sports cause otherwise I don't think there'd be that many high school kids who wanted to row. Totally. Yeah. So you have this a, effectively, you have this thing where you're like, we're going to have an auction. And the way we're going to auction is how closely you can approximate this ideal, which is perfect grades, perfect sat and athletic pursuit, preferably in a weird sport that nobody plays. Speaker 5 22:37 You know, you founded a nonprofit and you somehow did something exciting, right? So that's the target and whoever gets closest to approximating that gets in. And so you see people approximating that absurd ideal more and more closely. And so you can say, okay, well what's the alternative? And you know, we can imagine alternatives. So one could be that you simply auction off the seats in cash. Well that's, that's what I was thinking. Finish your thought and then I'll go Trump. Well, no, no, no, no. I made, let's, let's go through it. Right? So you want to sit, you could have the market allocate, you could auction the seats off by cash. You could say we're going to have an entering class of 5,000 students at Harvard this year and we're putting on eBay, you know, and however many, whatever you know, bid number 5,000 is, that's the price everybody pays, you know, Dutch auction style. Speaker 5 23:23 Another way you could do it is that you could do it. And you know, economists who study rent seeking have talked about different allocation mechanisms. And the interesting thing is that conceptually the cash auction isn't that different from the merit auction. You know, that auctioning off in Tash is conceptually, well, yeah. In some ways it is. In some ways it isn't. Right? But in terms of like you have pursuing it, but there's other ways that you would not have intense competition there. There's some more in the sense that you have competition, right? Other ways you would not have competition. So one way you do it would be that you do it by lottery. You either just say everyone who applies, we're going to put your number on a hat, we'll pull it out. Or maybe anyone who's minimally qualified, you know, let's say you got at least a 3.5 on your high school GPA and at least 1200 on the sat, right? Speaker 5 24:07 So not like a stellar student but pretty good. And we'll put all those names in a hat and then we'll pull out 5,000 and there might very well be somebody who's like way smarter but doesn't get in. Okay. And then the last way would be that you just allocate it by birth that you just say, you know, all legacies automatically get in. All non legacies automatically don't, or everybody who was, you know, comes from this family automatically against whatever. So I think you can ask, why do we focus on very basically the merit auction instead of the cash auction, the pure random lottery or the pure legacy system. And I think it's because it grants it the most legitimacy. Speaker 0 24:48 Oh, that's exactly right, Gabriel. Speaker 5 24:51 Yeah. Like if I, if you graduated from a Harvard and everybody knows that Harvard only admits the most impressive high school students in the country, then that's impressive. Whereas if everyone knows that Harvard only admits the people who paid the most in cash or the people who won the lottery, like literally the admissions office is just, you know, a big hat and then they pull your name out of the hat, uh, that would not be impressive. Right? Like even if everything else about Harvard was the same, his same class, the same faculty, you know, they kept in Cambridge, uh, all that sort of thing. So I think, you know, the reason that we have merit as the, you know, a very weird kind of merit, right? That includes stuff like, you know, can you row a canoe across a canal fast? You know, the, it just, we have that because of Grant's the most legitimacy now, of course. And then we can complain about various ways that this principal is violated, but it has to be the salient dimension or else the legitimacy collapses. Speaker 0 25:45 And not just legitimacy for the institution, but also legitimacy for those individuals who got in through alternative means. Right. It's like, like everyone knows the smartest kids go to university X and I got in and it grants that individual legit, much more legitimacy than if you just had, but yeah, like my mom and dad just paid for this. Speaker 5 26:09 Yeah, exactly. It's like a, it Groucho Marx said about, I wouldn't be in no club that would have me for a member. Right. You wouldn't want to be in a, a, a graduate of a school where it was known that you'd bribed your way in. Right. And this is why it's seen as an, an insult to somebody like Cushner that it's now widely known that Cushner basically did bribe his way yet through the development system. He didn't, his father did to be clear. Well, okay, look, that's your family. Yes. Right. Speaker 3 26:35 But it's a sliding scale like in reality, like it's known that applicants who are believed to not require financial have a faster path in those who don't. I know from personal experience that when elite schools recruit those who are at named schools where you can infer that the parents are wealthy and likely to be donors, they have a faster track into admission. Like I've, I've seen that happen with elite schools when I have interviewed for admission and seen who's gotten in and the truth is, my belief is the business model is that you, what you do is you engage in a hybrid system of what you're describing, Gabriel, you allow some people in for monetary transactions and what you're selling is you're laundering your privileged in a sense is what people have called it, right? You are taking your low ability or modest ability child and mixing them up with high ability children who have had to accomplish great things to get in because they didn't have that fast trick and you're hoping that people on the other end can't tell the difference. Speaker 3 27:35 They're like, wow, it's all Harvard graduate. And they don't take that second step to ask, okay, is this a Harvard graduate who got in by moving mountains or writing that op-ed? Or is it somebody whose dad was like the best orthodontist in Iowa and went into like this crazy boarding school and learned to play high ally or whatever esoteric support and got like college admissions people are college consultants to, you know, go over their essays and basically paid to get in with a much lower bar. I think that's, that's fundamentally the business model and you're right in the sense that they can't, it's an open secret among those who've been to those institutions and are familiar with them, but they can't make it like a sliding ability scale because the business model is the laundering of rich people's kids. That's my view. Speaker 4 28:22 Yes. So I, I worry that sort of, on the one hand, we're pushing against this notion of meritocracy while creating a different notion of, of merit. And so on the one hand we'd say, Oh, maybe we should go to a randomized system because what is merit? And then we're coming up with all these other things about people who really deserve to be there and aren't there. Now this happens in part because we think about wealth. We sometimes forget that by virtue of being wealthy, your kid is just simply going to be in a school with better resources and probably lower class sizes and therefore more attention. And so there's a lot more nurture than that happens, um, uh, for through the children of the wealthy. And that nurturing is what then is reflected in and the college applications. And so, because there are a lot of qualities that we can't directly observe and we're thinking about the qualities of a student, uh, we need, we rely on these proxies that are imperfect and that we don't like. Um, and, but every time we try to come up with different proxies, we run the risk of coming up with a proxy that's that that's going to create a system that's worse than the one we already have. So as sociologists, I think we should sort of be a little more sort of worried about our visions of the better world and the possibility of ending up with outcomes that are opposite of those. We intend 10 <inaudible>. Yeah, well is my position Speaker 5 29:42 on, um, you know, it's, we sometimes perceive it as an egalitarian metric to move away from test scores and towards well-roundedness as an admissions criteria. But my contention is always that well-roundedness as much easier to buy than test scores. Like, you know, like tutoring, you know, depending on which estimates you look at gets you somewhere between 30 and a hundred sat points, which is not that much when you look at the S the scale of what it takes to get into a top school. But you know, you can very easily buy your way into your kid founding a nonprofit. You can fairly easily buy your way into a kid being a high ally athlete because you know, I mean, they still have to do the work. They still have to, you know, be in the court all day with that weird hook basket thing on their arm. Speaker 5 30:24 But you have to buy your way into that. Right. I mean, every high school in America has a basketball team and attracts, but only weird preppy schools have rowing teams and highlight teams and lacrosse teams and that sort of thing. And so that is almost directly a way to buy things. You know, I, I totally agree with Fred that what we conceive of as merit as currently measured is, you know, to some extent kind of a transmutation of capital, but some parts of it are more readily purchasable than others. Hmm. It's, it's relatively hard to buy sat and it's relatively easy to buy, lettered in a weird preppy sport or founded a nonprofit. Yeah. Leadership experiences. Yeah, exactly. Speaker 4 31:06 Yeah. Although I, I worry about our designation but weird preppy sports because yeah, I'm wondering whether or not if we were, if we were to sort of decide that sports are kind of like cast systems and people who are in many of these sports are actually sort of passing down on traditions as there's a sense that, you know, my father rode his father road and, and so you have a, so you have a lineage, um, on a lot of these things like the rowing team and lacrosse gets a little bit sort of rougher. Um, but there tends to be sort of, uh, a sense that for those sports in which the body matters less and you talk much more about sort of skills that are fit one cultivates over time, that's where you start seeing value accrue both in terms of where the body matters less and player different types of racialized bodies are either highly present or, or, or not or not very precedent. And so you could then imagine sort of the valuation sort of at some kind of valuation scheme in which by virtue of sort of the history of lineage, the history of racial composition, it the ease with which one can move in and out of the sport and the amount of cultivation that is required to be in or out of one of these sports, that that somehow creates a different level of valuation for that sport. And so for people on the outside, it looks weird for people on the inside it looks like tradition. Speaker 0 32:32 Well, and I just want to reiterate like I am not calling for any new system of merit. I'm calling for a system in which we stop using the word merit. I'm calling for assistant, which we were like, look, it's going to change every single year. People, and you may not like that kind of uncertainty, but if my good right is such a valuable scarce one, right, that so many people are going to want, you're just going to jump through the hoops. And I actually think people will continue to jump through the hoops. I think one of the biggest problems is that the way in which admissions are set up now is we actually haven't changed the sort of model for what merit looks like, you know, for, for decades now. Right? You know, when we moved away from having, okay, we have your GPA and we have your standardized test score to Oh now we're going to have interviews and we need recommendations and all of that other stuff. Speaker 0 33:34 All of that supplemental stuff. Oh, and you need a sport and extracurriculars, right? We've been stuck there for decades. Right. And I think that what happens is that, you know, families with resources and it doesn't even need to be money, right? You know, it could be other kinds of capital. They figure out how to game the system to their advantage and people with, with not just a lot of one kind of capital, but individuals with, you know, sort of like this kind of diversity of capital and the more of each kind they have, the better are actually able to game the system to their advantage. But we all know that, right? We all know that there wouldn't be so many tutors and sat prep classes and you know, all of these, Oh, let's take you to Honduras, right. For a summer to help us build a village trips. Speaker 0 34:26 Right. For people who can pay for them if that wasn't, if that was in the fact. And so for me, I think it's kind of like the hypocrisy of, I mean not so much a poverty, cause I kind of feel as though colleges and universities don't explicitly say you need to get this sat score and you need to do these particular things. They say we are highly selective, right? And they just leave it up to you and your coach to figure out what it is you need to do to get in. Right. So it's not that they're being hypocritical with that, but I actually think that they let our imaginations, right, both individually, but collectively as a society lead us to under have an understanding of what we mean by marriage. And then when people don't get into their colleges and universities of choice, they feel cheated. They feel as though someone else must've taken their spot, right? Because they know that they did all the things that they needed to do in order to get in. And it's not that it's that, that they have one idea of what merit means. Right. And the way in which the admissions process worked out in that year Speaker 5 35:38 for that institution just didn't work out in their favor. I feel like what you're, what you're saying reminds me of when Bourdieu talks about, you know, the game only works if everyone denies the rules of the game. You know, I think you're talking about a level of candor that would break the system. You know, and I understand how as a parent of teens that's appealing to you, it'll be there years, but you know, it wouldn't be on the college's interests to be that candidate. Speaker 2 36:06 You've been listening to the annex of sociology podcast. A special thank you to Fred weary of Princeton university. His book is credit where it's due, rethinking financial citizenship, coauthored with Kristin seatbelt and Anthony Alvarez with Russell Sage on the web, the antics podcast.com on Twitter at sow Shanix. And on Facebook, the annex sociology podcast. Our producer is Le Seth Merino. The socio cast team includes Jaylene cologne and Fazio Mohammad theme music by Lina ORSA. On behalf of Leslie Hinkson and Gabriel Rossman, I'm Joe Cohen. Thanks for listening.

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