The big splashy story-of-the-moment in my corner of the universe is, of course, the college admissions bribery scandal, which is highly relevant to my interests. And also has a lot of the bizarre little fillips that get it wide coverage throughout the media universe. I’ve said a lot of small snarky things about this on Twitter, but it’s probably worth typing out some of my longer-form Thoughts. In no particular order:

— As a graduate of and professor at an elite private college, the idea of students buying their way in is not at all a shocking revelation. I certainly knew of people when I was at Williams who were widely believed to have gotten in only because their parents donated shitloads of money, and I have heard the same said about some students at Union. This is a Thing in the elite-college world, and always has been; the current scandal just turns the dials up to 11.

— The most fucked-up part of this whole thing is that, in many of these cases, the students were apparently unaware of what was done on their behalf. There’s a sense in which this is a logical consequence of overly intensive parenting, but it’s also deeply and profoundly weird. I feel just awful for those kids. I mean, the kid who posed for photos to fake being a water-polo player can eat it, but the kid who was surprised to learn that he’d been recruited as a pole-vaulter deserves a bit of sympathy. And the ones who are just now learning that their high standardized-test scores were faked are genuinely sad.

— We’ll never get to know this, but particularly with the kids whose test scores were faked, I’d be curious to know how they’ve fared as college students. While the social-media presumption has been that all these kids must’ve been thoroughly worthless, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that while their admission was fraudulent, at least some of these kids have been doing just fine up to this point. I suspect that many of these kids are perfectly capable of making good use of their ill-gotten education, and some of them probably were. Again, that’s a sad outcome.

— The other baffling aspect of this is that some of the sums of money involved seem weirdly inefficient. If you’re going to spend a few million dollars getting your kid into a college, why wouldn’t you do it in the traditional manner, by endowing a professorship or building a dorm?

As I said on Twitter last night, I think the issue here is that most of these people weren’t spending enough to get their unqualified kids into a good school that they didn’t have a prior relationship with. If you contribute $500,000 to a college in the form of $50,000 alumni donations over a ten-year span and then happen to mention that you’ve got a kid who’s applying to colleges, that probably gets your indolent child some extra consideration. If you walk in off the street and say “I’ll give you $500,000 if you let my idiot son in,” on the other hand, they’re going to show you the door. Even at USC, that figure probably needs two additional zeroes for a one-time payment to get a kid in, and the check has to clear before Junior shows up for orientation.

That’s the one bit on the parental side that’s sad. The sums of money mentioned in this case are mostly in the tens of thousands of dollars, and in the crazy world of elite higher ed, that’s just not that much. If your bribe budget maxes out at $50,000, you probably can’t do better than paying some huckster to photoshop your kid’s head onto a stock photo of a track star.

If you’re shelling out $6 million, though, I don’t understand why you’re dealing with a shady middleman and not just talking to the development office. People are strange.

— This is yet another story that slaps me in the face with what a bizarre world I’ve been living in for most of my adult life.

— This nonsense could not possibly have come at a worse time for the elite higher ed world. It’s already been a kind of scary year with the total collapse of a bunch of colleges, most notably Hampshire, which had some national reputation if not the flipping great wodges of cash they would’ve needed to stay open. The last thing we need is more news that makes responsible parents think the whole system is a corrupt scam.

— Prior to this story breaking, the higher-ed thing I was planning to blog about was this set of proposals from Catharine Bond Hill, which included both a suggestion that elite schools admit more students and allowing more communication between schools. I find both of those proposals interesting, and possibly even more relevant in light of this new scandal, but it’s really hard for them to compete for attention with William H. Macy memes.

— To be clear, the behavior of these parents is thoroughly reprehensible, and particularly harmful to good students from less privileged backgrounds who got squeezed out by the fraudulent applications of wealthier kids from their age cohort. The parents, and the kids who were active participants in these schemes, richly deserve their public humiliation. By all means, let us point at them and laugh.

That said, I’m not quite willing to join the torches-and-pitchforks brigade to burn the whole thing down. I freely admit, though, that that’s largely because I live here, and it’s hard to disentangle self-interest from the whole mess to decide what reforms ought to be made to prevent this kind of thing in the future. It’s definitely something that I’ll be thinking a lot about in the near future, though, and if I come up with anything, I’ll let you know.