Yes, they happen in the US too

Admissions scandals? Surprise, surprise, they happen in the United States of America too. Because the wealthy do have a knack for fouling up everything everywhere. The love for money fuels greed and greed bends morality. That should be some consolation for poor parents and guardians here who, every year, see their brilliant children and wards denied admission into our tertiary institutions because as the Americans like to say, when money talks, you-know-what walks.

Admissions and bribery scandals are rocking God’s own country. It is not funny because many respectability citizens have rotten eggs in their faces. We do not expect some things to happen in God’s own country because it is God’s own country, for crying aloud. But let us not forget that money is a revered god next to God in America.  It is the only country that claims such close affinity with the divine in the world. We thought that should lift it and its citizens above the common failings of other countries, such as ours where the daily media fare that churns the stomach is corruption, corruption, corruption.

Code-named Operation Varsity Blues by federal investigators, the first indication that wealthy parents buy admissions for their children in the country’s Ivy League universities came to light on March 12 this year. It is a dirty, shocking story of conspiracy and greed.

The man at the centre of the scandals is William Rick Singer, 58, who lives in Newport Beach, California. According to federal investigators, he controls two firms, Key Worldwide Foundation and the Edge College and Career Network, through which he carries out the illegal admissions schemes. He allegedly received $25 million from some 33 parents between 2011 and 2018. He used part of this “money to fraudulently inflate entrance exam test scores and bribe college officials.” He told the FBI that he used this method to facilitate the admission of children in 750 families in eleven universities. Singer has since been singing to the FBI and his fellow travellers are dancing the American equivalent of owambe.

He will be going down for his transgressions. He faces up to 65 years in prison and a fine of $1.2 million fine. But others are going down with him not because the prison could be a lonely place for a millionaire too but because those who breach the law could not expect it not to get its cold hands around their scrawny necks. The FBI is charging Singer and 49 others with felony and conspiracy to “commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud.” In the list are parents and university staff whose palms Singer greased. Singer used various methods, including allowing the children of his clients to cheat in examinations. The audacity of it.

According to the FBI, the dramatis personae include “prominent businesspeople and well-known actors.” The wealthy believe that illegally using their wealth to give their children a good education in top universities in the country is a proper and sensible use of their wealth. The problem is that they used their money to secure unfair advantage for their children to the disadvantage of better qualified children whose parents have no money to oil the wheels of admissions and thus threw the mud in the face of meritocracy.

Trust the law. Singer’s fellow travellers will pay a stiff price. If the FBI proves its case against them, they could spend the next 20 years in jail each – and pay fines. Not to worry; the good thing is that they would then show off their children from the Ivy League universities to their fellow prison inmates.

Whatever we may think of this admissions scandal, we can see the difference between the US and our own country. No country can claim to be free of those who operate on the edge of the law but the difference between a country where the law is the protector of the system and a country where the law is treated with contempt as an irritant, is that that in the former the law respects none who breaches it. It is possible that Singer was not the first to perpetrate the admissions scandal in his country, but his arrest shows that the law has long arms in a nation of laws, not of men.

We are not strangers to admissions scandals in our country. They date back to the expose of the Owosho scandal in the University of Lagos in 1974 and much later in the University of Benin and other tertiary institutions. The expose did not end the scandals. Parents still buy admissions for their children in universities and unity schools. Given the digital age, it has even become more scientific. The existence of professional examination writers hired by parents to write WAEC, JAMB and post-JAMB examinations for their children is a well-known fact. Indeed, universities conduct their own post-JAM admission tests because they know that professional examination writers are employed by parents to help their children secure good results. There is some evidence that a child who scores well above the cut off mark for his course in JAMB decidedly scores well below the cut off mark in post-JAMB examinations.

The admissions scandal will continue to flourish for as long as we refuse to clean up our educational system. The rot in the system is a celebration of paper qualifications at the expense of education. We have been repeatedly told by educationists and ministers of education that our universities are busy producing graduates who are not trained to be useful to themselves, let alone the society. Still, the rot persists because our leaders believe they can end it by the approved sheer number of ill-equipped and ill-staffed federal, state and private universities.