Journal #7: For your next essay, you will be writing on the topic of the recent college admissions scandal that took place about a year ago. This scandal involved several wealthy families (including some celebrities like Lori Laughlin and Felicity Huffman

I’m studying for my English class and need an explanation.

Journal #7:

For your next essay, you will be writing on the topic of the recent college admissions scandal that took place about a year ago. This scandal involved several wealthy families (including some celebrities like Lori Laughlin and Felicity Huffman) who were caught cheating or bribing their children’s way into some of the nation’s top universities. Parents were caught doing things like bribing test proctors to correct their child’s wrong SAT answers, paying people to take tests for their kids, and faking involvement in sports so that their kids could get athletic scholarships (some parents even had their kids’ heads Photoshopped onto athletes’ bodies to make it look like their child was playing the sport).

While I think we can all agree that what these families did is unethical and obviously illegal, this scandal also brought to light the many legal ways that parents can pay for their kids to have a better chance at getting into prestigious universities—they can hire tutors, enroll their kids in test-prep classes, pay for writing coaches, etc. This week, you will be reading two different opinions on this scandal and the college admissions process more generally. In one text, the writer believes that cheating like this happens all the time, and, even worse, it highlights the fact that there are still plenty of legal ways for families to pay their child’s way into college. In the other article, the writer is an Ivy League student who argues that our current admissions process is fair and that students who get into good schools do so because they work hard and deserve to be there.

For this journal, I want you to think a bit about this scandal and the two opinions you’ll be reading. Here are your questions: how fair do you think the current college admissions process is? Do you think all students have the same chance to get into the school of their choice, or does this process favor some groups of students over others? Should things be done to change the way colleges currently decide who gets admitted? And if so, what could be changed to make this process fair for all students?