The College Admissions Scandal was All About Bragging Rights

Your alma mater gives you social cachet for life.

In his defense of his famous friends, playwright David Mamet urged the public to see the wealthy, accused parents of the college admissions bribery scandal as devoted parents who acted only out of the singular, blind love that parents have to see their children succeed.

My parents also cared greatly about my college acceptance, but their love came in the form of a Saturday SAT crash course, a $30 test prep book from Barnes and Nobles and a whole lot of weekends road tripping to various schools.

No, I won’t believe that the parents behind the college admissions bribery scandal were acting only on altruism. I think they were acting selfishly to give themselves, by way of their children, bragging rights. I think they wanted that college admission feather in their cap more than anything else.

Saying the name of your college alma mater has a certain social cachet that never goes away. It follows you everywhere — cocktail parties, first introductions, meeting strangers on the train.

Undergrad is usually a one and done experience that you don’t get to relive, so where you spend that time seems particularly crucial. It’s a tidbit of your life story that you can always claim.

I did not go to a prestigious school but I did go to a well-known public university. When I am asked where I went to college — and I am asked very often, even 15 years after graduation — I usually get a positive reaction.

What’s more, if I find someone who has also gone to the same school then we almost have a little club going right then and there. As a college alum of any kind, you feel the kinship and the exclusivity of being in that group. Not everyone gets to partake in that experience, be in that club, and that’s the point of admissions in the first place.

College alma maters are the same cliche-y game as in high school — who’s in and who’s out. And the gravitational pull is strong.

For decades the bachelor’s degree was the educational ticket to a better life — money, access, jobs, comfort and social status. One study I once read told me that my bachelor’s degree would amass me roughly a million dollars more in earnings over the course of my career. That something notable for us in the middle try to strive for, but small potatoes to those who already have a family fortune, key connections and an automatic ‘in’ to the elite echelons of society that we can only dream of. These people have Wikipedia pages in their honor, for crying out loud. I’m just another gal that needs a hefty education on my resume to stand out.

It’s hard to imagine any child of ultra-wealthy parents tinkering away on their resume on Microsoft Word or sending in an application through Indeed.com and hoping for the best.

So why did they want their children to go to these prestigious colleges anyway? I think it’s all about the name-drop alma mater.

These kids might have been under-qualified to go to a school like Harvard but they could have gained admission in their own right to any number of schools in the top 50 and 100 U.S. universities and still had a pretty commendable educational background. But that wouldn’t have gleaned the social cachet of saying the name of a university that truly impressed your friends at dinner.

Celebrities are no different than ordinary people. They like to brag, just like we do. They like to aloofly post their daily exploits out there in the world so we can silently consume it — their makeup, their homes, their diets, their color schemes. Just like us, they see their children as extensions of themselves. It’s why we post pictures of our babies on Instagram rather than our own tired mug. The kids are our success stories and our pride.

I might not know exactly what it’s like to live in L.A. and drift through the society of Hollywood but I imagine it’s a microcosm of everyone’s life. We are all still painfully aware of who in our social circles does what, has what money, lives where and looks how. We are all silently trying to create new value for ourselves by way of our success and our children’s success. Very few of us have found true enlightenment to not care or worry about these materialistic things.

Even in the celebrity world there is a social structure that excludes and includes. It’s cliches and clubs — literally and figuratively. Nowhere does that pressure seem greatest than when the stakes are highest.

But most people don’t bribe and cheat to get into college. So if there is any over-arching meditation to have on what just happened here, it might be to wonder how we still as a society are so classist about college.

Why would anyone have thought Olivia Jade, the daughter of Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli, needed to go to college and sit in a seminar hall for psych 101. She was already a proven entreprenuer and Vlogger in her own right. She had a huge social media following — 1.4 million Instagram followers and 1.9 million YouTube subscribers — and several endorsement deals, including a makeup line at Sephora. And, as she famously opined on YouTube, she wasn’t genuinely interested in school.

Olivia Jade had actual talents and they were the branding savvy and coolness factor that a bachelor’s degree simply can never buy. She was on the verge of breaking out as a bona fide star. Anyone could have seen her going the course of Kylie Jenner and becoming a self-made billionaire (though the criticism of ‘self-made’ that Jenner received would apply equally to Olivia Jade having both come from rich and famous families, but let’s not split hairs).

We are as Americans, to paraphrase John Steinbeck, just temporarily embarrassed millionaires finding inspiration in those who have made it. We like entitled rich kids in this country — we watch them on TV; we buy their clothes and products; we vote them into the presidency. We think we could be them someday with the proper big break.

And while a case can be made that a well-rounded formal education can benefit anyone, Olivia Jade is an example of someone that might actually have found sitting in a seminar hall detrimental to her life goals. As long as she was forced to do schoolwork she had to take away from her growing career.

While many have come to realize in recent years that a bachelor’s degree isn’t a right fit for every kid straight out of high school, it doesn’t stop us from feeling like that reality is better suited for someone else’s kid.

Of course all of that is now moot in the wake of this scandal— her career is trashed and her brand may never recover. In an effort to secure a lifetime of bragging rights as a USC family, her parents allegedly bribed and faked their way to gain admission to that exclusive college club. They must have known — as can be concluded from her own Vlogging — that she didn’t want to go to college and probably also that she wasn’t very academically inclined. It was recently reported that she didn’t even fill out her own college application — so her parents got someone to do it for her.

Given all that, given all of their privilege as well-heeled multi-millionaires, it’s hard to accept that this was parental altruism to make their daughter well prepared for a career internship someday. It’s hard to see how this wasn’t a selfish crusade for their own pride.

Mamet’s plea for what he calls the Texas defense — “not guilt, but don’t do it again” — should be reserved for the Jean Valjeans of the world. People who act illegally out of desperation to preserve their basic human needs. Not people who act illegally because their egos are too big to fail.