'How Do We Rebuild Trust?' A Year After Admissions Scandal, Presidents Say College Must Change

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As shocking as the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal seemed to everyday Americans, with its accusations of bribes, faked athletic credentials and falsified test scores, it came as even more of a surprise to college presidents.

Beyond the sheer scale of the fraud — millions of dollars allegedly funneled to athletics staffers, coaches and test proctors — was what it said about their institutions.

Colleges, especially elite ones, have long viewed themselves as places open to anyone, where promising students from any background can find support to learn, grow and prepare for successful careers.

What if none of that was true? If it was mainly the rich and famous gaining access to America’s top schools, how open were they, really?

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Many Americans, it became clear, were convinced the college admissions process was rigged, and the only way to get a leg up was to cheat.

A year later, six leaders of some of the country’s most selective colleges say they, too, have been questioning the fairness of college admissions. They take responsibility for some of the public’s mistrust of higher education. But they also say Americans’ obsession with being the best in all avenues of life is partially to blame.

USA TODAY interviewed six presidents of selective colleges to see what has changed in higher education since the admissions scandal — and what hasn’t. Excerpts have been lightly edited and presented together, although each interview was conducted separately.

Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

Bucknell University President John Bravman

John Bravman, president of Bucknell University, a private college in Pennsylvania: Some of the interviews I saw absolutely solidified in my mind that neither child nor parents understood what college was about. Colleges of this caliber, frankly, are not finishing schools. I think they were being approached as finishing schools, or schools where you can meet your future partner. Or where you’re going to get hooked up with the right alum. Does that happen sometimes? Sure. That’s not the purpose of higher education.

Davidson College President Carol Quillen

Carol Quillen, president of Davidson College, a liberal arts college in North Carolina: The big takeaway for me was there is no public confidence in the integrity of higher education admission. And how do we rebuild trust with the public and live up to our obligation to make education a public good, and to serve the societies and communities that support us? How do we make the case that the public should and can trust higher education?

Trinity College President Joanne Berger-Sweeny.

Joanne Berger-Sweeney, president of Trinity College, a liberal arts college in Connecticut: The positive thing about Varsity Blues was allowed people to recognize that there may be flaws when you’re just trying to assess a candidate on SAT scores. Maybe I keep hounding on that issue because, you know, Trinity, we became a test-optional institution. (In 2015, Trinity gave prospective students the option to include their ACT and SAT scores as part of their application, rather than requiring test scores for all applicants.) We recognized SATs can be flawed instruments. They can be viewed in a total package, but it’s as though people have started to believe that SATs were correlated with how smart their kids were and how well they were going to do. And there was a lot of counter-evidence to that.

The University of Washington's Seattle campus — The University of Washington’s Seattle campus

President Ana Mari Cauce of University of Washington

Ana Mari Cauce, president of the University of Washington, a public institution: I think that the data does suggest it’s very much a myth, but that is very much present for some parents, more than others, and that’s the ‘getting into the right school or not getting into the right school will determine everyone’s path in life.’ Part of what has kept that myth and has perhaps grown that myth is the side effect of the middle class being hollowed out. There’s a broader discussion to be had about: What are our priorities? I think for a large public like the UW, it has to be in part: How do we rebuild the middle class?

Carol Christ, chancellor of University of California, Berkeley.

Carol Christ, chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, a public university: So I fault, in part, the college rankings that create what I think is a false sense that there’s an ordinal ranking of quality of institutions, which anybody who knows higher education knows isn’t true. So people kind of have a false sense: ‘If I go to number two, it’s going to be better than number three, which is better than number four.’ The truth is there are many excellent choices for every student. And students are so anxious about getting into the right college that they apply to many more than used to be the case. I realize this is ancient history, but when I was applying to college, you applied to three colleges. Now students routinely apply to 12 to 15 colleges, which makes on the other side of the desk, the admissions business, very difficult. You have no idea what students are going to accept your offer.

Quillen (Davidson): It seems to me that the post-secondary education sector is being asked to educate many, many more people much more quickly at a much lower cost for an uncertain economic future. And so how do we participate in doing that? It’s our job to make sure that it’s available to everyone. Not everybody is going to want the same kind of education. So differentiation is good. We should support each other as we differentiate and offer different things to different groups of learners.

Berger-Sweeney (Trinity): We’re putting too much pressure on these kids now about college admissions. Any narrative about finding the perfect college probably disservices the students and their family. There are lots of great institutions. There are great students, and it’s about finding good fit. And the likelihood is that there is more than one college or two colleges out there that are good fits. And any idea that you have to go to a specific college or a specific place, it’s putting too much pressure on our system. We’re in a country that believes in prestige and particular institutions come with a prestige factor. We try to get away from calling ourselves elite, but I recognize being at Trinity College, we do have a particular and strong brand.

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Cornell University, an Ivy League school in Ithaca, New York

Bravman (Bucknell): I’m 62 years old. It seems my whole life has just seen a slow decline in the overall view of institutions of all types. And why would colleges be immune from that? Everything is under scrutiny like never before. So something like Varsity Blues ignites a passion in people, understandably. We know we’re an expensive option. So that just throws in there another piece about wealth and fame and fortune and therefore of access. I try to explain who we are, who we’re not, why it costs so much to go to college — there are good answers there for what people expect today — and I just find there’s no solution as a silver bullet. You communicate, you communicate, you communicate. You explain who you are, what you do, how you do it, and you hope to make headway.

Cornell University President Martha Pollack.

Martha Pollack, president of Cornell University, a private university: That skepticism really bothers me. It bothers me because I think a lot of the people who are making those claims are still sending their kids to college. I worry the students who could benefit the most financially might get that message and not come. I firmly believe, and there’s evidence to show this, that people are healthier, they’re more involved in their community, there’s all kinds of nonfinancial benefits that accrue from a university education. Often when people ask what’s my greatest challenge, they think I am going to say long-term financial stability, and that is a challenge. But what I say is I don’t think a lot of the public does realize what we do in universities.

Berger-Sweeney (Trinity): (About six years ago, when she became president, she was tasked with making the student body more talented.) In order to get better students, I needed more financial aid. Because we were excluding a number of really talented, smart students, not because of their ability, but because of their ability to pay. And so, when I was able to convince the trustees that we needed more money for financial aid, we went out and started to recruit from a broader pool than we had before. What I love to tell people is talent exists across every zip code and every geographic region of the country. Opportunity doesn’t always exist across those. So when I had more money that I could put into financial aid, I was able to recruit better, more talented students on every scale and metric that I had. It so happened that it was a more diverse student body.

Sproul Hall on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley is a symbol of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s.

Christ (Berkeley): When you think about the kind of volume of applications that a place like Berkeley gets, you’re comparing applicants that have had every opportunity with people whose opportunities have been very limited. (For the fall 2019 class, Berkeley turned away about 35,600 applicants for its freshman class with weighted GPAs of 4.0 or higher.) And how do you make choices if you’re a state institution serving the state of California? What responsibility do you have to choose a student body that’s in some way representative of the state, or that gives economic opportunities through really excellent higher education to populations in the state that have had less of a chance at those advantages? So it’s an enormously fraught subject.

President, Ana Mari Cauce, University of Washington.

Cauce (Washington): Yes, we’re a selective university, but we’re not as highly selective as some, particularly in terms of our in-state applications. There are still students that we turn down that I know could have done well here and that I take zero pride in the fact that we are not able to take them. As proud as I am about the fabulous students that we admit, I always also have to say that I am sorry that there are some excellent students that we were simply not able to make room for. The bottom line is what we want for our state of Washington is to have a very high-functioning set of public universities so that students who don’t get in here have other good options.

Cauce (Washington): It’s the question of who pays for it. That’s part of why it’s so important to have strong public trust, for people to understand that public universities, and in particular, higher education more broadly, is not just a benefit to the individual student, but it’s a benefit to society at large. For example, one-third of our students aim to be the first in their family to graduate from college — a full third of our students. When that happens, not only are you changing the trajectory of their lives, but usually of their younger brothers and sisters, their children, et cetera. They’re more apt to be employed. They’re more apt to vote. There’s a whole host of positive consequences.

Pollack (Cornell): We have to truly address the affordability issue. That means being much clearer about what the actual costs are. We’ve got this very complicated system with sticker prices, and then Pell Grants (federal scholarships for low-income students), and then other kinds of grants and work-study. I think we have to work to drive down costs for those in the middle class who are being squeezed even once they understand the actual cost. Then I think we somehow have to figure out how to tell a better story about what college is doing for our young alumni. And maybe we should be relying on their own voices, because I go around the country, meeting with Cornell alumni, young, middle-aged, old, and they tell an extraordinary story about the impact that their education has had on them.

Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

Berger-Sweeney (Trinity): The largest democratization of higher education with the GI Bill (a massive program that made it possible for veterans to attend college paid by the government). Where before, when college education was pretty much more or less for the wealthy or more elite, I’m sorry to say a number of college and university presidents were not supportive of the GI Bill. They did not know how they were going to handle a more diverse population. It’s a little bit of a reminder and maybe a small bit of history repeating itself. This isn’t a new thing for higher education. We have been having arguments about diversity in higher education for quite a while in the U.S. For the most part, we have come out on the right side of history.

Bravman (Bucknell): Students today are very different than they were 44 years ago. They’re different than they were 10 years ago. So we see a continuing evolution in the student mindset. And we don’t have the luxury, and the wealthiest schools in the country don’t have the luxury, of just assuming: ‘Hey, this is who we are. Take it or leave it.’

Christ (Berkeley): I think the great challenge at the University of California, certainly where I sit at Berkeley, is not that we want to admit students who wouldn’t be able to do the work. It’s that there are so many students who are applying who would do the work brilliantly, but we don’t have space for, so that’s the real challenge we have to solve.

Cauce (Washington): I certainly hope more and more of us are saying: We want to be judged by the quality of education and the experience we give to students that come here, not by the number of students we turn down, which just stokes the anxiety of students and creates the conditions that led to Varsity Blues. I hope that we continue to look at how can institutions of higher education continue to play this role they have played historically of building, and in this case it would be rebuilding, the middle class and being a pathway to social mobility. I think there are some aspects of reproducing privilege that we need to look at very carefully.

Pollack (Cornell): We’re still going to want to be doing a better job of explaining what it actually costs to go to college. I think we’re still going to be driving towards ways to, and this is an important point, not to just bring in more middle- and low-income students, but support them once they’re there. So when people talk about diversity and inclusion, the inclusion part is important.

Quillen (Davidson): People seem to be interacting with other people who are just like them and living in this sort of echo-chamber world where something like getting into school can become a thing for which you’re willing to break the law. Part of it is: How do we address the conditions that are now dividing us? How do we think about unequal access to all kinds of resources, not just education, but other things? How do we address growing disparities in wealth? How do we think about building a society where democratic public life is possible and we’re all effective citizens and care about the well being of each other? How do we build that world, and what is higher ed’s role in building that world? Only in a very rarefied environment can getting your kid into a particular institution become the obsession of your life.

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Editor’s note: Data in fact boxes comes from the federal government’s College Navigator. Pell Grants refer to a federal grant given to students from low-income families.

Education coverage at USA TODAY is made possible in part by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation does not provide editorial input.