Showing posts with label university. Show all posts
Showing posts with label university. Show all posts
Saturday 4 March 2023
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Monday 20 September 2021
Wednesday 15 September 2021
Wednesday 7 April 2021
How to plan your exam preparation
How to study for exams?
How to plan for your exams
Essay Memorisation Techniques
How to learn new content
Essay Writing Workshop
Revision tips
Spaced Repetition
How to learn new content
Saturday 16 January 2021
Saturday 25 July 2020
Sixth-formers able to haggle for top UK universities under new grading system
Experts warn ‘sharp-elbowed’ middle classes more likely to talk their way into places as institutions look to expand writes Anna Fazackerley in The Guardian
A-level results day at Rochdale sixth form a year ago. This year, experts say, students will have much more power to negotiate their university places. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer
School leavers may feel that, with A-level exams cancelled, they have lost control over their future. But experts say they have never had more power to talk their way into their first-choice university, even if they miss their grades.
As sixth-formers nervously await next month’s teacher-assessed results from the exams regulator, Ofqual, research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies has found that in the aftermath of coronavirus, the UK higher education sector is facing losses of between £3bn and £19bn in the new academic year, depending on how many students enrol.
Many universities expect to lose 50-100% of their lucrative international student intake, a blow that will hit the most selective institutions hardest. While they have agreed to a government cap on student numbers to maintain stability, it was set with enough room for successful universities to increase UK student numbers to make up some of the shortfall.
Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute thinktank, says: “The way they are grading A-levels this year gives [young people] much more room to negotiate. You can easily ring and make a case for being let in based on your grades being wrong.”
He says that if universities have lots of empty seats this year they will be “in compulsory redundancy territory”.
Simon Marginson, professor of higher education at Oxford University, agrees school leavers have “an unusual level of power this time”. In ordinary years universities, particularly the elite ones, have been wary of letting in too many applicants with lower grades for fear it could affect their position in the all-important league tables.
Marginson predicts this year could be different. “No one loses competitive position if everyone shifts the same way at the same time, as seems likely. The name of the game is organisational survival and everyone knows that.”
However, many academics are concerned that more disadvantaged candidates might be less likely to negotiate offers and hunt down good places in clearing.
Barnaby Lenon, former head of Harrow public school and chair of the Independent Schools Council, has urged university admission authorities to look beyond “dodgy” A-level grades, which “could be wrong”, when deciding who to admit.
Everyone has heard tales of middle-class parents picking up the phone to Oxford or Cambridge to argue for their child’s place. Lee Elliot Major, professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter, says: “Never underestimate the adeptness of the sharp-elbowed middle classes at exploiting opportunities. And no opportunity is more prized than a place at a prestigious university.”
Elliot Major worries that next month’s frantic last-minute market for places may further skew the playing field against poorer young people. “There is a genuine fear that many disadvantaged pupils who would have excelled in their A-levels this year will be penalised with lower scores by the system of calculated grades, which estimates grades on the basis of historical averages of schools,” he says.
Some believe Ucas, the admissions service, is not helping. Mark Corver, former director of analysis and research at Ucas and now founder of dataHE consultancy, has warned the government there is not enough detailed data publicly available to allow students and teachers to prove if the Ofqual grading process has gone wrong for them.
“We’ve asked Ucas repeatedly to release some simple tables showing the typical exam grades that applicants with different predicted grades get in a normal year. They have steadfastly refused,” he says. “We’ve found them reluctant and obstructive. Given they are a charity and not a commercial organisation, it’s very disappointing.”
However, Richard O’Kelly, head of analytical data at Ucas, denies the organisation is being obstructive. He says it cannot publish the data set, which breaks down results by factors including gender, ethnicity and social background, because it creates an “unacceptable risk” of individual applicants being identifiable. He adds: “We have published more data during this year than ever before to promote confidence amongst students and universities.”
Sophie Hatton, an 18-year-old school leaver from Birmingham, says she is feeling “increasingly anxious” waiting for her A-level grades. “At first I thought it was great having all my exams cancelled. Then it hit me how terrifying it is that two years of work could account for nothing as I have no full way of showing my potential.”
Hatton is hoping to study sociology at Nottingham Trent University, but she says that if she doesn’t get the grades she needs she will get on the phone and try to negotiate, “to prove I am a determined, hard-working student”.
Kate Spalding, another 18-year-old waiting for her results, in Southampton, says she was upset for days after hearing she could not sit her exams: “I felt all my work had gone to waste.” Now, she says, she has decided to trust her teachers and is feeling more confident.
She is planning a gap year, but if she does not get the grades she needs to study drama at Manchester or Leeds, she intends to retake her A-levels later in the year.
Despite the government’s cap on student numbers this year, with financial penalties for those that exceed it, many selective institutions are planning for expansion, within the boundary of an extra 5% on last year’s enrolment forecasts.
Prof Colin Riordan, vice-chancellor of Cardiff University, a member of the Russell Group, says his university is anticipating a 2% growth in UK student numbers this year. “Given the way the cap has been set, it is conceivable that quite a few selective universities will take marginally more students than last year, and altogether that could be quite a lot,” he says.
Yet Riordan admits that for institutions such as his, international students and not UK ones make the real financial difference – and their numbers will be unclear until October or November. “Really we won’t know how many international students we will get until they actually turn up – or don’t,” he says.
Vice-chancellors say the way A-levels are being calculated this year is making them nervous. Another Russell Group head, who asked not to be named, says: “We have thousands of students who have put us as first choice and accepted our offer. Usually we can be pretty accurate on what percentage will achieve the grades. But this year if there is even 10% inflation on that, that’s a big difference.”
The government has confirmed, in new guidance issued earlier this month, that it will not penalise universities for going over their cap because a larger number of students than expected meet their offer grades. But the vice-chancellor says that, in a Covid-19 world, a big increase would put pressure on facilities. “There are two nightmares: one where no one turns up, and one where everyone turns up while we are trying to do social distancing,” he says.
If prestigious institutions expand, they could suck up some students who might have chosen mid-ranking universities, leaving some of those institutions without enough undergraduates – and their £9,250 a year fees. Marginson says this would leave universities at the bottom of the sector “facing very difficult times”.
Dean Machin, head of policy at the University of Portsmouth, agrees. “We have potentially got the worst of both worlds. For sector stability we enabled government to control the number of people who go to university – and unfortunately it is unlikely to provide all universities the protection they were seeking.”
The Office for Students regulator is consulting on new powers to intervene faster to protect students in case any universities or colleges are at risk of closure.
School leavers may feel that, with A-level exams cancelled, they have lost control over their future. But experts say they have never had more power to talk their way into their first-choice university, even if they miss their grades.
As sixth-formers nervously await next month’s teacher-assessed results from the exams regulator, Ofqual, research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies has found that in the aftermath of coronavirus, the UK higher education sector is facing losses of between £3bn and £19bn in the new academic year, depending on how many students enrol.
Many universities expect to lose 50-100% of their lucrative international student intake, a blow that will hit the most selective institutions hardest. While they have agreed to a government cap on student numbers to maintain stability, it was set with enough room for successful universities to increase UK student numbers to make up some of the shortfall.
Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute thinktank, says: “The way they are grading A-levels this year gives [young people] much more room to negotiate. You can easily ring and make a case for being let in based on your grades being wrong.”
He says that if universities have lots of empty seats this year they will be “in compulsory redundancy territory”.
Simon Marginson, professor of higher education at Oxford University, agrees school leavers have “an unusual level of power this time”. In ordinary years universities, particularly the elite ones, have been wary of letting in too many applicants with lower grades for fear it could affect their position in the all-important league tables.
Marginson predicts this year could be different. “No one loses competitive position if everyone shifts the same way at the same time, as seems likely. The name of the game is organisational survival and everyone knows that.”
However, many academics are concerned that more disadvantaged candidates might be less likely to negotiate offers and hunt down good places in clearing.
Barnaby Lenon, former head of Harrow public school and chair of the Independent Schools Council, has urged university admission authorities to look beyond “dodgy” A-level grades, which “could be wrong”, when deciding who to admit.
Everyone has heard tales of middle-class parents picking up the phone to Oxford or Cambridge to argue for their child’s place. Lee Elliot Major, professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter, says: “Never underestimate the adeptness of the sharp-elbowed middle classes at exploiting opportunities. And no opportunity is more prized than a place at a prestigious university.”
Elliot Major worries that next month’s frantic last-minute market for places may further skew the playing field against poorer young people. “There is a genuine fear that many disadvantaged pupils who would have excelled in their A-levels this year will be penalised with lower scores by the system of calculated grades, which estimates grades on the basis of historical averages of schools,” he says.
Some believe Ucas, the admissions service, is not helping. Mark Corver, former director of analysis and research at Ucas and now founder of dataHE consultancy, has warned the government there is not enough detailed data publicly available to allow students and teachers to prove if the Ofqual grading process has gone wrong for them.
“We’ve asked Ucas repeatedly to release some simple tables showing the typical exam grades that applicants with different predicted grades get in a normal year. They have steadfastly refused,” he says. “We’ve found them reluctant and obstructive. Given they are a charity and not a commercial organisation, it’s very disappointing.”
However, Richard O’Kelly, head of analytical data at Ucas, denies the organisation is being obstructive. He says it cannot publish the data set, which breaks down results by factors including gender, ethnicity and social background, because it creates an “unacceptable risk” of individual applicants being identifiable. He adds: “We have published more data during this year than ever before to promote confidence amongst students and universities.”
Sophie Hatton, an 18-year-old school leaver from Birmingham, says she is feeling “increasingly anxious” waiting for her A-level grades. “At first I thought it was great having all my exams cancelled. Then it hit me how terrifying it is that two years of work could account for nothing as I have no full way of showing my potential.”
Hatton is hoping to study sociology at Nottingham Trent University, but she says that if she doesn’t get the grades she needs she will get on the phone and try to negotiate, “to prove I am a determined, hard-working student”.
Kate Spalding, another 18-year-old waiting for her results, in Southampton, says she was upset for days after hearing she could not sit her exams: “I felt all my work had gone to waste.” Now, she says, she has decided to trust her teachers and is feeling more confident.
She is planning a gap year, but if she does not get the grades she needs to study drama at Manchester or Leeds, she intends to retake her A-levels later in the year.
Despite the government’s cap on student numbers this year, with financial penalties for those that exceed it, many selective institutions are planning for expansion, within the boundary of an extra 5% on last year’s enrolment forecasts.
Prof Colin Riordan, vice-chancellor of Cardiff University, a member of the Russell Group, says his university is anticipating a 2% growth in UK student numbers this year. “Given the way the cap has been set, it is conceivable that quite a few selective universities will take marginally more students than last year, and altogether that could be quite a lot,” he says.
Yet Riordan admits that for institutions such as his, international students and not UK ones make the real financial difference – and their numbers will be unclear until October or November. “Really we won’t know how many international students we will get until they actually turn up – or don’t,” he says.
Vice-chancellors say the way A-levels are being calculated this year is making them nervous. Another Russell Group head, who asked not to be named, says: “We have thousands of students who have put us as first choice and accepted our offer. Usually we can be pretty accurate on what percentage will achieve the grades. But this year if there is even 10% inflation on that, that’s a big difference.”
The government has confirmed, in new guidance issued earlier this month, that it will not penalise universities for going over their cap because a larger number of students than expected meet their offer grades. But the vice-chancellor says that, in a Covid-19 world, a big increase would put pressure on facilities. “There are two nightmares: one where no one turns up, and one where everyone turns up while we are trying to do social distancing,” he says.
If prestigious institutions expand, they could suck up some students who might have chosen mid-ranking universities, leaving some of those institutions without enough undergraduates – and their £9,250 a year fees. Marginson says this would leave universities at the bottom of the sector “facing very difficult times”.
Dean Machin, head of policy at the University of Portsmouth, agrees. “We have potentially got the worst of both worlds. For sector stability we enabled government to control the number of people who go to university – and unfortunately it is unlikely to provide all universities the protection they were seeking.”
The Office for Students regulator is consulting on new powers to intervene faster to protect students in case any universities or colleges are at risk of closure.
Thursday 16 July 2020
Ten years from graduating, I'm still not sure university was a good decision
I studied English, slept a lot and developed an aversion to ‘hard’ books. Was university anything more than an expensive blip? asks Eleanor Margolis in The Guardian
‘I suppose I’d say, ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’, but I was asleep the week I was supposed to read A Tale of Two Cities.’ Photograph: incamerastock / Alamy/Alamy
Under my bed, in a shoebox covered in dust, lie a disused strap-on and my degree. In a sense, this physical copy of my 2:1 in English literature from a middle-ranking university is the most expensive thing I own. This month marks 10 years since I graduated into a thumping recession and – joke’s on you, Student Loans Company – a whole decade in which I haven’t paid off a single penny of my student debt. A fact that has made me look back on those three years, all that time ago, I spent at uni and wonder – what exactly was that?
Obviously, I was incredibly lucky to go to university. Especially at a time when tuition fees were a third of what they are now. Or – perhaps more pertinently – at a time where a global pandemic wasn’t sending the entire education system into a very real existential crisis. I was lucky that my middle classness made higher education an inevitability. Like growing boobs and starting my period, university was a fact of life. When it came to choosing my degree, I simply went with the subject I’d always done best in at school.
It never occurred to me there was any other way. But this was when I was still a a perpetually horny, semi-closeted lesbian teenager with depression and anxiety up to the eyeballs, and the self-esteem of a naked mole rat that finds itself in a hall of mirrors. I was in no way ready to make a major life decision that would cost me tens of thousands of pounds. I had no idea who I was yet, let alone how I should be spending the next three years of my existence.
I assumed I’d muddle through it – just how I’d muddled through GCSEs and A-levels. You do the reading, you churn out essays, you progress to whatever the next thing is that’s expected of you. Plus, the work side of things was a minor consideration compared to the thought of all the other queer girls I might meet. It was going to be fun, eye-opening, vital.
It was and it wasn’t. Over the next three years I would date boys, become even more anxious and depressed, and cultivate a resentment towards “hard” books. To this day, I suffer from a sort of reading-induced narcolepsy. I’ve always been a painfully slow reader; being given a week to read Ulysses along with fluttering mounds of literary theory so dense you’d think it had escaped from the Cern lab, was not a recipe for happiness. When I’m stressed, I sleep. Even by students’ sleepy reputation, I was practically comatose for three-quarters of the time. On the flipside, I made good friends, learned what “dasein” meant, and came out as gay. I suppose I’d say, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, but I was asleep the week I was supposed to read A Tale of Two Cities.
How much of life do we do simply because it’s the “done thing”? Last month, Euan Blair, the son of that guy who was very into the idea that getting more people into higher education was the best way to even the societal playing field, wrote in the Times that degrees are now “irrelevant.” His argument that we need to “retrain the nation” was especially spammy coming from someone who runs a tech startup specialising in apprenticeships.
Should I really have gone to university? I honestly don’t know. All the jobs I’ve ever applied for have required a degree, but then again no one’s ever asked to see the scrap of paper in the dildo box under my bed. What if I’d said I have a first in sub-linear aquatics from Mary Berry College, Cambridge, and ended up in a better position than I’m in now?
What I do know is that if I had the opportunity to go back to university, now would be the time I could actually make the most out of it. At 31, not only do I have a greater sense of who I am, but I know what fascinates me. I’m infinitely more receptive to learning now than I was at 18; and I wish I hadn’t so brazenly pissed my university experience up the wall. When I think of the seminars I turned up to without having done the reading, I feel queasy. If university has played no definable role in the 10 years since I graduated, and I didn’t have the awareness to milk it for everything it was worth at the time, then I ask – once again – what was it? Other than a very expensive and quite interesting blip.
And all the while, I could have just done a Marcus Rashford and become a world-class footballer, led a successful campaign against child poverty, and got an honorary degree – all without going to university. You know, the easy route.
Under my bed, in a shoebox covered in dust, lie a disused strap-on and my degree. In a sense, this physical copy of my 2:1 in English literature from a middle-ranking university is the most expensive thing I own. This month marks 10 years since I graduated into a thumping recession and – joke’s on you, Student Loans Company – a whole decade in which I haven’t paid off a single penny of my student debt. A fact that has made me look back on those three years, all that time ago, I spent at uni and wonder – what exactly was that?
Obviously, I was incredibly lucky to go to university. Especially at a time when tuition fees were a third of what they are now. Or – perhaps more pertinently – at a time where a global pandemic wasn’t sending the entire education system into a very real existential crisis. I was lucky that my middle classness made higher education an inevitability. Like growing boobs and starting my period, university was a fact of life. When it came to choosing my degree, I simply went with the subject I’d always done best in at school.
It never occurred to me there was any other way. But this was when I was still a a perpetually horny, semi-closeted lesbian teenager with depression and anxiety up to the eyeballs, and the self-esteem of a naked mole rat that finds itself in a hall of mirrors. I was in no way ready to make a major life decision that would cost me tens of thousands of pounds. I had no idea who I was yet, let alone how I should be spending the next three years of my existence.
I assumed I’d muddle through it – just how I’d muddled through GCSEs and A-levels. You do the reading, you churn out essays, you progress to whatever the next thing is that’s expected of you. Plus, the work side of things was a minor consideration compared to the thought of all the other queer girls I might meet. It was going to be fun, eye-opening, vital.
It was and it wasn’t. Over the next three years I would date boys, become even more anxious and depressed, and cultivate a resentment towards “hard” books. To this day, I suffer from a sort of reading-induced narcolepsy. I’ve always been a painfully slow reader; being given a week to read Ulysses along with fluttering mounds of literary theory so dense you’d think it had escaped from the Cern lab, was not a recipe for happiness. When I’m stressed, I sleep. Even by students’ sleepy reputation, I was practically comatose for three-quarters of the time. On the flipside, I made good friends, learned what “dasein” meant, and came out as gay. I suppose I’d say, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, but I was asleep the week I was supposed to read A Tale of Two Cities.
How much of life do we do simply because it’s the “done thing”? Last month, Euan Blair, the son of that guy who was very into the idea that getting more people into higher education was the best way to even the societal playing field, wrote in the Times that degrees are now “irrelevant.” His argument that we need to “retrain the nation” was especially spammy coming from someone who runs a tech startup specialising in apprenticeships.
Should I really have gone to university? I honestly don’t know. All the jobs I’ve ever applied for have required a degree, but then again no one’s ever asked to see the scrap of paper in the dildo box under my bed. What if I’d said I have a first in sub-linear aquatics from Mary Berry College, Cambridge, and ended up in a better position than I’m in now?
What I do know is that if I had the opportunity to go back to university, now would be the time I could actually make the most out of it. At 31, not only do I have a greater sense of who I am, but I know what fascinates me. I’m infinitely more receptive to learning now than I was at 18; and I wish I hadn’t so brazenly pissed my university experience up the wall. When I think of the seminars I turned up to without having done the reading, I feel queasy. If university has played no definable role in the 10 years since I graduated, and I didn’t have the awareness to milk it for everything it was worth at the time, then I ask – once again – what was it? Other than a very expensive and quite interesting blip.
And all the while, I could have just done a Marcus Rashford and become a world-class footballer, led a successful campaign against child poverty, and got an honorary degree – all without going to university. You know, the easy route.
Thursday 2 July 2020
What's wrong with WhatsApp
As social media has become more inhospitable, the appeal of private online groups has grown. But they hold their own dangers – to those both inside and out. By William Davies in The Guardian
In the spring, as the virus swept across the world and billions of people were compelled to stay at home, the popularity of one social media app rose more sharply than any other. By late March, usage of WhatsApp around the world had grown by 40%. In Spain, where the lockdown was particularly strict, it rose by 76%. In those early months, WhatsApp – which hovers neatly between the space of email, Facebook and SMS, allowing text messages, links and photos to be shared between groups – was a prime conduit through which waves of news, memes and mass anxiety travelled.
At first, many of the new uses were heartening. Mutual aid groups sprung up to help the vulnerable. Families and friends used the app to stay close, sharing their fears and concerns in real time. Yet by mid-April, the role that WhatsApp was playing in the pandemic looked somewhat darker. A conspiracy theory about the rollout of 5G, which originated long before Covid-19 had appeared, now claimed that mobile phone masts were responsible for the disease. Across the UK, people began setting fire to 5G masts, with 20 arson attacks over the Easter weekend alone.
WhatsApp, along with Facebook and YouTube, was a key channel through which the conspiracy theory proliferated. Some feared that the very same community groups created during March were now accelerating the spread of the 5G conspiracy theory. Meanwhile, the app was also enabling the spread of fake audio clips, such as a widely shared recording in which someone who claimed to work for the NHS reported that ambulances would no longer be sent to assist people with breathing difficulties.
This was not the first time that WhatsApp has been embroiled in controversy. While the “fake news” scandals surrounding the 2016 electoral upsets in the UK and US were more focused upon Facebook – which owns WhatsApp – subsequent electoral victories for Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Narendra Modi in India were aided by incendiary WhatsApp messaging, exploiting the vast reach of the app in these countries. In India, there have also been reports of riots and at least 30 deaths linked to rumours circulating on WhatsApp. India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has sought ways of regulating WhatsApp content, though this has led to new controversies about government infringement on civil liberties.
FacebookTwitterPinterest A security message on WhatsApp. Photograph: Thomas White/Reuters
But what makes WhatsApp potentially more dangerous than public social media are the higher levels of trust and honesty that are often present in private groups. It is a truism that nobody is as happy as they appear on Facebook, as attractive as they appear on Instagram or as angry as they appear on Twitter, which spawns a growing weariness with such endless performance. By contrast, closed groups are where people take off their public masks and let their critical guard down. Neither anonymity (a precondition of most trolling) nor celebrity are on offer. The speed with which rumours circulate on WhatsApp is partly a reflection of how altruistic and uncritical people can be in groups. Most of the time, people seem to share false theories about Covid-19 not with the intention of doing harm, but precisely out of concern for other group members. Anti-vaxx, anti-5G or anti-Hillary rumours combine an identification of an enemy with a strong internal sense of solidarity. Nevertheless, they add to the sense that the world is hostile and dangerous.
There is one particular pattern of a group chat that can manufacture threats and injustices out of thin air. It tends to start with one participant speculating that they are being let down or targeted by some institution or rival group – be it a public service, business or cultural community – whereupon a second participant agrees. By this stage, it becomes risky for anyone else to defend the institution or group in question, and immediately a new enemy and a new resentment is born. Instantly, the warnings and denunciations emanating from within the group take on a level of authenticity that cannot be matched by the entity that is now the object of derision.
But what if the first contributor has misunderstood or misread something, or had a very stressful day and needs to let off steam? And what if the second is merely agreeing so as to make the first one feel better? And what if the other members are either too distracted, too inhibited or too exhausted to say anything to oppose this fresh indignation? This needn’t snowball into the forms of conspiracy theory that produce riots or arson attacks. But even in milder forms, it makes the job of communicating official information – occasionally life-saving information – far more troublesome than it was just a decade ago. Information about public services and health risks is increasingly having to penetrate a thicket of overlapping groups, many of which may have developed an instinctive scepticism to anything emanating from the “mainstream”.
Part of the challenge for institutions is that there is often a strange emotional comfort in the shared feeling of alienation and passivity. “We were never informed about that”, “nobody consulted us”, “we are being ignored”. These are dominant expressions of our political zeitgeist. As WhatsApp has become an increasingly common way of encountering information and news, a vicious circle can ensue: the public world seems ever more distant, impersonal and fake, and the private group becomes a space of sympathy and authenticity.
This is a new twist in the evolution of the social internet. Since the 90s, the internet has held out a promise of connectivity, openness and inclusion, only to then confront inevitable threats to privacy, security and identity. By contrast, groups make people feel secure and anchored, but also help to fragment civil society into separate cliques, unknown to one another. This is the outcome of more than 20 years of ideological battles over what sort of social space the internet should be.
For a few years at the dawn of the millennium, the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conferences (or ETech), were a crucible in which a new digital world was imagined and debated. Launched by the west coast media entrepreneur Tim O’Reilly and hosted annually around California, the conferences attracted a mixture of geeks, gurus, designers and entrepreneurs, brought together more in a spirit of curiosity than of commerce. In 2005, O’Reilly coined the term “web 2.0” to describe a new wave of websites that connected users with each other, rather than with existing offline institutions. Later that year, the domain name facebook.com was purchased by a 21-year-old Harvard student, and the age of the giant social media platforms was born.
Within this short window of time, we can see competing ideas of what a desirable online community might look like. The more idealistic tech gurus who attended ETech insisted that the internet should remain an open public space, albeit one in which select communities could cluster for their own particular purposes, such as creating open-source software projects or Wikipedia entries. The untapped potential of the internet, they believed, was for greater democracy. But for companies such as Facebook, the internet presented an opportunity to collect data about users en masse. The internet’s potential was for greater surveillance. The rise of the giant platforms from 2005 onwards suggested the latter view had won out. And yet, in a strange twist, we are now witnessing a revival of anarchic, self-organising digital groups – only now, in the hands of Facebook as well. The two competing visions have collided.
In the spring, as the virus swept across the world and billions of people were compelled to stay at home, the popularity of one social media app rose more sharply than any other. By late March, usage of WhatsApp around the world had grown by 40%. In Spain, where the lockdown was particularly strict, it rose by 76%. In those early months, WhatsApp – which hovers neatly between the space of email, Facebook and SMS, allowing text messages, links and photos to be shared between groups – was a prime conduit through which waves of news, memes and mass anxiety travelled.
At first, many of the new uses were heartening. Mutual aid groups sprung up to help the vulnerable. Families and friends used the app to stay close, sharing their fears and concerns in real time. Yet by mid-April, the role that WhatsApp was playing in the pandemic looked somewhat darker. A conspiracy theory about the rollout of 5G, which originated long before Covid-19 had appeared, now claimed that mobile phone masts were responsible for the disease. Across the UK, people began setting fire to 5G masts, with 20 arson attacks over the Easter weekend alone.
WhatsApp, along with Facebook and YouTube, was a key channel through which the conspiracy theory proliferated. Some feared that the very same community groups created during March were now accelerating the spread of the 5G conspiracy theory. Meanwhile, the app was also enabling the spread of fake audio clips, such as a widely shared recording in which someone who claimed to work for the NHS reported that ambulances would no longer be sent to assist people with breathing difficulties.
This was not the first time that WhatsApp has been embroiled in controversy. While the “fake news” scandals surrounding the 2016 electoral upsets in the UK and US were more focused upon Facebook – which owns WhatsApp – subsequent electoral victories for Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Narendra Modi in India were aided by incendiary WhatsApp messaging, exploiting the vast reach of the app in these countries. In India, there have also been reports of riots and at least 30 deaths linked to rumours circulating on WhatsApp. India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has sought ways of regulating WhatsApp content, though this has led to new controversies about government infringement on civil liberties.
Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro with a printout of an opponent’s WhatsApp message about him. Photograph: Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters
As ever, there is a risk of pinning too much blame for complex political crises on an inert technology. WhatsApp has also taken some steps to limit its use as a vehicle for misinformation. In March, a WhatsApp spokesperson told the Washington Post that the company had “engaged health ministries around the world to provide simple ways for citizens to receive accurate information about the virus”. But even away from such visible disruptions, WhatsApp does seem to be an unusually effective vehicle for sowing distrust in public institutions and processes.
A WhatsApp group can exist without anyone outside the group knowing of its existence, who its members are or what is being shared, while end-to-end encryption makes it immune to surveillance. Back in Britain’s pre-Covid-19 days, when Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn were the issues that provoked the most feverish political discussions, speculation and paranoia swirled around such groups. Media commentators who defended Corbyn were often accused of belonging to a WhatsApp group of “outriders”, co-ordinated by Corbyn’s office, which supposedly told them what line to take. Meanwhile, the Conservative party’s pro-Brexit European Research Group was said to be chiefly sustained in the form of a WhatsApp group, whose membership was never public. Secretive coordination – both real and imagined – does not strengthen confidence in democracy.
WhatsApp groups can not only breed suspicion among the public, but also manufacture a mood of suspicion among their own participants. As also demonstrated by closed Facebook groups, discontents – not always well-founded – accumulate in private before boiling over in public. The capacity to circulate misinformation and allegations is becoming greater than the capacity to resolve them.
The political threat of WhatsApp is the flipside of its psychological appeal. Unlike so many other social media platforms, WhatsApp is built to secure privacy. On the plus side, this means intimacy with those we care about and an ability to speak freely; on the negative side, it injects an ethos of secrecy and suspicion into the public sphere. As Facebook, Twitter and Instagram become increasingly theatrical – every gesture geared to impress an audience or deflect criticism – WhatsApp has become a sanctuary from a confusing and untrustworthy world, where users can speak more frankly. As trust in groups grows, so it is withdrawn from public institutions and officials. A new common sense develops, founded on instinctive suspicion towards the world beyond the group.
The ongoing rise of WhatsApp, and its challenge to both legacy institutions and open social media, poses a profound political question: how do public institutions and discussions retain legitimacy and trust once people are organised into closed and invisible communities? The risk is that a vicious circle ensues, in which private groups circulate ever more information and disinformation to discredit public officials and public information, and our alienation from democracy escalates.
When WhatsApp was bought by Facebook in 2014 for $19bn, it was the most valuable tech acquisition in history. At the time, WhatsApp brought 450 million users with it. In February this year, it hit 2 billion users worldwide – and that is even before its lockdown surge – making it by far the most widely used messenger app, and the second most commonly used app after Facebook itself. In many countries, it is now the default means of digital communication and social coordination, especially among younger people.
The features that would later allow WhatsApp to become a conduit for conspiracy theory and political conflict were ones never integral to SMS, and have more in common with email: the creation of groups and the ability to forward messages. The ability to forward messages from one group to another – recently limited in response to Covid-19-related misinformation – makes for a potent informational weapon. Groups were initially limited in size to 100 people, but this was later increased to 256. That’s small enough to feel exclusive, but if 256 people forward a message on to another 256 people, 65,536 will have received it.
Groups originate for all sorts of purposes – a party, organising amateur sport, a shared interest – but then take on a life of their own. There can be an anarchic playfulness about this, as a group takes on its own set of in-jokes and traditions. In a New York Magazine piece last year, under the headline “Group chats are making the internet fun again”, the technology critic Max Read argued that groups have become “an outright replacement for the defining mode of social organization of the past decade: the platform-centric, feed-based social network.”
It’s understandable that in order to relax, users need to know they’re not being overheard – though there is a less playful side to this. If groups are perceived as a place to say what you really think, away from the constraints of public judgement or “political correctness”, then it follows that they are also where people turn to share prejudices or more hateful expressions, that are unacceptable (or even illegal) elsewhere. Santiago Abascal, the leader of the Spanish far-right party Vox, has defined his party as one willing to “defend what Spaniards say on WhatsApp”.
As ever, there is a risk of pinning too much blame for complex political crises on an inert technology. WhatsApp has also taken some steps to limit its use as a vehicle for misinformation. In March, a WhatsApp spokesperson told the Washington Post that the company had “engaged health ministries around the world to provide simple ways for citizens to receive accurate information about the virus”. But even away from such visible disruptions, WhatsApp does seem to be an unusually effective vehicle for sowing distrust in public institutions and processes.
A WhatsApp group can exist without anyone outside the group knowing of its existence, who its members are or what is being shared, while end-to-end encryption makes it immune to surveillance. Back in Britain’s pre-Covid-19 days, when Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn were the issues that provoked the most feverish political discussions, speculation and paranoia swirled around such groups. Media commentators who defended Corbyn were often accused of belonging to a WhatsApp group of “outriders”, co-ordinated by Corbyn’s office, which supposedly told them what line to take. Meanwhile, the Conservative party’s pro-Brexit European Research Group was said to be chiefly sustained in the form of a WhatsApp group, whose membership was never public. Secretive coordination – both real and imagined – does not strengthen confidence in democracy.
WhatsApp groups can not only breed suspicion among the public, but also manufacture a mood of suspicion among their own participants. As also demonstrated by closed Facebook groups, discontents – not always well-founded – accumulate in private before boiling over in public. The capacity to circulate misinformation and allegations is becoming greater than the capacity to resolve them.
The political threat of WhatsApp is the flipside of its psychological appeal. Unlike so many other social media platforms, WhatsApp is built to secure privacy. On the plus side, this means intimacy with those we care about and an ability to speak freely; on the negative side, it injects an ethos of secrecy and suspicion into the public sphere. As Facebook, Twitter and Instagram become increasingly theatrical – every gesture geared to impress an audience or deflect criticism – WhatsApp has become a sanctuary from a confusing and untrustworthy world, where users can speak more frankly. As trust in groups grows, so it is withdrawn from public institutions and officials. A new common sense develops, founded on instinctive suspicion towards the world beyond the group.
The ongoing rise of WhatsApp, and its challenge to both legacy institutions and open social media, poses a profound political question: how do public institutions and discussions retain legitimacy and trust once people are organised into closed and invisible communities? The risk is that a vicious circle ensues, in which private groups circulate ever more information and disinformation to discredit public officials and public information, and our alienation from democracy escalates.
When WhatsApp was bought by Facebook in 2014 for $19bn, it was the most valuable tech acquisition in history. At the time, WhatsApp brought 450 million users with it. In February this year, it hit 2 billion users worldwide – and that is even before its lockdown surge – making it by far the most widely used messenger app, and the second most commonly used app after Facebook itself. In many countries, it is now the default means of digital communication and social coordination, especially among younger people.
The features that would later allow WhatsApp to become a conduit for conspiracy theory and political conflict were ones never integral to SMS, and have more in common with email: the creation of groups and the ability to forward messages. The ability to forward messages from one group to another – recently limited in response to Covid-19-related misinformation – makes for a potent informational weapon. Groups were initially limited in size to 100 people, but this was later increased to 256. That’s small enough to feel exclusive, but if 256 people forward a message on to another 256 people, 65,536 will have received it.
Groups originate for all sorts of purposes – a party, organising amateur sport, a shared interest – but then take on a life of their own. There can be an anarchic playfulness about this, as a group takes on its own set of in-jokes and traditions. In a New York Magazine piece last year, under the headline “Group chats are making the internet fun again”, the technology critic Max Read argued that groups have become “an outright replacement for the defining mode of social organization of the past decade: the platform-centric, feed-based social network.”
It’s understandable that in order to relax, users need to know they’re not being overheard – though there is a less playful side to this. If groups are perceived as a place to say what you really think, away from the constraints of public judgement or “political correctness”, then it follows that they are also where people turn to share prejudices or more hateful expressions, that are unacceptable (or even illegal) elsewhere. Santiago Abascal, the leader of the Spanish far-right party Vox, has defined his party as one willing to “defend what Spaniards say on WhatsApp”.
A WhatsApp newspaper ad in India warning about fake information on its service. Photograph: Prakash Singh/AFP/Getty Images
A different type of group emerges where its members are all users of the same service, such as a school, a housing block or a training programme. A potential problem here is one of negative solidarity, in which feelings of community are deepened by turning against the service in question. Groups of this sort typically start from a desire to pool information – students staying in touch about deadlines, say – but can swiftly become a means of discrediting the institution they cluster around. Initial murmurs of dissatisfaction can escalate rapidly, until the group has forged an identity around a spirit of resentment and alienation, which can then be impossible to dislodge with countervailing evidence.
Faced with the rise of new technologies, one option for formal organisations and associations is to follow people to their preferred platform. In March, the government introduced a WhatsApp-based information service about Covid-19, with an automated chatbot. But groups themselves can be an unreliable means of getting crucial information to people. Anecdotal evidence from local political organisers and trade union reps suggests that, despite the initial efficiency of WhatsApp groups, their workload often increases because of the escalating number of sub-communities, each of which needs to be contacted separately. Schools desperately seek to get information out to parents, only to discover that unless it appears in precisely the right WhatsApp group, it doesn’t register. The age of the message board, be it physical or digital, where information can be posted once for anyone who needs it, is over.
WhatsApp’s ‘broadcast list’ function, which allows messages to be sent to multiple recipients who are invisible to one another (like email’s ‘bcc’ line), alleviates some of the problems of groups taking on a life of their own. But even then, lists can only include people who are already mutual contacts of the list-owner. The problem, from the point of view of institutions, is that WhatsApp use seems fuelled by a preference for informal, private communication as such. University lecturers are frequently baffled by the discovery that many students and applicants don’t read email. If email is going into decline, WhatsApp does not seem to be a viable alternative when it comes to sharing verified information as widely and inclusively as possible.
Groups are great for brief bursts of humour or frustration, but, by their very nature, far less useful for supporting the circulation of public information. To understand why this is the case, we have to think about the way in which individuals can become swayed and influenced once they belong to a group.
The internet has brought with it its own litany of social pathologies and threats. Trolling, flaming, doxing, cancelling and pile-ons are all risks that go with socialising within a vast open architecture. “Open” platforms such as Twitter are reminders that much social activity tends to be aimed at a small and select community, but can be rendered comical or shameful when exposed to a different community altogether.
As any frequent user of WhatsApp or a closed Facebook group will recognise, the moral anxiety associated with groups is rather different. If the worry in an open network is of being judged by some outside observer, be it one’s boss or an extended family member, in a closed group it is of saying something that goes against the codes that anchor the group’s identity. Groups can rapidly become dominated by a certain tone or worldview that is uncomfortable to challenge and nigh-impossible to dislodge. WhatsApp is a machine for generating feelings of faux pas, as comments linger in a group’s feed, waiting for a response.
This means that while groups can generate high levels of solidarity, which can in principle be put to powerful political effect, it also becomes harder to express disagreement within the group. If, for example, an outspoken and popular member of a neighbourhood WhatsApp group begins to circulate misinformation about health risks, the general urge to maintain solidarity means that their messages are likely to be met with approval and thanks. When a claim or piece of content shows up in a group, there may be many members who view it as dubious; the question is whether they have the confidence to say as much. Meanwhile, the less sceptical can simply forward it on. It’s not hard, then, to understand why WhatsApp is a powerful distributor of “fake news” and conspiracy theories.
As on open social platforms, one of the chief ways of building solidarity on WhatsApp is to posit some injustice or enemy that threatens the group and its members. In the most acute examples, conspiracy theories are unleashed against political opponents, to the effect that they are paedophiles or secret affiliates of foreign powers. Such plausibly deniable practices swirled around the fringes of the successful election campaigns of Modi, Bolsonaro and Donald Trump, and across multiple platforms.
A different type of group emerges where its members are all users of the same service, such as a school, a housing block or a training programme. A potential problem here is one of negative solidarity, in which feelings of community are deepened by turning against the service in question. Groups of this sort typically start from a desire to pool information – students staying in touch about deadlines, say – but can swiftly become a means of discrediting the institution they cluster around. Initial murmurs of dissatisfaction can escalate rapidly, until the group has forged an identity around a spirit of resentment and alienation, which can then be impossible to dislodge with countervailing evidence.
Faced with the rise of new technologies, one option for formal organisations and associations is to follow people to their preferred platform. In March, the government introduced a WhatsApp-based information service about Covid-19, with an automated chatbot. But groups themselves can be an unreliable means of getting crucial information to people. Anecdotal evidence from local political organisers and trade union reps suggests that, despite the initial efficiency of WhatsApp groups, their workload often increases because of the escalating number of sub-communities, each of which needs to be contacted separately. Schools desperately seek to get information out to parents, only to discover that unless it appears in precisely the right WhatsApp group, it doesn’t register. The age of the message board, be it physical or digital, where information can be posted once for anyone who needs it, is over.
WhatsApp’s ‘broadcast list’ function, which allows messages to be sent to multiple recipients who are invisible to one another (like email’s ‘bcc’ line), alleviates some of the problems of groups taking on a life of their own. But even then, lists can only include people who are already mutual contacts of the list-owner. The problem, from the point of view of institutions, is that WhatsApp use seems fuelled by a preference for informal, private communication as such. University lecturers are frequently baffled by the discovery that many students and applicants don’t read email. If email is going into decline, WhatsApp does not seem to be a viable alternative when it comes to sharing verified information as widely and inclusively as possible.
Groups are great for brief bursts of humour or frustration, but, by their very nature, far less useful for supporting the circulation of public information. To understand why this is the case, we have to think about the way in which individuals can become swayed and influenced once they belong to a group.
The internet has brought with it its own litany of social pathologies and threats. Trolling, flaming, doxing, cancelling and pile-ons are all risks that go with socialising within a vast open architecture. “Open” platforms such as Twitter are reminders that much social activity tends to be aimed at a small and select community, but can be rendered comical or shameful when exposed to a different community altogether.
As any frequent user of WhatsApp or a closed Facebook group will recognise, the moral anxiety associated with groups is rather different. If the worry in an open network is of being judged by some outside observer, be it one’s boss or an extended family member, in a closed group it is of saying something that goes against the codes that anchor the group’s identity. Groups can rapidly become dominated by a certain tone or worldview that is uncomfortable to challenge and nigh-impossible to dislodge. WhatsApp is a machine for generating feelings of faux pas, as comments linger in a group’s feed, waiting for a response.
This means that while groups can generate high levels of solidarity, which can in principle be put to powerful political effect, it also becomes harder to express disagreement within the group. If, for example, an outspoken and popular member of a neighbourhood WhatsApp group begins to circulate misinformation about health risks, the general urge to maintain solidarity means that their messages are likely to be met with approval and thanks. When a claim or piece of content shows up in a group, there may be many members who view it as dubious; the question is whether they have the confidence to say as much. Meanwhile, the less sceptical can simply forward it on. It’s not hard, then, to understand why WhatsApp is a powerful distributor of “fake news” and conspiracy theories.
As on open social platforms, one of the chief ways of building solidarity on WhatsApp is to posit some injustice or enemy that threatens the group and its members. In the most acute examples, conspiracy theories are unleashed against political opponents, to the effect that they are paedophiles or secret affiliates of foreign powers. Such plausibly deniable practices swirled around the fringes of the successful election campaigns of Modi, Bolsonaro and Donald Trump, and across multiple platforms.
FacebookTwitterPinterest A security message on WhatsApp. Photograph: Thomas White/Reuters
But what makes WhatsApp potentially more dangerous than public social media are the higher levels of trust and honesty that are often present in private groups. It is a truism that nobody is as happy as they appear on Facebook, as attractive as they appear on Instagram or as angry as they appear on Twitter, which spawns a growing weariness with such endless performance. By contrast, closed groups are where people take off their public masks and let their critical guard down. Neither anonymity (a precondition of most trolling) nor celebrity are on offer. The speed with which rumours circulate on WhatsApp is partly a reflection of how altruistic and uncritical people can be in groups. Most of the time, people seem to share false theories about Covid-19 not with the intention of doing harm, but precisely out of concern for other group members. Anti-vaxx, anti-5G or anti-Hillary rumours combine an identification of an enemy with a strong internal sense of solidarity. Nevertheless, they add to the sense that the world is hostile and dangerous.
There is one particular pattern of a group chat that can manufacture threats and injustices out of thin air. It tends to start with one participant speculating that they are being let down or targeted by some institution or rival group – be it a public service, business or cultural community – whereupon a second participant agrees. By this stage, it becomes risky for anyone else to defend the institution or group in question, and immediately a new enemy and a new resentment is born. Instantly, the warnings and denunciations emanating from within the group take on a level of authenticity that cannot be matched by the entity that is now the object of derision.
But what if the first contributor has misunderstood or misread something, or had a very stressful day and needs to let off steam? And what if the second is merely agreeing so as to make the first one feel better? And what if the other members are either too distracted, too inhibited or too exhausted to say anything to oppose this fresh indignation? This needn’t snowball into the forms of conspiracy theory that produce riots or arson attacks. But even in milder forms, it makes the job of communicating official information – occasionally life-saving information – far more troublesome than it was just a decade ago. Information about public services and health risks is increasingly having to penetrate a thicket of overlapping groups, many of which may have developed an instinctive scepticism to anything emanating from the “mainstream”.
Part of the challenge for institutions is that there is often a strange emotional comfort in the shared feeling of alienation and passivity. “We were never informed about that”, “nobody consulted us”, “we are being ignored”. These are dominant expressions of our political zeitgeist. As WhatsApp has become an increasingly common way of encountering information and news, a vicious circle can ensue: the public world seems ever more distant, impersonal and fake, and the private group becomes a space of sympathy and authenticity.
This is a new twist in the evolution of the social internet. Since the 90s, the internet has held out a promise of connectivity, openness and inclusion, only to then confront inevitable threats to privacy, security and identity. By contrast, groups make people feel secure and anchored, but also help to fragment civil society into separate cliques, unknown to one another. This is the outcome of more than 20 years of ideological battles over what sort of social space the internet should be.
For a few years at the dawn of the millennium, the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conferences (or ETech), were a crucible in which a new digital world was imagined and debated. Launched by the west coast media entrepreneur Tim O’Reilly and hosted annually around California, the conferences attracted a mixture of geeks, gurus, designers and entrepreneurs, brought together more in a spirit of curiosity than of commerce. In 2005, O’Reilly coined the term “web 2.0” to describe a new wave of websites that connected users with each other, rather than with existing offline institutions. Later that year, the domain name facebook.com was purchased by a 21-year-old Harvard student, and the age of the giant social media platforms was born.
Within this short window of time, we can see competing ideas of what a desirable online community might look like. The more idealistic tech gurus who attended ETech insisted that the internet should remain an open public space, albeit one in which select communities could cluster for their own particular purposes, such as creating open-source software projects or Wikipedia entries. The untapped potential of the internet, they believed, was for greater democracy. But for companies such as Facebook, the internet presented an opportunity to collect data about users en masse. The internet’s potential was for greater surveillance. The rise of the giant platforms from 2005 onwards suggested the latter view had won out. And yet, in a strange twist, we are now witnessing a revival of anarchic, self-organising digital groups – only now, in the hands of Facebook as well. The two competing visions have collided.
Mark Zuckerberg talking about privacy at a Facebook conference in 2019. Photograph: Amy Osborne/AFP/Getty Images
To see how this story unfolded, it’s worth going back to 2003. At the ETech conference that year, a keynote speech was given by the web enthusiast and writer Clay Shirky, now an academic at New York University, which surprised its audience by declaring that the task of designing successful online communities had little to do with technology at all. The talk looked back at one of the most fertile periods in the history of social psychology, and was entitled “A group is its own worst enemy”.
Shirky drew on the work of the British psychoanalyst and psychologist Wilfred Bion, who, together with Kurt Lewin, was one of the pioneers of the study of “group dynamics” in the 40s. The central proposition of this school was that groups possess psychological properties that exist independently of their individual members. In groups, people find themselves behaving in ways that they never would if left to their own devices.
Like Stanley Milgram’s notorious series of experiments to test obedience in the early 60s – in which some participants were persuaded to administer apparently painful electric shocks to others – the mid-20th century concern with group dynamics grew in the shadow of the political horrors of the 30s and 40s, which had posed grave questions about how individuals come to abandon their ordinary sense of morality. Lewin and Bion posited that groups possess distinctive personalities, which emerge organically through the interaction of their members, independently of what rules they might have been given, or what individuals might rationally do alone.
With the dawn of the 60s, and its more individualistic political hopes, psychologists’ interest in groups started to wane. The assumption that individuals are governed by conformity fell by the wayside. When Shirky introduced Bion’s work at the O’Reilly conference in 2003, he was going out on a limb. What he correctly saw was that, in the absence of any explicit structures or rules, online communities were battling against many of the disruptive dynamics that fascinated the psychologists of the 40s.
Shirky highlighted one area of Bion’s work in particular: how groups can spontaneously sabotage their own stipulated purpose. The beauty of early online communities, such as listservs, message boards and wikis, was their spirit of egalitarianism, humour and informality. But these same properties often worked against them when it came to actually getting anything constructive done, and could sometimes snowball into something obstructive or angry. Once the mood of a group was diverted towards jokes, disruption or hostility towards another group, it became very difficult to wrest it back.
Bion’s concerns originated in fear of humanity’s darker impulses, but the vision Shirky was putting to his audience that day was a more optimistic one. If the designers of online spaces could preempt disruptive “group dynamics”, he argued, then it might be possible to support cohesive, productive online communities that remained open and useful at the same time. Like a well designed park or street, a well-designed online space might nurture healthy sociability without the need for policing, surveillance or closure to outsiders. Between one extreme of anarchic chaos (constant trolling), and another of strict moderation and regulation of discussion (acceding to an authority figure), thinking in terms of group dynamics held out the promise of a social web that was still largely self-organising, but also relatively orderly.
But there was another solution to this same problem waiting in the wings, which would turn out to be world-changing in its consequences: forget group dynamics, and focus on reputation dynamics instead. If someone online has a certain set of offline attributes, such as a job title, an album of tagged photos, a list of friends and an email address, they will behave themselves in ways that are appropriate to all of these fixed public identifiers. Add more and more surveillance into the mix, both by one’s peers and by corporations, and the problem of spontaneous group dynamics disappears. It is easier to hold on to your self-control and your conscience if you are publicly visible, including to friends, extended family and colleagues.
For many of the Californian pioneers of cyberculture, who cherished online communities as an escape from the values and constraints of capitalist society, Zuckerberg’s triumph represents an unmitigated defeat. Corporations were never meant to seize control of this space. As late as 2005, the hope was that the social web would be built around democratic principles and bottom-up communities. Facebook abandoned all of that, by simply turning the internet into a multimedia telephone directory.
The last ETech was held in 2009. Within a decade, Facebook was being accused of pushing liberal democracy to the brink and even destroying truth itself. But as the demands of social media have become more onerous, with each of us curating a profile and projecting an identity, the lure of the autonomous group has resurfaced once again. In some respects, Shirky’s optimistic concern has now become today’s pessimistic one. Partly thanks to WhatsApp, the unmoderated, self-governing, amoral collective – larger than a conversation, smaller than a public – has become a dominant and disruptive political force in our society, much as figures such as Bion and Lewin feared.
Conspiracy theories and paranoid group dynamics were features of political life long before WhatsApp arrived. It makes no sense to blame the app for their existence, any more than it makes sense to blame Facebook for Brexit. But by considering the types of behaviour and social structures that technologies enable and enhance, we get a better sense of some of society’s characteristics and ailments. What are the general tendencies that WhatsApp helps to accelerate?
First of all, there is the problem of conspiracies in general. WhatsApp is certainly an unbeatable conduit for circulating conspiracy theories, but we must also admit that it seems to be an excellent tool for facilitating genuinely conspiratorial behaviour. One of the great difficulties when considering conspiracy theories in today’s world is that, regardless of WhatsApp, some conspiracies turn out to be true: consider Libor-fixing, phone-hacking, or efforts by Labour party officials to thwart Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral prospects. These all happened, but one would have sounded like a conspiracy theorist to suggest them until they were later confirmed by evidence.
A communication medium that connects groups of up to 256 people, without any public visibility, operating via the phones in their pockets, is by its very nature, well-suited to supporting secrecy. Obviously not every group chat counts as a “conspiracy”. But it makes the question of how society coheres, who is associated with whom, into a matter of speculation – something that involves a trace of conspiracy theory. In that sense, WhatsApp is not just a channel for the circulation of conspiracy theories, but offers content for them as well. The medium is the message.
The full political potential of WhatsApp has not been witnessed in the UK. To date, it has not served as an effective political campaigning tool, partly because users seem reluctant to join large groups with people they don’t know. However, the influence – imagined or real – of WhatsApp groups within Westminster and the media undoubtedly contributes to the deepening sense that public life is a sham, behind which lurk invisible networks through which power is coordinated. WhatsApp has become a kind of “backstage” of public life, where it is assumed people articulate what they really think and believe in secret. This is a sensibility that has long fuelled conspiracy theories, especially antisemitic ones. Invisible WhatsApp groups now offer a modern update to the type of “explanation” that once revolved around Masonic lodges or the Rothschilds.
Away from the world of party politics and news media, there is the prospect of a society organised as a tapestry of overlapping cliques, each with their own internal norms. Groups are less likely to encourage heterodoxy or risk-taking, and more likely to inculcate conformity, albeit often to a set of norms hostile to those of the “mainstream”, whether that be the media, politics or professional public servants simply doing their jobs. In the safety of the group, it becomes possible to have one’s cake and eat it, to be simultaneously radical and orthodox, hyper-sceptical and yet unreflective.
For all the benefits that WhatsApp offers in helping people feel close to others, its rapid ascendency is one further sign of how a common public world – based upon verified facts and recognised procedures – is disintegrating. WhatsApp is well equipped to support communications on the margins of institutions and public discussion: backbenchers plotting coups, parents gossipping about teachers, friends sharing edgy memes, journalists circulating rumours, family members forwarding on unofficial medical advice. A society that only speaks honestly on the margins like this will find it harder to sustain the legitimacy of experts, officials and representatives who, by definition, operate in the spotlight. Meanwhile, distrust, alienation and conspiracy theories become the norm, chipping away at the institutions that might hold us together.
To see how this story unfolded, it’s worth going back to 2003. At the ETech conference that year, a keynote speech was given by the web enthusiast and writer Clay Shirky, now an academic at New York University, which surprised its audience by declaring that the task of designing successful online communities had little to do with technology at all. The talk looked back at one of the most fertile periods in the history of social psychology, and was entitled “A group is its own worst enemy”.
Shirky drew on the work of the British psychoanalyst and psychologist Wilfred Bion, who, together with Kurt Lewin, was one of the pioneers of the study of “group dynamics” in the 40s. The central proposition of this school was that groups possess psychological properties that exist independently of their individual members. In groups, people find themselves behaving in ways that they never would if left to their own devices.
Like Stanley Milgram’s notorious series of experiments to test obedience in the early 60s – in which some participants were persuaded to administer apparently painful electric shocks to others – the mid-20th century concern with group dynamics grew in the shadow of the political horrors of the 30s and 40s, which had posed grave questions about how individuals come to abandon their ordinary sense of morality. Lewin and Bion posited that groups possess distinctive personalities, which emerge organically through the interaction of their members, independently of what rules they might have been given, or what individuals might rationally do alone.
With the dawn of the 60s, and its more individualistic political hopes, psychologists’ interest in groups started to wane. The assumption that individuals are governed by conformity fell by the wayside. When Shirky introduced Bion’s work at the O’Reilly conference in 2003, he was going out on a limb. What he correctly saw was that, in the absence of any explicit structures or rules, online communities were battling against many of the disruptive dynamics that fascinated the psychologists of the 40s.
Shirky highlighted one area of Bion’s work in particular: how groups can spontaneously sabotage their own stipulated purpose. The beauty of early online communities, such as listservs, message boards and wikis, was their spirit of egalitarianism, humour and informality. But these same properties often worked against them when it came to actually getting anything constructive done, and could sometimes snowball into something obstructive or angry. Once the mood of a group was diverted towards jokes, disruption or hostility towards another group, it became very difficult to wrest it back.
Bion’s concerns originated in fear of humanity’s darker impulses, but the vision Shirky was putting to his audience that day was a more optimistic one. If the designers of online spaces could preempt disruptive “group dynamics”, he argued, then it might be possible to support cohesive, productive online communities that remained open and useful at the same time. Like a well designed park or street, a well-designed online space might nurture healthy sociability without the need for policing, surveillance or closure to outsiders. Between one extreme of anarchic chaos (constant trolling), and another of strict moderation and regulation of discussion (acceding to an authority figure), thinking in terms of group dynamics held out the promise of a social web that was still largely self-organising, but also relatively orderly.
But there was another solution to this same problem waiting in the wings, which would turn out to be world-changing in its consequences: forget group dynamics, and focus on reputation dynamics instead. If someone online has a certain set of offline attributes, such as a job title, an album of tagged photos, a list of friends and an email address, they will behave themselves in ways that are appropriate to all of these fixed public identifiers. Add more and more surveillance into the mix, both by one’s peers and by corporations, and the problem of spontaneous group dynamics disappears. It is easier to hold on to your self-control and your conscience if you are publicly visible, including to friends, extended family and colleagues.
For many of the Californian pioneers of cyberculture, who cherished online communities as an escape from the values and constraints of capitalist society, Zuckerberg’s triumph represents an unmitigated defeat. Corporations were never meant to seize control of this space. As late as 2005, the hope was that the social web would be built around democratic principles and bottom-up communities. Facebook abandoned all of that, by simply turning the internet into a multimedia telephone directory.
The last ETech was held in 2009. Within a decade, Facebook was being accused of pushing liberal democracy to the brink and even destroying truth itself. But as the demands of social media have become more onerous, with each of us curating a profile and projecting an identity, the lure of the autonomous group has resurfaced once again. In some respects, Shirky’s optimistic concern has now become today’s pessimistic one. Partly thanks to WhatsApp, the unmoderated, self-governing, amoral collective – larger than a conversation, smaller than a public – has become a dominant and disruptive political force in our society, much as figures such as Bion and Lewin feared.
Conspiracy theories and paranoid group dynamics were features of political life long before WhatsApp arrived. It makes no sense to blame the app for their existence, any more than it makes sense to blame Facebook for Brexit. But by considering the types of behaviour and social structures that technologies enable and enhance, we get a better sense of some of society’s characteristics and ailments. What are the general tendencies that WhatsApp helps to accelerate?
First of all, there is the problem of conspiracies in general. WhatsApp is certainly an unbeatable conduit for circulating conspiracy theories, but we must also admit that it seems to be an excellent tool for facilitating genuinely conspiratorial behaviour. One of the great difficulties when considering conspiracy theories in today’s world is that, regardless of WhatsApp, some conspiracies turn out to be true: consider Libor-fixing, phone-hacking, or efforts by Labour party officials to thwart Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral prospects. These all happened, but one would have sounded like a conspiracy theorist to suggest them until they were later confirmed by evidence.
A communication medium that connects groups of up to 256 people, without any public visibility, operating via the phones in their pockets, is by its very nature, well-suited to supporting secrecy. Obviously not every group chat counts as a “conspiracy”. But it makes the question of how society coheres, who is associated with whom, into a matter of speculation – something that involves a trace of conspiracy theory. In that sense, WhatsApp is not just a channel for the circulation of conspiracy theories, but offers content for them as well. The medium is the message.
The full political potential of WhatsApp has not been witnessed in the UK. To date, it has not served as an effective political campaigning tool, partly because users seem reluctant to join large groups with people they don’t know. However, the influence – imagined or real – of WhatsApp groups within Westminster and the media undoubtedly contributes to the deepening sense that public life is a sham, behind which lurk invisible networks through which power is coordinated. WhatsApp has become a kind of “backstage” of public life, where it is assumed people articulate what they really think and believe in secret. This is a sensibility that has long fuelled conspiracy theories, especially antisemitic ones. Invisible WhatsApp groups now offer a modern update to the type of “explanation” that once revolved around Masonic lodges or the Rothschilds.
Away from the world of party politics and news media, there is the prospect of a society organised as a tapestry of overlapping cliques, each with their own internal norms. Groups are less likely to encourage heterodoxy or risk-taking, and more likely to inculcate conformity, albeit often to a set of norms hostile to those of the “mainstream”, whether that be the media, politics or professional public servants simply doing their jobs. In the safety of the group, it becomes possible to have one’s cake and eat it, to be simultaneously radical and orthodox, hyper-sceptical and yet unreflective.
For all the benefits that WhatsApp offers in helping people feel close to others, its rapid ascendency is one further sign of how a common public world – based upon verified facts and recognised procedures – is disintegrating. WhatsApp is well equipped to support communications on the margins of institutions and public discussion: backbenchers plotting coups, parents gossipping about teachers, friends sharing edgy memes, journalists circulating rumours, family members forwarding on unofficial medical advice. A society that only speaks honestly on the margins like this will find it harder to sustain the legitimacy of experts, officials and representatives who, by definition, operate in the spotlight. Meanwhile, distrust, alienation and conspiracy theories become the norm, chipping away at the institutions that might hold us together.
Sunday 17 March 2019
Americans really pay a bribe for a good education? In Britain, we’ve got far subtler ways
The deviousness that some routinely resort to here puts the US scandal in the shade writes Catherine Bennett in The Guardian
Actress Felicity Huffman has been indicted in the university admissions scandal. Photograph: David McNew/AFP/Getty Images
Ditto Smith’s generous quotation from a statement provided for a girl who has been reinvented, apparently for scam purposes, as a “US Club Soccer All American”: “On the soccer or lacrosse etc I am the one who looks like a boy amongst girls with my hair tied up, arms sleeveless, and blood and bruises from head to toe.”
Not, of course, that’s there’s anything illegal, here or in the US, about reproducing personal statements from professional suppliers or collaborating with a teacher and/or parent – the latter, though risibly unfair, is routine. Another Varsity Blues alleged tactic, that of buying a diagnosis requiring extra exam time, may have no exact UK parallel but, according to a 2017 BBC report, one in five children in independent schools received extra time for GCSE and A-levels. David Kynaston and David Green, in a powerful critique of independent schools, recently pointed out various advantages, made possible by high fees: “Far greater resources are available for diagnosing special needs, challenging exam results and guiding university applications.”
If, mercifully, UK universities are low on dependable side doors, the shamelessness of some of the US defendants, as they appear to pursue their imagined birthright (Ivy League bragging rights) can still sound uncomfortably familiar. Many British parents, equally fearful of mediocrity, are similarly unabashed on local tricks and stratagems – not only private education, but house moves, music lessons (for reserved school places), intensive coaching, internships, resits, religious conversions, fake addresses, and, the Times now reports, FOI requests to Oxbridge, from disappointed parents – that will end up, added to financial and cultural capital, delivering much the same outcome as the US scandal. Legal or otherwise, the result is enhanced educational opportunities for the privileged and untalented, fewer for the talented but disadvantaged.
The pervasive cunning is hardly surprising given the official esteem for “sharp-elbowed” parental operators, who, David Laws once argued, set a fine example. It follows, as demonstrated by UK politicians on all sides, that extreme resourcefulness in, say, keeping places from less fortunate residents, is readily passed off as understandable dedication as opposed to insatiable self-interest. Don’t we all want [smiling face with halo emoji] the best for our kids?
Following some unspecified epiphany, David Cameron, of previously wavering faith, secured places at an oversubscribed church school, some distance from No 10, requiring proof of “Sunday worship in a church at least twice a month for 36 months before the closing applications date”. Equally instructively, my own, affluent MP, Emily Thornberry, had, earlier, hoovered up three of the few precious places at an outstanding, part-selective school in Hertfordshire, 13 miles from home, which tradition annually reserves for her Islington constituents. On Twitter, she has reminded critics: “All my children educated in the state sector.” There is no suggestion that either MP has broken any laws.
There must be, beyond legality, some ethically significant factor that makes non-paying wangling infinitely superior to the ugly, US variety. But you probably have to buy a place at Harvard to find out what it is.
‘Emily Thornberry hoovered up three precious places at an outstanding part-selective school.’ Photograph: George Cracknell Wright/Rex/Shutterstock
“Dude, dude, what do you think, I’m a moron?” Thus, one of the parents accused of involvement in the US college bribery racket. He’d been warned – by a wiretapped conspirator – not to reveal that he paid $50,000 for his daughter’s fraudulent test results, part of a system the fixer calls “the side door”.
Appropriately soothed – “I’m not saying you’re a moron” – the accused father is recorded, by the FBI, assuring the scam’s organiser that he’ll deliver, if required, the agreed fiction. “I’m going to say that I’ve been inspired how you’re helping underprivileged kids get into college. Totally got it.”
Although many of the best bits of an FBI affidavit – presenting the case against the accused parents – have been widely circulated, this sublime page-turner deserves to be enjoyed in full, if not put up for literary awards pending film adaptation (Laura Dern has been suggested for Felicity Huffman), and made compulsory reading in all admission departments. It’s not just that extracts can’t convey the fathomless entitlement and mendacity exhibited by affluent, ostensibly respectable parents. They can’t begin to do justice to the affidavit’s entertainment value as savage social comedy, something productions of Molière often attempt, but rarely achieve.
Even the dramatis personae, in the investigation the FBI named “Operation Varsity Blues”, reads like an updated Tartuffe: “Todd Blake is an entrepreneur and investor. Diane Blake is an executive at a retail merchandising firm.” Here, too, cultivated, fluent people, many of whom also sound deluded, greedy and hypocritical, appear to be playing with their children’s lives for no reason beyond self-gratification. But the dialogue, when not jaw-dropping, races along (“And it works?” asks a defendant. “Every time.”), the plots and motives are horribly plausible, and the jeopardy is evidently real to the alleged conspirators, even if the all-encompassing irony of their alleged scheme is not. “She actually won’t really be part of the water polo team, right?”
And from a fellow future defendant, on the risks, if this status-enhancing, child-perfecting scam were to be discovered: “You know, the, the embarrassment to everyone in the communities. Oh my God, it would just be – yeah. Ugh.”
Are FBI affidavits regularly as good as the tale of Operation Varsity Blues? If so, the death of the novel should be easier to bear. Although this document has one overriding purpose – to show that accused parents and witnesses colluded in fraudulent applications – special thanks are due to special agent Laura Smith, the author, who never writes a dull page. Maybe the individual cases were fully as compelling as this edited evidence suggests. Or maybe agent Smith’s organisation of her material really does indicate considerable, dry artistry? Either way, you cherish the detail when an accused parent replies, following an allegedly fraudulently extracted college offer: “This is wonderful news! [high-five emoji].”
“Dude, dude, what do you think, I’m a moron?” Thus, one of the parents accused of involvement in the US college bribery racket. He’d been warned – by a wiretapped conspirator – not to reveal that he paid $50,000 for his daughter’s fraudulent test results, part of a system the fixer calls “the side door”.
Appropriately soothed – “I’m not saying you’re a moron” – the accused father is recorded, by the FBI, assuring the scam’s organiser that he’ll deliver, if required, the agreed fiction. “I’m going to say that I’ve been inspired how you’re helping underprivileged kids get into college. Totally got it.”
Although many of the best bits of an FBI affidavit – presenting the case against the accused parents – have been widely circulated, this sublime page-turner deserves to be enjoyed in full, if not put up for literary awards pending film adaptation (Laura Dern has been suggested for Felicity Huffman), and made compulsory reading in all admission departments. It’s not just that extracts can’t convey the fathomless entitlement and mendacity exhibited by affluent, ostensibly respectable parents. They can’t begin to do justice to the affidavit’s entertainment value as savage social comedy, something productions of Molière often attempt, but rarely achieve.
Even the dramatis personae, in the investigation the FBI named “Operation Varsity Blues”, reads like an updated Tartuffe: “Todd Blake is an entrepreneur and investor. Diane Blake is an executive at a retail merchandising firm.” Here, too, cultivated, fluent people, many of whom also sound deluded, greedy and hypocritical, appear to be playing with their children’s lives for no reason beyond self-gratification. But the dialogue, when not jaw-dropping, races along (“And it works?” asks a defendant. “Every time.”), the plots and motives are horribly plausible, and the jeopardy is evidently real to the alleged conspirators, even if the all-encompassing irony of their alleged scheme is not. “She actually won’t really be part of the water polo team, right?”
And from a fellow future defendant, on the risks, if this status-enhancing, child-perfecting scam were to be discovered: “You know, the, the embarrassment to everyone in the communities. Oh my God, it would just be – yeah. Ugh.”
Are FBI affidavits regularly as good as the tale of Operation Varsity Blues? If so, the death of the novel should be easier to bear. Although this document has one overriding purpose – to show that accused parents and witnesses colluded in fraudulent applications – special thanks are due to special agent Laura Smith, the author, who never writes a dull page. Maybe the individual cases were fully as compelling as this edited evidence suggests. Or maybe agent Smith’s organisation of her material really does indicate considerable, dry artistry? Either way, you cherish the detail when an accused parent replies, following an allegedly fraudulently extracted college offer: “This is wonderful news! [high-five emoji].”
Actress Felicity Huffman has been indicted in the university admissions scandal. Photograph: David McNew/AFP/Getty Images
Ditto Smith’s generous quotation from a statement provided for a girl who has been reinvented, apparently for scam purposes, as a “US Club Soccer All American”: “On the soccer or lacrosse etc I am the one who looks like a boy amongst girls with my hair tied up, arms sleeveless, and blood and bruises from head to toe.”
Not, of course, that’s there’s anything illegal, here or in the US, about reproducing personal statements from professional suppliers or collaborating with a teacher and/or parent – the latter, though risibly unfair, is routine. Another Varsity Blues alleged tactic, that of buying a diagnosis requiring extra exam time, may have no exact UK parallel but, according to a 2017 BBC report, one in five children in independent schools received extra time for GCSE and A-levels. David Kynaston and David Green, in a powerful critique of independent schools, recently pointed out various advantages, made possible by high fees: “Far greater resources are available for diagnosing special needs, challenging exam results and guiding university applications.”
If, mercifully, UK universities are low on dependable side doors, the shamelessness of some of the US defendants, as they appear to pursue their imagined birthright (Ivy League bragging rights) can still sound uncomfortably familiar. Many British parents, equally fearful of mediocrity, are similarly unabashed on local tricks and stratagems – not only private education, but house moves, music lessons (for reserved school places), intensive coaching, internships, resits, religious conversions, fake addresses, and, the Times now reports, FOI requests to Oxbridge, from disappointed parents – that will end up, added to financial and cultural capital, delivering much the same outcome as the US scandal. Legal or otherwise, the result is enhanced educational opportunities for the privileged and untalented, fewer for the talented but disadvantaged.
The pervasive cunning is hardly surprising given the official esteem for “sharp-elbowed” parental operators, who, David Laws once argued, set a fine example. It follows, as demonstrated by UK politicians on all sides, that extreme resourcefulness in, say, keeping places from less fortunate residents, is readily passed off as understandable dedication as opposed to insatiable self-interest. Don’t we all want [smiling face with halo emoji] the best for our kids?
Following some unspecified epiphany, David Cameron, of previously wavering faith, secured places at an oversubscribed church school, some distance from No 10, requiring proof of “Sunday worship in a church at least twice a month for 36 months before the closing applications date”. Equally instructively, my own, affluent MP, Emily Thornberry, had, earlier, hoovered up three of the few precious places at an outstanding, part-selective school in Hertfordshire, 13 miles from home, which tradition annually reserves for her Islington constituents. On Twitter, she has reminded critics: “All my children educated in the state sector.” There is no suggestion that either MP has broken any laws.
There must be, beyond legality, some ethically significant factor that makes non-paying wangling infinitely superior to the ugly, US variety. But you probably have to buy a place at Harvard to find out what it is.
Thursday 14 March 2019
Meritocracy is a myth invented by the rich
The college admissions scandal is a reminder that wealth, not talent, is what determines the opportunities you have in life writes Nathan Robinson in The Guardian
‘There can be never be such thing as a meritocracy, because there’s never going to be fully equal opportunity.’ Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
The US college admissions scandal is fascinating, if not surprising. Over 30 wealthy parents have been criminally charged over a scheme in which they allegedly paid a company large sums of money to get their children into top universities. The duplicity involved was extreme: everything from paying off university officials to inventing learning disabilities to facilitate cheating on standardized tests. One father even faked a photo of his son pole vaulting in order to convince admissions officers that the boy was a star athlete.
It’s no secret that wealthy people will do nearly anything to get their kids into good schools. But this scandal only begins to reveal the lies that sustain the American idea of meritocracy. William “Rick” Singer, who admitted to orchestrating the scam, explained that there are three ways in which a student can get into the college of their choice: “There is a front door which is you get in on your own. The back door is through institutional advancement, which is ten times as much money. And I’ve created this side door.” The “side door” he’s referring to is outright crime, literally paying bribes and faking test scores. It’s impossible to know how common that is, but there’s reason to suspect it’s comparatively rare. Why? Because for the most part, the wealthy don’t need to pay illegal bribes. They can already pay perfectly legal ones.
In his 2006 book, The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges, Daniel Golden exposes the way that the top schools favor donors and the children of alumni. A Duke admissions officer recalls being given being given a box of applications she had intended to reject, but which were returned to her for “special” reconsideration. In cases where parents are expected to give very large donations upon a student’s admission, the applicant may be described as an “institutional development” candidate—letting them in would help develop the institution. Everyone by now is familiar with the way the Kushner family bought little Jared a place at Harvard. It only took $2.5m to convince the school that Jared was Harvard material.
The inequality goes so much deeper than that, though. It’s not just donations that put the wealthy ahead. Children of the top 1% (and the top 5%, and the top 20%) have spent their entire lives accumulating advantages over their counterparts at the bottom. Even in first grade the differences can be stark: compare the learning environment at one of Detroit’s crumbling public elementary schools to that at a private elementary school that costs tens of thousands of dollars a year. There are high schools, such as Phillips Academyin Andover, Massachusetts, that have billion dollar endowments. Around the country, the level of education you receive depend on how much money your parents have.
Even if we equalized public school funding, and abolished private schools, some children would be far more equal than others. 2.5m children in the United States go through homelessness every year in this country. The chaotic living situation that comes with poverty makes it much, much harder to succeed. This means that even those who go through Singer’s “front door” have not “gotten in on their own.” They’ve gotten in partly because they’ve had the good fortune to have a home life conducive to their success.
People often speak about “equality of opportunity” as the American aspiration. But having anything close to equal opportunity would require a radical re-engineering of society from top to bottom. As long as there are large wealth inequalities, there will be colossal differences in the opportunities that children have. No matter what admissions criteria are set, wealthy children will have the advantage. If admissions officers focus on test scores, parents will pay for extra tutoring and test prep courses. If officers focus instead on “holistic” qualities, pare. It’s simple: wealth always confers greater capacity to give your children the edge over other people’s children. If we wanted anything resembling a “meritocracy,” we’d probably have to start by instituting full egalitarian communism.
In reality, there can be never be such thing as a meritocracy, because there’s never going to be fully equal opportunity. The main function of the concept is to assure elites that they deserve their position in life. It eases the “anxiety of affluence,” that nagging feeling that they might be the beneficiaries of the arbitrary “birth lottery” rather than the products of their own individual ingenuity and hard work.
There’s something perverse about the whole competitive college system. But we can imagine a different world. If everyone was guaranteed free, high-quality public university education, and a public school education matched the quality of a private school education, there wouldn’t be anything to compete for.
Instead of the farce of the admissions process, by which students have to jump through a series of needless hoops in order to prove themselves worthy of being given a good education, just admit everyone who meets a clearly-established threshold for what it takes to do the coursework. It’s not as if the current system is selecting for intelligence or merit. The school you went to mostly tells us what economic class your parents were in. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
‘There can be never be such thing as a meritocracy, because there’s never going to be fully equal opportunity.’ Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
The US college admissions scandal is fascinating, if not surprising. Over 30 wealthy parents have been criminally charged over a scheme in which they allegedly paid a company large sums of money to get their children into top universities. The duplicity involved was extreme: everything from paying off university officials to inventing learning disabilities to facilitate cheating on standardized tests. One father even faked a photo of his son pole vaulting in order to convince admissions officers that the boy was a star athlete.
It’s no secret that wealthy people will do nearly anything to get their kids into good schools. But this scandal only begins to reveal the lies that sustain the American idea of meritocracy. William “Rick” Singer, who admitted to orchestrating the scam, explained that there are three ways in which a student can get into the college of their choice: “There is a front door which is you get in on your own. The back door is through institutional advancement, which is ten times as much money. And I’ve created this side door.” The “side door” he’s referring to is outright crime, literally paying bribes and faking test scores. It’s impossible to know how common that is, but there’s reason to suspect it’s comparatively rare. Why? Because for the most part, the wealthy don’t need to pay illegal bribes. They can already pay perfectly legal ones.
In his 2006 book, The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges, Daniel Golden exposes the way that the top schools favor donors and the children of alumni. A Duke admissions officer recalls being given being given a box of applications she had intended to reject, but which were returned to her for “special” reconsideration. In cases where parents are expected to give very large donations upon a student’s admission, the applicant may be described as an “institutional development” candidate—letting them in would help develop the institution. Everyone by now is familiar with the way the Kushner family bought little Jared a place at Harvard. It only took $2.5m to convince the school that Jared was Harvard material.
The inequality goes so much deeper than that, though. It’s not just donations that put the wealthy ahead. Children of the top 1% (and the top 5%, and the top 20%) have spent their entire lives accumulating advantages over their counterparts at the bottom. Even in first grade the differences can be stark: compare the learning environment at one of Detroit’s crumbling public elementary schools to that at a private elementary school that costs tens of thousands of dollars a year. There are high schools, such as Phillips Academyin Andover, Massachusetts, that have billion dollar endowments. Around the country, the level of education you receive depend on how much money your parents have.
Even if we equalized public school funding, and abolished private schools, some children would be far more equal than others. 2.5m children in the United States go through homelessness every year in this country. The chaotic living situation that comes with poverty makes it much, much harder to succeed. This means that even those who go through Singer’s “front door” have not “gotten in on their own.” They’ve gotten in partly because they’ve had the good fortune to have a home life conducive to their success.
People often speak about “equality of opportunity” as the American aspiration. But having anything close to equal opportunity would require a radical re-engineering of society from top to bottom. As long as there are large wealth inequalities, there will be colossal differences in the opportunities that children have. No matter what admissions criteria are set, wealthy children will have the advantage. If admissions officers focus on test scores, parents will pay for extra tutoring and test prep courses. If officers focus instead on “holistic” qualities, pare. It’s simple: wealth always confers greater capacity to give your children the edge over other people’s children. If we wanted anything resembling a “meritocracy,” we’d probably have to start by instituting full egalitarian communism.
In reality, there can be never be such thing as a meritocracy, because there’s never going to be fully equal opportunity. The main function of the concept is to assure elites that they deserve their position in life. It eases the “anxiety of affluence,” that nagging feeling that they might be the beneficiaries of the arbitrary “birth lottery” rather than the products of their own individual ingenuity and hard work.
There’s something perverse about the whole competitive college system. But we can imagine a different world. If everyone was guaranteed free, high-quality public university education, and a public school education matched the quality of a private school education, there wouldn’t be anything to compete for.
Instead of the farce of the admissions process, by which students have to jump through a series of needless hoops in order to prove themselves worthy of being given a good education, just admit everyone who meets a clearly-established threshold for what it takes to do the coursework. It’s not as if the current system is selecting for intelligence or merit. The school you went to mostly tells us what economic class your parents were in. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
It's not just corruption. Entrance into elite US colleges is rigged in every way
An FBI sting revealed that wealthy parents are buying their children a place in top universities. But they’re not the only problem: the whole system is rigged writes Richard V Reeves in The Guardian
How elite US schools give preference to wealthy and white 'legacy' applicants
Or how about Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law? Kushner was accepted into Harvard shortly after his father donated $2.5m. An official at Kushner’s high school said there was “no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would, on the merits, get into Harvard. His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it.”
David E and Stacey Goel just gave $100m to Harvard. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that their children probably have an excellent chance of Harvard admission.
Even those parents who are not in the wealthiest brackets, but are squarely in the upper middle class, can use their money to boost their kids’ chances, through tutors, SAT prep classes, athletic coaches. Students who apply early have better chances of admission, which favors more affluent families since early admission precedes financial aid decisions. Many colleges prefer students who have “shown an interest” in their college. How to show an interest? By visiting the campus – easy for those with money for flights and hotels, less so for those on modest or low incomes.
Small wonder that at elite colleges, including most of those targeted in the corruption scheme such as Yale, Duke, Stanford and Wake Forest, take more students from families in the top 1% of the income distribution than from those in the bottom 60% combined.
So hats off to FBI special agent Bonavolonta and his team for exposing the corruption admissions. But it is in fact simply the most visible sign of a much deeper problem with college admissions. Elite colleges are serving to reinforce class inequality, rather than reduce it. The opaque, complex, unfair admissions process is a big part of the problem. From an equality perspective, it is not just Singer and his clients who are at fault: it’s the system as a whole.
‘Elite colleges are serving to reinforce class inequality, rather than reduce it.’ Photograph: Boston Globe/Boston Globe via Getty Images
Shock horror! Wealthy Americans are using their money to buy their children places at elite colleges. An FBI investigation, appropriately named Operation Varsity Blues, has exposed a $25m cash-for-admissions scandal. Coaches were allegedly bribed to declare candidates as athletic recruits; test administrators to change their scores, or allow someone else to take the test for them.
At the center of the cheating scheme was William “Rick” Singer, the founder of a for-profit college preparation business based in Newport Beach, California. Among the 33 parents caught in the FBI sting were Hollywood stars Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman. Loughlin starred in the series Full House. Huffman is famous for her role in Desperate Housewives; now she will be more famous as a desperate mom. And she’s not alone. The breathless anxiety among many affluent parents to get their kids into the very best colleges is a striking feature of upper-class American life.
Singer’s bribery scheme allegedly allowed parents to buy entrance for their offspring at some of the nation’s most prestigious colleges, including Yale, Georgetown University, Stanford University, UCLA, the University of San Diego, USC, University of Texas and Wake Forest.
FBI officers were at pains to point out that the colleges themselves are not being found liable; though nine athletic coaches were caught in the net.
“Following 10 months of investigation using sophisticated techniques, the FBI uncovered what we believe to be a rigged system,” John Bonavolonta, the FBI special agent in charge said, “robbing students all over the country of their right to a fair shot of getting into some of the most elite universities in this country”.
But here’s the thing: the whole system is “rigged” in favor of more affluent parents. It is true that the conversion of wealth into a desirable college seat was especially egregious in this case – to the extent that it was actually illegal. But there are countless ways that students are robbed of a “fair shot” if they are not lucky enough to be born to well-resourced, well-connected parents.
The difference between this illegal scheme and the legal ways in which money buys access is one of degree, not of kind. The mistake here was to do something illegal. Meanwhile, much of what goes on in college admissions many not be illegal, but it is immoral.
Take legacy preferences, for example. This boosts the admissions chances of the children of alumni; and for obvious reasons the alumni of elite colleges tend to be pretty affluent, especially if they marry each other. (They are also disproportionately white.) The acceptance rate for legacy applicants at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Georgetown and Stanford is between two and three times higher than the general admission rate. If they don’t get in first time round, they might be asked to take a “gap year” and enter a year later instead, a loophole known as “Z-listing”. A Princeton study found that being a legacy applicant had the same effect as adding 160 SAT points – on the old scale up to 1600 – to a student’s application. Imagine if colleges gave that kind of admissions boost to lower-income kids?
As John W Anderson, the former co-director of college counseling at the Phillips Academy, an elite boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts, once admitted, of the students from his school who are Z-listed for Harvard, “a very, very, very high percent” are legacies. The Harvard Crimson estimates the proportion at around one in two.
Or how about donor preferences? Rather than bribing coaches, the wealthiest parents can just bribe – sorry, donate to – the college directly. In 2017, the Washington Post reported on the special treatment given to “VIP applicants” via an annual “watch list”. Applicants whose parents were big donors would have notes on their files reading “$500k. Must be on WL” (wait list). Even better, these donations are tax free!
As a general rule, the bigger the money the bigger the effect on admissions chances. Among elite aspirational alums, the question asked is “what’s the price?”. In other words, how much do you have to donate to get your child in?
Whatever the price is, those with the fattest wallets can obviously pay it. Peter Malkin graduated from Harvard Law School in 1958. He became a very wealthy real estate businessman, and huge donor. In 1985, the university’s indoor athletic facility was renamed the Malkin Athletic Center in his honor. All three of Malkin’s children went to Harvard. By 2009, five of his six college-age grandchildren had followed suit. (One brave boy dared to go to Stanford instead.)
Shock horror! Wealthy Americans are using their money to buy their children places at elite colleges. An FBI investigation, appropriately named Operation Varsity Blues, has exposed a $25m cash-for-admissions scandal. Coaches were allegedly bribed to declare candidates as athletic recruits; test administrators to change their scores, or allow someone else to take the test for them.
At the center of the cheating scheme was William “Rick” Singer, the founder of a for-profit college preparation business based in Newport Beach, California. Among the 33 parents caught in the FBI sting were Hollywood stars Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman. Loughlin starred in the series Full House. Huffman is famous for her role in Desperate Housewives; now she will be more famous as a desperate mom. And she’s not alone. The breathless anxiety among many affluent parents to get their kids into the very best colleges is a striking feature of upper-class American life.
Singer’s bribery scheme allegedly allowed parents to buy entrance for their offspring at some of the nation’s most prestigious colleges, including Yale, Georgetown University, Stanford University, UCLA, the University of San Diego, USC, University of Texas and Wake Forest.
FBI officers were at pains to point out that the colleges themselves are not being found liable; though nine athletic coaches were caught in the net.
“Following 10 months of investigation using sophisticated techniques, the FBI uncovered what we believe to be a rigged system,” John Bonavolonta, the FBI special agent in charge said, “robbing students all over the country of their right to a fair shot of getting into some of the most elite universities in this country”.
But here’s the thing: the whole system is “rigged” in favor of more affluent parents. It is true that the conversion of wealth into a desirable college seat was especially egregious in this case – to the extent that it was actually illegal. But there are countless ways that students are robbed of a “fair shot” if they are not lucky enough to be born to well-resourced, well-connected parents.
The difference between this illegal scheme and the legal ways in which money buys access is one of degree, not of kind. The mistake here was to do something illegal. Meanwhile, much of what goes on in college admissions many not be illegal, but it is immoral.
Take legacy preferences, for example. This boosts the admissions chances of the children of alumni; and for obvious reasons the alumni of elite colleges tend to be pretty affluent, especially if they marry each other. (They are also disproportionately white.) The acceptance rate for legacy applicants at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Georgetown and Stanford is between two and three times higher than the general admission rate. If they don’t get in first time round, they might be asked to take a “gap year” and enter a year later instead, a loophole known as “Z-listing”. A Princeton study found that being a legacy applicant had the same effect as adding 160 SAT points – on the old scale up to 1600 – to a student’s application. Imagine if colleges gave that kind of admissions boost to lower-income kids?
As John W Anderson, the former co-director of college counseling at the Phillips Academy, an elite boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts, once admitted, of the students from his school who are Z-listed for Harvard, “a very, very, very high percent” are legacies. The Harvard Crimson estimates the proportion at around one in two.
Or how about donor preferences? Rather than bribing coaches, the wealthiest parents can just bribe – sorry, donate to – the college directly. In 2017, the Washington Post reported on the special treatment given to “VIP applicants” via an annual “watch list”. Applicants whose parents were big donors would have notes on their files reading “$500k. Must be on WL” (wait list). Even better, these donations are tax free!
As a general rule, the bigger the money the bigger the effect on admissions chances. Among elite aspirational alums, the question asked is “what’s the price?”. In other words, how much do you have to donate to get your child in?
Whatever the price is, those with the fattest wallets can obviously pay it. Peter Malkin graduated from Harvard Law School in 1958. He became a very wealthy real estate businessman, and huge donor. In 1985, the university’s indoor athletic facility was renamed the Malkin Athletic Center in his honor. All three of Malkin’s children went to Harvard. By 2009, five of his six college-age grandchildren had followed suit. (One brave boy dared to go to Stanford instead.)
How elite US schools give preference to wealthy and white 'legacy' applicants
Or how about Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law? Kushner was accepted into Harvard shortly after his father donated $2.5m. An official at Kushner’s high school said there was “no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would, on the merits, get into Harvard. His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it.”
David E and Stacey Goel just gave $100m to Harvard. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that their children probably have an excellent chance of Harvard admission.
Even those parents who are not in the wealthiest brackets, but are squarely in the upper middle class, can use their money to boost their kids’ chances, through tutors, SAT prep classes, athletic coaches. Students who apply early have better chances of admission, which favors more affluent families since early admission precedes financial aid decisions. Many colleges prefer students who have “shown an interest” in their college. How to show an interest? By visiting the campus – easy for those with money for flights and hotels, less so for those on modest or low incomes.
Small wonder that at elite colleges, including most of those targeted in the corruption scheme such as Yale, Duke, Stanford and Wake Forest, take more students from families in the top 1% of the income distribution than from those in the bottom 60% combined.
So hats off to FBI special agent Bonavolonta and his team for exposing the corruption admissions. But it is in fact simply the most visible sign of a much deeper problem with college admissions. Elite colleges are serving to reinforce class inequality, rather than reduce it. The opaque, complex, unfair admissions process is a big part of the problem. From an equality perspective, it is not just Singer and his clients who are at fault: it’s the system as a whole.
Wednesday 13 March 2019
How wealthy Americans ‘get their kids into university'
Joshua Chaffin in The FT
William McGlashan had to make his son a football player. And quickly.
In exchange for a $250,000 payment, a California-based university-admissions consultant had arranged for the younger McGlashan to skirt the normal application process at the University of Southern California and be accepted as a prized American football recruit. A “side door” into the university, the consultant, William Singer, called it.
The problem was that the boy did not play football. They did not even have a football team at his secondary school. “We have images of him in lacrosse. I don’t know if that matters,” offered Mr McGlashan, a top executive at the private equity firm TPG and co-founder with rock star Bono of the Rise Fund, a socially conscious investment vehicle.
“They [USC] don’t have a lacrosse team,” Mr Singer responded. Then he took matters into his own hands. “I’m going to make him a kicker/punter,” he decided, listing specialist positions in the sport often occupied by the slight of frame. “I’ll get a picture and figure out how to Photoshop and stuff.”
“He does have really strong legs,” Mr McGlashan joked.
The two men bantered about the deal, and how Mr Singer had made other applicants appear to be champion water polo players for the same purpose. Months earlier, the 55-year-old Mr McGlashan had paid Mr Singer $50,000 to have someone doctor his son’s university entrance exam. “Pretty funny. The way the world works these days is unbelievable,” Mr McGlashan observed.
"I can do anything and everything, if you guys are amenable to doing it" William Singer, founder of The Edge College & Career Network
Those discussions are reproduced in a criminal complaint filed by the Justice Department on Tuesday after an investigation into bribery in college admissions that resulted in charges against 50 individuals — including prominent actors and investors — and involved some of the most prestigious names in US higher education.
At the centre of the scheme was Mr Singer, 58, who was fired in 1988 as a high school basketball coach in Sacramento because of his abusive behaviour toward referees. He later reinvented himself as a svengali in Newport Beach for his apparent mastery of the increasingly cut-throat university admissions game. On Tuesday Mr Singer pleaded guilty to federal charges including racketeering conspiracy and obstruction of justice.
“OK, so, who we are — what we do is help the wealthiest families in the US get their kids into school,” Mr Singer told one prospective client, Gordon Caplan, the co-chairman of the prominent US law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher.
In extensive phone conversations authorities recorded with 32 parents, Mr Singer comes off as an indispensable problem-solver and quasi-magician — a man able to spare one client, the actress of Lori Loughlin, the apparent indignity of having to send her daughter to Arizona State University.
“I can make [test] scores happen, and nobody on the planet can get scores to happen,” he boasted to one client of his consultancy, The Edge College & Career Network.
“She won’t even know that it happened. It will happen as though, she will think that she’s really super smart, and she got lucky on a test, and you got a score now. There’s lots of ways to do this. I can do anything and everything, if you guys are amenable to doing it.”
All told, Mr Singer collected about $25m in bribes over a seven-year period, according to authorities.
US college admissions are supposed to be a merit-based business. But it has always had its set-aside places for legacy applicants and the children of those willing to fork over enough money.
At a time when the affordability of university education is emerging as a major political issue, the revelation that the moneyed elites had gamed the system for their children — at the expense of more deserving candidates — is likely to be seized on by politicians.
Daniel Golden won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, The Price of Admission, which detailed the underside of the business at a time when globalisation was raising the value of a prestigious university degree — and making it evermore competitive for students to access them.
Writing for The Guardian newspaper in 2016, Mr Golden called it the “grubby secret of American higher education: that the rich buy their underachieving children’s way into elite universities with massive, tax-deductible donations”.
He claimed that President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner — not regarded as a brilliant scholar in high school — was accepted by Harvard not long after his father Charles made a $2.5m donation to the university.
Mr Singer called that “the backdoor”. At The Edge, he came up with a “side door”: arranging bribes for tennis, sailing and soccer coaches so that they would sneak his applicants into school as ostensible sports stars.
As the criminal complaint noted, many of the schools reserve admissions spaces for their athletics department: “At Georgetown, approximately 158 admissions slots are allocated to athletic coaches, and students recruited for those slots have substantially higher admissions prospects than non-recruited students.”
USC, a school that was once considered more expensive than selective, was one of Mr Singer’s best bets. With the alleged connivance of the school’s senior women’s athletic director, Donna Heinel, he wangled spots for applicants supposedly destined for its water polo, basketball, football and rowing teams. Ms Heinel and the water polo coach, Jovan Vavic, were dismissed by the school on Tuesday and also criminally charged.
Running through the complaint is the angst of affluent parents caught up in a school admissions process that is increasingly viewed as a make-or-break gateway to future success.
One of those charged, Agustin Huneeus, a California vineyard owner, appears tormented that his daughter is losing out to Mr McGlashan’s son, a schoolmate.
“Is Bill [McGlashan] doing any of this shit? Is he just talking a clean game with me and helping his kid or not? Cause he makes me feel guilty.”
Mr Huneeus paid $50,000 for someone to doctor his daughter’s college entrance exam. She ended up scoring in the 96th percentile.
Like Mr McGlashan, Mr Huneeus also opted to pay Mr Singer $250,000 to buy her admission to USC — in this case as a star water polo player. The girl was late in sending a picture so Mr Singer found one of an actual water polo player and submitted that instead.
On one occasion Mr Singer had two different clients unwittingly sitting fraudulent entrance exams in the same testing room. In order for the scheme to work, he repeatedly emphasised to parents it was essential that they petitioned for medical exemptions so that their children could be given extra time to complete the test — ideally a few days. That way proctors bribed by Mr Singer would have occasion to adjust the results.
“What happened is, all the wealthy families that figured out that if I get my kid tested and they get extended time, they can do better on the test. So most of these kids don’t even have issues, but they’re getting time. The playing field is not fair,” Mr Singer explains to Mr Caplan, the lawyer, as he markets his services.
“No, it’s not. I mean this is, to be honest, it feels a little weird. But,” Mr Caplan responds.
Ultimately, one thing that Mr Caplan and the parents shared was a determination to keep the scheme secret from the children they were desperate to help. It was no easy feat since, in some cases, test scores would be massively inflated for mediocre — even poor — students.
There was also the need to secure the medical waivers and then petition for the students to take the test at specific facilities in Houston or Hollywood controlled by Mr Singer. (He often advised parents to tell authorities their students had to travel on the appointed date for a wedding or bar mitzvah.)
“Now does he, here’s the only question, does he know? Is there a way that he doesn’t know what happened?” Mr McGlashan asked of his son at one point.
Mr McGlashan — who was placed on “indefinite administrative leave” by TPG on Tuesday and did not respond to requests for comment — seemingly managed to put aside his reservations.
So did another parent, Marci Palatella, the chief executive of a California liquor distributor. She and her spouse paid Mr Singer $500,000 to secure their son’s admission to USC after apparently hearing about his services from “people at Goldman Sachs who have, you know, recommended you highly”.
As Ms Palatella later confided to Mr Singer, she and her partner “laugh every day” about the scheme. “We’re like, ‘It was worth every cent.’”
FBI affidavit: overview of the conspiracy
Parents paid about $25m in bribes between 2011 and 2018.
Colleges and universities involved included Yale University, Stanford University, the University of Texas, the University of Southern California, and the University of California Los Angeles, Georgetown and Wake Forest
Bribes to college entrance exam administrators allowed a third party to assist in cheating on college entrance exams, in some cases posing as the actual students, and in others by providing students with answers during the exams or by correcting their answers after they had completed the exams
Bribes to university athletic coaches and administrators to designate students as purported athletic recruits regardless of their athletic abilities, and, in some cases, even though they did not play the sport they were purportedly recruited to play
Having a third party take classes in place of the actual students, with the understanding that grades earned in those classes would be submitted as part of the student’s college applications
Submitting falsified applications for admission to universities that included the fraudulently obtained exam scores and class grades, and often listed fake awards and athletic activities
Disguising the nature and source of the bribe payments by funnelling the money through the accounts of a purported, tax-deductible, charity, The Key Worldwide Foundation, from which many of the bribes were then paid
William McGlashan had to make his son a football player. And quickly.
In exchange for a $250,000 payment, a California-based university-admissions consultant had arranged for the younger McGlashan to skirt the normal application process at the University of Southern California and be accepted as a prized American football recruit. A “side door” into the university, the consultant, William Singer, called it.
The problem was that the boy did not play football. They did not even have a football team at his secondary school. “We have images of him in lacrosse. I don’t know if that matters,” offered Mr McGlashan, a top executive at the private equity firm TPG and co-founder with rock star Bono of the Rise Fund, a socially conscious investment vehicle.
“They [USC] don’t have a lacrosse team,” Mr Singer responded. Then he took matters into his own hands. “I’m going to make him a kicker/punter,” he decided, listing specialist positions in the sport often occupied by the slight of frame. “I’ll get a picture and figure out how to Photoshop and stuff.”
“He does have really strong legs,” Mr McGlashan joked.
The two men bantered about the deal, and how Mr Singer had made other applicants appear to be champion water polo players for the same purpose. Months earlier, the 55-year-old Mr McGlashan had paid Mr Singer $50,000 to have someone doctor his son’s university entrance exam. “Pretty funny. The way the world works these days is unbelievable,” Mr McGlashan observed.
"I can do anything and everything, if you guys are amenable to doing it" William Singer, founder of The Edge College & Career Network
Those discussions are reproduced in a criminal complaint filed by the Justice Department on Tuesday after an investigation into bribery in college admissions that resulted in charges against 50 individuals — including prominent actors and investors — and involved some of the most prestigious names in US higher education.
At the centre of the scheme was Mr Singer, 58, who was fired in 1988 as a high school basketball coach in Sacramento because of his abusive behaviour toward referees. He later reinvented himself as a svengali in Newport Beach for his apparent mastery of the increasingly cut-throat university admissions game. On Tuesday Mr Singer pleaded guilty to federal charges including racketeering conspiracy and obstruction of justice.
“OK, so, who we are — what we do is help the wealthiest families in the US get their kids into school,” Mr Singer told one prospective client, Gordon Caplan, the co-chairman of the prominent US law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher.
In extensive phone conversations authorities recorded with 32 parents, Mr Singer comes off as an indispensable problem-solver and quasi-magician — a man able to spare one client, the actress of Lori Loughlin, the apparent indignity of having to send her daughter to Arizona State University.
“I can make [test] scores happen, and nobody on the planet can get scores to happen,” he boasted to one client of his consultancy, The Edge College & Career Network.
“She won’t even know that it happened. It will happen as though, she will think that she’s really super smart, and she got lucky on a test, and you got a score now. There’s lots of ways to do this. I can do anything and everything, if you guys are amenable to doing it.”
All told, Mr Singer collected about $25m in bribes over a seven-year period, according to authorities.
US college admissions are supposed to be a merit-based business. But it has always had its set-aside places for legacy applicants and the children of those willing to fork over enough money.
At a time when the affordability of university education is emerging as a major political issue, the revelation that the moneyed elites had gamed the system for their children — at the expense of more deserving candidates — is likely to be seized on by politicians.
Daniel Golden won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, The Price of Admission, which detailed the underside of the business at a time when globalisation was raising the value of a prestigious university degree — and making it evermore competitive for students to access them.
Writing for The Guardian newspaper in 2016, Mr Golden called it the “grubby secret of American higher education: that the rich buy their underachieving children’s way into elite universities with massive, tax-deductible donations”.
He claimed that President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner — not regarded as a brilliant scholar in high school — was accepted by Harvard not long after his father Charles made a $2.5m donation to the university.
Mr Singer called that “the backdoor”. At The Edge, he came up with a “side door”: arranging bribes for tennis, sailing and soccer coaches so that they would sneak his applicants into school as ostensible sports stars.
As the criminal complaint noted, many of the schools reserve admissions spaces for their athletics department: “At Georgetown, approximately 158 admissions slots are allocated to athletic coaches, and students recruited for those slots have substantially higher admissions prospects than non-recruited students.”
USC, a school that was once considered more expensive than selective, was one of Mr Singer’s best bets. With the alleged connivance of the school’s senior women’s athletic director, Donna Heinel, he wangled spots for applicants supposedly destined for its water polo, basketball, football and rowing teams. Ms Heinel and the water polo coach, Jovan Vavic, were dismissed by the school on Tuesday and also criminally charged.
Running through the complaint is the angst of affluent parents caught up in a school admissions process that is increasingly viewed as a make-or-break gateway to future success.
One of those charged, Agustin Huneeus, a California vineyard owner, appears tormented that his daughter is losing out to Mr McGlashan’s son, a schoolmate.
“Is Bill [McGlashan] doing any of this shit? Is he just talking a clean game with me and helping his kid or not? Cause he makes me feel guilty.”
Mr Huneeus paid $50,000 for someone to doctor his daughter’s college entrance exam. She ended up scoring in the 96th percentile.
Like Mr McGlashan, Mr Huneeus also opted to pay Mr Singer $250,000 to buy her admission to USC — in this case as a star water polo player. The girl was late in sending a picture so Mr Singer found one of an actual water polo player and submitted that instead.
On one occasion Mr Singer had two different clients unwittingly sitting fraudulent entrance exams in the same testing room. In order for the scheme to work, he repeatedly emphasised to parents it was essential that they petitioned for medical exemptions so that their children could be given extra time to complete the test — ideally a few days. That way proctors bribed by Mr Singer would have occasion to adjust the results.
“What happened is, all the wealthy families that figured out that if I get my kid tested and they get extended time, they can do better on the test. So most of these kids don’t even have issues, but they’re getting time. The playing field is not fair,” Mr Singer explains to Mr Caplan, the lawyer, as he markets his services.
“No, it’s not. I mean this is, to be honest, it feels a little weird. But,” Mr Caplan responds.
Ultimately, one thing that Mr Caplan and the parents shared was a determination to keep the scheme secret from the children they were desperate to help. It was no easy feat since, in some cases, test scores would be massively inflated for mediocre — even poor — students.
There was also the need to secure the medical waivers and then petition for the students to take the test at specific facilities in Houston or Hollywood controlled by Mr Singer. (He often advised parents to tell authorities their students had to travel on the appointed date for a wedding or bar mitzvah.)
“Now does he, here’s the only question, does he know? Is there a way that he doesn’t know what happened?” Mr McGlashan asked of his son at one point.
Mr McGlashan — who was placed on “indefinite administrative leave” by TPG on Tuesday and did not respond to requests for comment — seemingly managed to put aside his reservations.
So did another parent, Marci Palatella, the chief executive of a California liquor distributor. She and her spouse paid Mr Singer $500,000 to secure their son’s admission to USC after apparently hearing about his services from “people at Goldman Sachs who have, you know, recommended you highly”.
As Ms Palatella later confided to Mr Singer, she and her partner “laugh every day” about the scheme. “We’re like, ‘It was worth every cent.’”
FBI affidavit: overview of the conspiracy
Parents paid about $25m in bribes between 2011 and 2018.
Colleges and universities involved included Yale University, Stanford University, the University of Texas, the University of Southern California, and the University of California Los Angeles, Georgetown and Wake Forest
Bribes to college entrance exam administrators allowed a third party to assist in cheating on college entrance exams, in some cases posing as the actual students, and in others by providing students with answers during the exams or by correcting their answers after they had completed the exams
Bribes to university athletic coaches and administrators to designate students as purported athletic recruits regardless of their athletic abilities, and, in some cases, even though they did not play the sport they were purportedly recruited to play
Having a third party take classes in place of the actual students, with the understanding that grades earned in those classes would be submitted as part of the student’s college applications
Submitting falsified applications for admission to universities that included the fraudulently obtained exam scores and class grades, and often listed fake awards and athletic activities
Disguising the nature and source of the bribe payments by funnelling the money through the accounts of a purported, tax-deductible, charity, The Key Worldwide Foundation, from which many of the bribes were then paid
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