The Price of Admission: An illegal scheme to buy spots at elite schools is focusing attention on the role of money in college admissions.

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: NATIONAL

They studied into the wee hours and agonized over their personal essays. They took standardized tests three, four, five times to increase their scores. And last fall, after years of preparation and anxiety, the students at Ewing Marion Kauffman School, a predominantly black charter school in Kansas City, Missouri, submitted their college applications, hoping all their hard work would pay off.

But students at Kauffman, and at high schools across the country, were recently reminded by the nation's largest-ever college admissions scandal that there's little fair about the process.

Last month, federal prosecutors charged 50 people in a brazen scheme to buy spots in first-year classes at Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, the University of Southern California (U.S.C.), and other big-name colleges. Among the 33 wealthy and well-connected parents who were charged were the actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin.

"It's frustrating that people are able to obtain their opportunities this way," says Khiana Jackson, 17, a senior at Kauffman. "We can put in work from 5th grade to 12th grade, every single day, come in early, leave late, and it's still not enough."

Fake Test Scores & Bribes

The illegal college admissions scheme involved falsifying SAT and ACT test scores and bribing college coaches to accept students under false pretenses. In one case, a girl who didn't play soccer became a star soccer recruit at Yale--after her parents paid $1.2 million. Loughlin and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, are accused of paying $500,000 in bribes to get their two daughters accepted as recruits for the rowing team at U.S.C., even though neither took part in the sport. The scheme's mastermind, a college admissions consultant named William "Rick" Singer, has pleaded guilty.

American universities are often cast as the envy of the world--institutions that select the best and the brightest young people after an objective and rigorous selection process. But the indictment shows how competitive, cutthroat, and sometimes unfair the college admissions process has become.

In this case, the parents of some of the nation's wealthiest and most privileged students allegedly committed fraud and engaged in bribery in their quests to get their children admitted to elite schools. But the scandal also exposes the lengths that wealthy families often go to--legally--to boost their children's chances for college admission.

"This is an extreme, unsubtle, and illegal example of the increasingly common practice of using money to get an edge in the race for a place in an elite university," says Christopher Hunt, who runs College Essay Mentor, a consulting service for applicants.

Test prep courses for the SAT or ACT are a multibillion-dollar industry. Wealthy parents can also hire consultants to advise their children on choosing the right extracurricular activities to make themselves stand out. They can pay for their kids to participate in competitive sports programs and hire private coaches to increase the odds that they get recruited to play in college. They can hire editors to help students with their application essays. And the very wealthy can also make big donations to colleges as their kids are applying.

All of that is legal. And experts say those things certainly tilt the admissions odds in favor of the families able to afford them.

This is deeply frustrating for students who come from more modest backgrounds. And to critics of the current...