Like many, I was both shocked and unsurprised by the recent revelation of a lucrative effort by wealthy parents to buy their children admissions spots in prominent colleges and universities. I was stunned by the amount of money involved, and by the payoffs that many college coaches took, in order to facilitate the efforts. On the other hand, it has long been an open secret that wealthy people -- particularly alumni -- have enormous influence to help their children gain college admission, regardless of their academic records.
Even so, this scandal has dramatically caught the public's attention. Early on, it even pushed the ongoing political soap opera as the top story in the country. Some of this awareness is likely due to the involvement of a couple of recognizable actresses. Even more, the scandal points to the conventional wisdom that the rich in this country play by completely different rules.
Many people have debated the injustices highlighted by the scandal. Certainly, there is fertile ground for such discussion, especially about matters of sports and education, access to education, standardized testing, and charitable giving.
Along with these issues, though, I've been fascinated by how certain details provide a helpful case study of human sin. On one level, this isn't surprising. Most people recognize that blatant injustice is an obvious example of sin. However, I think that it goes much deeper than that.
Rather than start with the confessed conman at the center of the scandal, I'd rather focus on the parents who participated. Certainly, it is not sinful to want to provide a solid education for your children -- this is a responsibility and expectation of parenthood. However, these parents paid exorbitant sums of money to ensure their child's admission into a specific select college, through whatever means someone else was willing to provide. In one case, the total spent was over $1 million.
I'm sure that they thought the hefty price tag was a guarantee that what they wanted to happen would happen -- the child would gain admission into the selected university of his or her choice. The bribes also had a ripple effect, as sin always does, negatively impacting others who were directly or indirectly involved. Coaches were bribed to present these applicants as preferred based on their athletic talents. People undermined the testing system, in a variety of ways. Other qualified applicants were likely denied admission.
The greater impact of the sin was closer to home. In attempting to help educate their children, these parents were deluded into misspending their resources. I'm sure there were all sorts of reasons and rationales for this, some of which probably related to guilt about how they have raised their children thus far.
Let me put it another way. Wouldn't it have made a greater impact if these parents had just spent $15,000 or $500,000 or $1.2 million directly on their child?
Imagine what experiences this amount of money could have provided for the children, regardless of where they went to college. You can start with the obvious -- tutors or other enhanced one-on-one learning opportunities. How about educational trips in various places around the country and world? Or, given the connections of the people involved, how about basically funding an otherwise unpaid internship for your child in the career of their choice (or multiple internships, given the amount of money involved)?
Sin is not only destructive of our relationships because it threatens our integrity. It also is delusional. Sin makes us assume that these are the only ways to get what we desire, most often by creating feelings of inadequacy and guilt in us. If we want it, we have to take it, whatever the consequences, because, deep down, we're pretty confident we don't really deserve it. Sin perverts our self-perception and self-awareness.
Or course, sin then perverts how we see the people around us. If we cannot properly understand our own value, how can we recognize the value of those around us? Usually, sin causes us to think less of (or about) others and how our actions might affect them.
I imagine that these parents were not just trying to give their children a leg up on other children, but also compensating for their own fears of being inadequate parents. Who knows? In some ways, they may have made mistakes that they shouldn't have as parents. (But isn't that true of all parents?) Regardless, they became convinced that this was the best way to help their child now.
Seriously, just take a minute and imagine the other ways they could have spent the same money on their child. Take a minute and imagine the ways you'd spend such amounts of money on your children (however old they are).
That's not what these parents did. They looked for the quick and sure-fire solution. In doing so, they wasted tons of money, facilitated fraud (with other willing participants), probably kept more deserving students from being admitted to some of these universities, and implicitly admitted that they did not think their child merited being in such a selective college based on their own academic record.
Now the harder question: where has this happened in your life? It's easy and fun to point fingers at the mistakes of others, but harder to point the same finger at ourselves. At what points in your life have you made a false choice, which really was against your own self-interest? When has sin perverted your self-perception, feeding off of your guilt and anxiety?
And, if you've done some of the hard work of identifying your sin, are you willing to do the harder work of confessing it, making amends for it, and working with God to change your false self-perception? In terms of the college admission scandal, it remains to be seen if any of those involved will do these things. As people of faith, though, this is some of the work we are in. And, for those of us who are faith leaders, the work extends to modeling such confession and providing encouragement for others to pursue it too.
Even so, this scandal has dramatically caught the public's attention. Early on, it even pushed the ongoing political soap opera as the top story in the country. Some of this awareness is likely due to the involvement of a couple of recognizable actresses. Even more, the scandal points to the conventional wisdom that the rich in this country play by completely different rules.
Many people have debated the injustices highlighted by the scandal. Certainly, there is fertile ground for such discussion, especially about matters of sports and education, access to education, standardized testing, and charitable giving.
Along with these issues, though, I've been fascinated by how certain details provide a helpful case study of human sin. On one level, this isn't surprising. Most people recognize that blatant injustice is an obvious example of sin. However, I think that it goes much deeper than that.
Rather than start with the confessed conman at the center of the scandal, I'd rather focus on the parents who participated. Certainly, it is not sinful to want to provide a solid education for your children -- this is a responsibility and expectation of parenthood. However, these parents paid exorbitant sums of money to ensure their child's admission into a specific select college, through whatever means someone else was willing to provide. In one case, the total spent was over $1 million.
I'm sure that they thought the hefty price tag was a guarantee that what they wanted to happen would happen -- the child would gain admission into the selected university of his or her choice. The bribes also had a ripple effect, as sin always does, negatively impacting others who were directly or indirectly involved. Coaches were bribed to present these applicants as preferred based on their athletic talents. People undermined the testing system, in a variety of ways. Other qualified applicants were likely denied admission.
The greater impact of the sin was closer to home. In attempting to help educate their children, these parents were deluded into misspending their resources. I'm sure there were all sorts of reasons and rationales for this, some of which probably related to guilt about how they have raised their children thus far.
Let me put it another way. Wouldn't it have made a greater impact if these parents had just spent $15,000 or $500,000 or $1.2 million directly on their child?
Imagine what experiences this amount of money could have provided for the children, regardless of where they went to college. You can start with the obvious -- tutors or other enhanced one-on-one learning opportunities. How about educational trips in various places around the country and world? Or, given the connections of the people involved, how about basically funding an otherwise unpaid internship for your child in the career of their choice (or multiple internships, given the amount of money involved)?
Sin is not only destructive of our relationships because it threatens our integrity. It also is delusional. Sin makes us assume that these are the only ways to get what we desire, most often by creating feelings of inadequacy and guilt in us. If we want it, we have to take it, whatever the consequences, because, deep down, we're pretty confident we don't really deserve it. Sin perverts our self-perception and self-awareness.
Or course, sin then perverts how we see the people around us. If we cannot properly understand our own value, how can we recognize the value of those around us? Usually, sin causes us to think less of (or about) others and how our actions might affect them.
I imagine that these parents were not just trying to give their children a leg up on other children, but also compensating for their own fears of being inadequate parents. Who knows? In some ways, they may have made mistakes that they shouldn't have as parents. (But isn't that true of all parents?) Regardless, they became convinced that this was the best way to help their child now.
Seriously, just take a minute and imagine the other ways they could have spent the same money on their child. Take a minute and imagine the ways you'd spend such amounts of money on your children (however old they are).
That's not what these parents did. They looked for the quick and sure-fire solution. In doing so, they wasted tons of money, facilitated fraud (with other willing participants), probably kept more deserving students from being admitted to some of these universities, and implicitly admitted that they did not think their child merited being in such a selective college based on their own academic record.
Now the harder question: where has this happened in your life? It's easy and fun to point fingers at the mistakes of others, but harder to point the same finger at ourselves. At what points in your life have you made a false choice, which really was against your own self-interest? When has sin perverted your self-perception, feeding off of your guilt and anxiety?
And, if you've done some of the hard work of identifying your sin, are you willing to do the harder work of confessing it, making amends for it, and working with God to change your false self-perception? In terms of the college admission scandal, it remains to be seen if any of those involved will do these things. As people of faith, though, this is some of the work we are in. And, for those of us who are faith leaders, the work extends to modeling such confession and providing encouragement for others to pursue it too.
Comments
Post a Comment