The College Admissions Racket

Abstract

In the aftermath of the well-publicized national scandal in which large fees (bribes) were paid for fraudulent access to college admissions, it may be a suitable time for review of the underlying causative circumstances. As usual, when transactional details initially appear to be inscrutable, conceptual distillation to elementary supply and demand can be instructive. In this case, both sides of the supply-demand relation were driven by natural, if undisciplined, motivation, augmented and exacerbated by idiosyncrasies of the higher education market setting.