Parents Being Parents: The College Admission Scandal

The recent uncovering of a college admission scandal should not be a surprise to any of us. Most have come in contact with parents just like ones highlighted in the story – privileged moms and dads, wealthy connected dads and moms who have personal relationships with the inside decision makers.

I hate to say it, but it’s true; when it comes to taking an interest in the success of children, most parents generally only care about our children. Whether it’s the local youth sports league, your school’s gifted and talented program, or in this case admission to America’s elite institutions, it’s been my experience that lots of parents across this country cheat and connive 24/7/365.

ALL INFLUENCE IS IMMORAL

I must tell you that I find it humorous how parents so quickly differentiate their morality from the lack of morals of the parents connected with Edge College and Career Network. Not me!

Unlike most moms and dads, when I see photos of actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, I don’t just see the faces of the cheating one-percent. Instead, the parents of the college admission scandal remind me of a few adults who crossed my path as a child and too many moms and dads to count who intersected our lives during Naeem’s childhood.

There’s a quote from Oscar Wilde which sums up the college admission scandal perfectly – “all influence is immoral.” Those high-profile parents charged in the college admission scandal are just like the soccer parents Naeem played with for more than a decade who often befriended the youth soccer coach so that their less talented children could start and play more minutes than other children. The actions of those privileged parents caught up in the college admission scandal are no different from parents I know who use their affiliation with their fraternities and sororities to increase their less deserving academically inferior child’s chances of receiving the organization’s annual scholarship. Moreover, the behavior of the parents under FBI investigation for their involvement in the college admissions scandal seems the same as the parents who make sizeable donations to the local college prep high school to raise their misbehaving and undeserving child’s probability of admission while decreasing the likelihood of a diverse student population.  

PARENTS WHO LIVE IN GLASS HOUSES

Rather than pat yourself on the back and celebrate the exposure of the misdeeds of the rich and famous, I’d like to encourage this nation’s parents to take a good look in the mirror. Per Oscar Wilde’s quote and my experiences, I contend that it doesn’t appear to matter if the parents are rich or poor, black or white, most parents find it perfectly acceptable to use whatever influence we have to benefit our children even if using our power means depriving another even a more deserving child of an opportunity.

I’m going to go out on a limb and surmise that if you were a member of America’s elite, you might have joined the more than 750 families who chose to use the services of Edge College and Career Network. Because at the end of the day, I believe Mr. Wilde is correct, “all influence is immoral.”

Moreover, I suspect that the parents caught up in the college admission scandal started just like you and me – merely wanting the best for their children. Something went wrong, very wrong. What went wrong is what always goes wrong when wealth and income are added to the equation of providing for children.

When parents are faced with making educational opportunities equal for all children or making the best educational opportunities exclusively available to their children we nearly always chose the latter. When it comes to education, parents have shown via segregated schools, zip code school funding and the like that we do not believe that all children are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

WEALTH AND INCOME THE GATEWAY DRUGS TO IMMORAL NARCISSISM

One thing that the college admission scandal unintentionally exposed is that wealth and income are America’s truth serums. The more of either – wealth or income – the more translucent America’s real despicable core shows.

Wealth and income are our gateway drugs to immoral narcissism. The college admission scandal shows that it’s one thing to be self-absorbed, but it’s another thing altogether to be depraved and egocentric. The parents so far connected in the scandal – like the thousands more I soon expect will be exposed – allowed their narcissistic tendencies to take over. Like a drug addict, they found themselves breaking the law because their imagined self-importance led them to believe they were entitled to anything they wanted absent consequence or exception.

Fortunately, you and I have other choices. Not only do we not have to be driven by our base human instincts and objectionable personal qualities, but we can also choose a better path of college preparation. There is no need for cheating on exams, hiring outrageously priced test prep consultants, photoshopping our children’s heads on another child’s body, bribing coaches and standardized testing officials, living in gated communities to take advantage of the privileged public school, or bequeathing large sums of money to our favorite – wink, wink – charity.

You don’t have to do what others seem content on doing. You can do what we did! We are neither wealthy or privileged, nor are we donors or alumnus of elite institutions yet our son earned undergraduate admission to 27 of Americas best colleges and received Ph.D. offers from 7 of Americas best Engineering doctoral programs.

Instead of cheating, embarrassing yourself and your family, getting caught up in a scandal, or paying overpriced test prep consultants, let me show you how to backward design your child’s life. I promise you that Backward Design is a much better way to go. Backward Design is proactive without being overbearing, it’s value centered not income and wealth driven, and it helps you practice honorable active not narcissistic passive parenting.

For the length of time that I’ve been publishing this blog, I’ve been practically begging to show you how we used Backward Design for our child. If you want to learn how to take care of your own child’s educational outcomes, stop focusing on what you don’t have and discontinue outsourcing your parental responsibility to others, we can show you a process that is both accessible to any parent and scandal free.

You don’t need to live in a “great” school district, master Adobe Photoshop, fly in a professional test taker or be able to easily spend $15,000 or $6.5 million. All you need to do is enroll in the Supa-Parenting Back to School course, register for our free Extraordinary College Planning workshops, keep reading our blog, keep looking for our no cost offers, and email me with any questions you might have about giving your children a chance to live their best life.

The most important thing you can to do is the one thing the parents of the college admission scandal neglected to do. Start believing that there is no one more capable than you to help your child fulfill their incredible potential and position them to reach their hopes and dreams. Start behaving as if any of your parenting misdeeds might lead to the loss of your job, the downfall of your business and, the erosion of your community standing because they just might.

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Are you working on your best mugshot pose? Have you been practicing your Perp Walk?