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By Jessica Grose
Opinion Writer
Last week, the actress Felicity Huffman made her first public comments about her role in the Varsity Blues admissions scandal, in which several wealthy parents paid a corrupt private admissions consultant named Rick Singer thousands of dollars to help them cheat to get their children into elite colleges. In 2019, Huffman pleaded guilty to “a single count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud, acknowledging that she paid $15,000 to arrange for cheating on her daughter’s SAT test.” She spent 11 days in prison, paid a $30,000 fine and had to do community service as part of her sentence.
In what was billed as her “first and only” interview about her transgressions, Huffman, who spoke to a local Los Angeles TV affiliate, said: “It felt like I had to give my daughter a future” — a statement that’s both shocking and illuminating.
Shocking because of the wildly narrow view of “a future” she must have had at the time, and illuminating because it helps explain why so many parents and high school students are out of their minds trying to gain admission to a handful of colleges. This is how Huffman described her interactions with Singer:
After a year he started to say, your daughter’s not going to get into any of the colleges that she wants to, and I believed him, and so when he slowly started to present the criminal scheme, it seemed like, and I know this seems crazy at the time, that that was my only option to give my daughter a future. And I know hindsight is 20/20, but it felt like I would be a bad mother if I didn’t do it. So I did it.
OK, wait: Huffman is an Oscar-nominated actor, married to another Oscar-nominated actor, William H. Macy. I haven’t seen their bank statements, but since both were on long-running television series, reportedly making hundreds of thousands of dollars per episode, it’s a safe bet that they don’t have to worry about their children’s long-term financial solvency. And yet there she was a few years ago, presumably panicked about her older daughter’s future.
Huffman’s daughter wanted to attend theater school, which makes the no-future-without-a-good-school claim even more perplexing, because it’s an even safer bet that if her child wanted an acting career, she wouldn’t even have to go to college to reap the benefits of her parents’ show business network.
Despite all this, Huffman reflected that she felt as if she would have been a bad mother if she didn’t give her child every advantage in the admissions process, which in her case included breaking the law. While that may not make sense outside of her bubble, I think this conundrum is the true key to her actions, and is akin to the motivations of many of the hyperchecking parents I mentioned in last week’s newsletter about online grading portals — parents who obsessively check their kids’ grades in a way that strips those children of any sense of agency. Those parents seem to feel that unless they’re pushing their kids as hard as possible to secure their futures, they’re bad parents.
To be clear: Being a helicoptering hyperchecker parent isn’t the same as doing what Huffman did. Most parents aren’t involved in pay-to-play schemes or arranging for fraudulent SAT scores. It’s worth acknowledging, too, that most of what we’re talking about falls under the general heading of champagne problems. I’d also put in a word here for restoring funding to public colleges and universities that was cut after the Great Recession, which is a far more pressing problem than parents who are overly involved in their kids’ schoolwork.
But I also want to provide a reality check.
I truly empathize with parents who feel that the world is now so competitive that unless their kids have perfect grades and an overabundance of extracurriculars, and therefore get into a selective college or are awarded substantial financial aid, it will adversely affect their kids for a lifetime — either they will never get a good job or they won’t be able to attend a decent school without accruing crippling student loan debt.
But those things don’t have to be true. I asked Jeffrey Selingo, a former editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education and the author of “Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions,” to bring this issue back down to reality. In “Who Gets In and Why,” Selingo notes that while getting into Harvard might give a student a better shot at a top graduate school or a job at Goldman Sachs, “if you’re a well-prepared student whose parents attended college, you’ll likely find important connections and pathways to success at nearly any school on your list.”
And in an email, Selingo referred me to the Department of Education’s College Scorecard as a tool for assessing how different undergraduate majors net out in the job market. In “Who Gets In and Why,” he noted:
In general, browsers of the College Scorecard will see that graduates of nursing, computer science and information technology programs earn the most a year after college — almost no matter where they go — while psychology, drama/theater arts and biology are the lowest paid (likely because psychology and biology majors go on to graduate or medical school, where the real money comes).
When you compare graduates with the same major, the differences are not overwhelming. For example, according to the College Scorecard, the median earnings for a computer science major at Binghamton University four years after graduation are $114,997, compared with $126,103 at the far more selective Georgetown University. The median earnings for a history major from U.C.L.A. are $47,888 four years after graduation, which is less than the $51,858 median for a history major from tiny Centre College in Kentucky.
As for debt, Selingo said that you really don’t need to be a perfect student to get merit aid, which is scholarship money that goes to students unrelated to financial need. “A lot of merit aid is simply bait used to reel in accepted students — in some cases despite middling grades in high school.” As he notes in “Who Gets In and Why,” “The U.S. Education Department found that in one year some 40 percent of full-time students at four-year colleges who had less than a B average and scored under a 1000 on the SAT received ‘merit scholarships’ from their institutions.”
If you’re not convinced by Selingo’s assessment, perhaps you’ll be convinced by the possible implications that so much pressure on specific outcomes holds for the mental health of young adults. While there is never just one cause of a psychological diagnosis, when a whopping 36 percent of current college students in one survey say they’ve been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder by a health professional, we need to take a good hard look at anything we might be doing to exacerbate their distress.
I talked to Jennifer Breheny Wallace, the author of “Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic — and What We Can Do About It,” for last week’s newsletter, and her book illustrates another, frankly, sad downside to the elite-schools-or-bust pressure so many families feel. Through her research, she found that many “kids are absorbing the idea that their worth is contingent on their performance — their G.P.A., the number of social media followers they have, their college brands — not for who they are deep at their core. They feel they only matter to the adults in their lives, their peers, the larger community, if they are successful.”
Wallace said she conducted two national surveys for “Never Enough” — one of parents from 6,500 families and another of nearly 500 young adults between the ages of 18 and 30. Eighty-three percent of parents surveyed agreed with the statement, “Others think that my children’s academic success is a reflection of my parenting.” And the pressure kids are feeling from all sides is affecting their relationships with their moms and dads in a really heartbreaking way. Over half of the students Wallace surveyed “went so far as to say they thought their parents loved them more when they were more successful, with 25 percent of students saying they believed this ‘a lot.’”
In a letter that Huffman wrote to the judge in her case, she said her “desperation to be a good mother” drove her actions. And she talked about the toll that it took on her relationship with her daughter when the truth was revealed. “When my daughter looked at me and asked with tears streaming down her face, ‘Why didn’t you believe in me? Why didn’t you think I could do it on my own?’ I had no adequate answer for her,” Huffman wrote.
None of us can fully control our children’s futures, which can feel terrifying, even for people who seemingly have everything. We have to prepare them for a world that is changing so fast technologically that I can’t even imagine what kind of jobs will exist for my children, much less know how to prepare them. But we need to have at least a measure of faith that we’ve given kids the tools they need to make their own way no matter what life throws at them. And as early decision news starts to trickle into students’ inboxes this week, the ability to be flexible, to rebound from disappointment and to make the most of available options is a skill that will serve them forever.
In 2019, Wallace wrote an article for The Washington Post about emerging research showing that students from high achieving schools “are experiencing higher rates of behavioral and mental health problems compared with national norms.”
In March, Derek Thompson of The Atlantic explored a similar issue: What if pressure-cooker schools in wealthy countries are drivers of teen anxiety that we’re overlooking?
My newsroom colleagues Ron Lieber and Tara Siegel Bernard, who between them “have written about paying for college for 20 years and are saving for at least 16 years of tuition payments,” are the authors of numerous articles about how to think about and finance college journeys.
Some companies like IBM, Accenture and Dell are becoming more flexible about bachelor’s degree requirements for some job listings, according to a CNBC report from 2022 that states, “In place of four-year-degree requirements, many companies are instead focusing on skills-based hiring to widen the talent pool.”
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