MosesWrites

As I make final preparations for a panel discussion later today on “The Economics of Fraud,” I’m glad recently to have been reading Michael D Gordin’s On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

While a slim volume, just a two page preface and then 101 pages across seven chapters, Professor Gordin’s book rewards slow and measured reading. How do we, and scientists in particular, draw epistemological boundaries around what’s known? How do we create or discover new, additional truths, and how to we falsify and disregard once-held truths as now no longer holding truth value?

Gordin’s analyses arise from an enormous erudition sustained by a tremendous intelligence. (I had the good fortune, occasionally, to hear his talks or comments during seminars while a graduate student 15-20 years ago.)

While apparently clearcut, fraud in college admissions (and perhaps fraud more generally) shares similar “fringe” problems.

Most everyone would likely agree, an entirely fake transcript—saying a student studied somewhere for a time, when they didn’t—constitutes fraud. But what about rampant, institutionalized grade inflation, test score inflation, that makes it hard to do what grades and scores ought to help one to do, to differentiate amongst students?

I also note that, importantly, in admissions fraud, there’s a real child, in the end, striving to attend college. A lot of what an admissions committee knows about that child might be untrue, but the child exists—unlike, say, my Ferrari, were I to advertise it for sale, or to use it as collateral because, in fact, I don’t have a Ferrari.

As I consider earlier, admissions fraud arises from the collisions of abundance and scarcity. So many students, globally, have the talent and resources to apply to and to study at top institutions of higher learning. Yet the capacity of those top institutions has remained more or less constant. The demand-supply imbalance for international undergraduates attenuates in extremis. So, we get fraud, just as when over-regulation or over-taxation impacts the exchange of goods and services, we get black markets.

Black markets bring other sorts of criminality and bad behaviors, like exploitation and denigration of shared values. In the extreme case, I can’t think of any ethical objection to entirely consensual, transactional sex amongst otherwise unattached individuals. But when pimps, human trafficking, drugging, abuse, and worse, sustain prostitution, then it's a moral abomination. In fact, a great deal of the former (transactional sex) likely takes place amongst young people in college, while for the latter (drugging and exploitation), while all too prevalent—date rape, harassment, groping, and like— it still doesn’t dominate entirely all relationships amongst late teens and early 20-somethings. Yet, for some, lasting trauma obviates, tragically, hope for eventually healthy, loving intimacy, and perverts a great deal of (often) male sexuality in general.

What happens when a student submits their college application, when they submit to the judgment of an institution, with varying degrees of honesty in their submission?

I’m drawn to Gordin’s description of the adversarial nature of science. So too with selective college admissions, beyond the warm and fuzzy glosses of self-discovery and self-actualization, a multi-tiered adversarial relationship exists.

First, a student decides to, or not to apply to a school: adversarial, yes/no moment number one, and hence the vast sums spent on recruitment, on “enrollment management.”

Then, a selective school decides to admit or deny that student: adversarial moment number two, based on what an institution hopes to have been an honest, considered weighing of a candidate’s potential in the context of all other candidates. Hence the time and care spent, and the real wisdom held by, the best admissions professionals.

Lastly, in a non-binding, non-early-decision context, an accepted student makes a final yes/no choice: to attend or not. Students who have been denied no longer have a choice.

Clearly, every student wants to find themselves with one amazing yes and, for sake of ego, a number of opportunities to say no, to turn down places that have otherwise expressed an interest in them (hence my regular use of dating analogies to explain college admissions).

Honestly, in less virtuous moments, I’m as happy to have said “no” to Harvard for graduate school as I am to have said “yes” to Princeton.

Highly selective institutions, at least the individuals making decisions do, I believe, struggle with the enormous weight of rejecting so many talented children. Yet institutionally, and particularly for those who do enroll and graduate, I think, more than we might like to say out loud, those students do rely for a significant sense of their self-worth upon having been chosen, on having stepped over those lost on the battlefield, on having taken their due. I got into Yale, and you, and you, and you—you did not, once and forever. Hence what I find so disturbing, and heart-breaking, the petty bitterness of those spurned—say, a student unhappy with an offer from Berkeley, because they missed out on a top 10 school, or someone lamenting Chapel Hill, because they didn’t get Duke. Ungrateful little shits, a blunt person might say, but the reality of the world of torturous anxiety and doubt that provokes and sustains such an emotional experience can’t be dismissed out of hand, the blame can’t fall entirely on the shoulders of a seventeen- or eighteen- or nineteen-year-old child, however mature and adult-like they wish to imagine themselves.

Given the forever adversarial nature of selective and in particular extremely selective admissions, fraud will endure; we can only promote more clearly and honestly the nature of the process, and the values that undergird elite, exclusive education.

As with science, mainstream and fringe, “there will inevitably be winners and losers” (89), those selected and those rejected. So long as winners—admitted students—those recognized and included as worthy—gain demonstrable advantages, personally (even if undergirding in many cases extreme self-doubt) and socially (even if compounding extreme and growing stratification)—so long as winners win, many will cheat; to varying degrees, many will cheat to still chance and tame luck, but in the end an entirely honest reckoning will never arise absent a truly honest self.

Or as ROSÉ puts it, “the long game, the long game, game start… come give me something I can feel.”

19 September 2025

Columbus, Ohio

Fraud Fringe Admissions