Washington Monthly Editor-in-Chief Paul Glastris on Wednesday lamented what he said was an “obsession” with elite higher education amid a wide-ranging college admissions scandal involving a number of wealthy families.
“There’s a lot of great colleges out there, and they don’t cost all that much money,” Glastris told Hill.TV’s Krystal Ball and Buck Sexton on “Rising.”
“It’s this obsession with the elite schools that people in our class are obsessed with, and it diverts attention from the fact that 90 [percent], 95 percent of the country goes to schools that are not highly selective, and they’re very uneven,” he continued. “Some of them are rip-offs, some of them are fantastic.”
Actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman on Tuesday were among those charged in a widespread college admission scheme.
The plot, which has been described as “largest college admissions scam ever prosecuted by the Department of Justice,” allegedly involved getting prospective students admitted to colleges and universities as athletic recruits — even if they did not play sports — by bribing coaches, as well as paying people to help cheat on college entrance exams.
Washington Monthly releases a list of college rankings each year. Glastris told Hill.TV that the publication does not particularly care about criteria such as college entrance exams for its rankings.
“When we rank colleges, we don’t even factor in test scores, SAT scores, because we don’t care about that stuff because it’s not what’s important,” he said.
— Julia Manchester
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